Zend Avesta Part 01

SR No.: 007671
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1895
Total Pages: 2695
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 200

FARGARD VIII.
105
VI. 33 (107). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Shall the man be clean who has touched a corpse that has been dried up and dead more than a year?
34 (108). Ahura Mazda answered: 'He shall. The dry mingles not with the dry. Should the dry mingle with the dry, how soon all this material world of mine would be only one Peshôtanu, bent on the destruction of righteousness, and whose soul will cry and wail ! so numberless are the beings that die upon the face of the earth 8.'
VII. 35 (111). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Can the man be made clean that has
the Dastur (see $ 74 n.), and by this execution an ordinary capital crime may be redeemed (Comm. ad VII, 52).
"The corpse, dried up, contains no longer any of the solid and liquid elements that generate corruption and infection (see above, p. 75, n. 2).
This principle still prevails even with Musulman Persians : Pour encourir leur immondicité dans l'attouchement des Chrétiens et autres idolatres, il est nécessaire que s'ils les touchent, leurs vêtements soient mouillés. C'est à cause, disent-ils, qu'étans secs l'immondicité ne s'attache pas; .... ce qui est cause que dans les villes où leurs Mullas et Docteurs ont plus d'autorité, ils font parfois défendre par leurs Kans que lorsqu'il pleut, les Chrétiens ne sortent pas de leurs maisons, de crainte que par accident, venans à les heurter, ils ne soient rendus immondes' (G. du Chinon, p. 88 seq.; cf. Chardin). Still nowadays, in Persia, the Jews are not allowed to go out of their house on a rainy day, lest the religious impurity, conducted through the rain, should pass from the Jew to the Musulman.
• See Farg. V, 4.
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