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JULY, 1903.)
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES.
2971
And both the folk have from the remote past, when they were one people, preserved. variety of technical expressions along with these names, - terms connected with the invitation to the offering, the presents and their bestowal, the axioms, the prayers, the hymns, the adoration and glorification of ethereal existences, the consecrated water, the operation of the sacrifice and the physical state in which they must be conducted. So much as the very quaint views like a belief in the purificatory virtue, in . religious sense, of the urine of cattle which were necessarily sacred animals from immemorial antiquity, and the solicitude with which the desecration of fire and water was avoided are alike shared by the Indian and the Iranian, which shows that they have been transmitted from the ages of their unity.
But the result of the greatest moment of a comparison of the two religions is that the East Aryans must have already bailt a community, a community invested not with a national alone, but with a very definite religious character also. Provisionally, men were admitted into the creed immediately after birth with certain rites. But when the neophyte had attained to years of discretion, and was brought up to his proper status, he was initiated. The symbols of the initiation were a sacred girdle and a cord. The mental training which qualified a man to be a member of the order is concentrated in one word, which has no exact equivalent in our language, and all the various shades of its meaning it is impossible to convey through a single word in another tongue. It comprises all that is beooming, trefitting, in conformity with, the community, and at the same time in an exalted sense connotes what with reference to the fraternity is righteous, erect, equitable, holy. It is applied to observance of religious obligations, to obedience, to prescriptive usages.77 An unprejudiced investigation of the word requires the recognition of its two-fold import in the Veda as well as the Avesta. And it is not improbable that early in the East Aryan period it bore, along with an ecclesiastical, an ethical sense or significance. 3. The causes of the diversity of the Indian and the Iranian religions,
notwithstanding their common descent. • We endeavoured in the preceding section to give a cursory sketch of the East Aryan faith, basing our delineation on the relics to be met with in the Indian and Iranian religions, which prove that these two have sprung, if mediately, from the former. The coincidences cannot be fortuitous, and so they admit of no other explanation save that of sameness of origin. But we shall not call it into question that the Vedic and the Avesta religions are conspicuously divergent in respect of their peculiar dogma, their character, with regard to their cult, and in point of their ethics. The problem before us' is : wherein lie the causes of this vast dissimilarity in their common heritage ? Nay, dissimilarity is too weak and inadequate an expression. The religions are diametrically opposed. To the devout Zarathushtrian those beings are evil genii whom the Brahman adores, the Vedic ritual of Soma offering a revolting, orgie, the Brahman's cremation an abominable sacrilege to the sacrosanct fire, his reclase life in solitary contemplation, a repudiation of the grand law of practical activity which sanctifies the earth and cripples the might of the demons. Whence this sharp contrast? The answer which suggests itself at the first blush is that the making or the formation of the two religions is different ; nor is the solution incorrect. The Vedio religion has sprung, that is, has by degrees evolved itself ander the influence of the leading families and Brahmanic sobools out of the materials of the East Aryan religion. It is the organization of the peculiar form which the latter assumed when its professors settled in new places of habitation and saw themselves encircled by the representatives of an alien cult, which, if it was not lower, at least corresponded to social conditions other than their own. Though their own cult, therefore, was but slightly modified, figares of new deities wore associated with those they continued to pay homage to, and were pushed to the
Arta, where from 8. rta, Baktrian soha. The word expressive of the genuinely pious man, as they conceived him, in the same among the Indians and the Iranianet yapan - aphavan. Bergaigne, Darmesteter, and others have laid utros na pon the noglooted ritoallatio signifiomnoo. But more correot is Spiegel, Dio Arische Periode, 18 and 30. De Harlez, in his Origine du forogatriuniem (p. 74 ang.), perbapo idealises too much.
