Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 75

lxxii
VENDIDAD.
Zarathustra'; and as these questions are not of a general character, but refer to details, the matter is much broken up into fragments, each of which, consisting of a question with its answer, stands by itself, as an independent passage.
We shall treat in the following pages, first of the laws of purification, then of the civil laws, and, lastly, of the penalties both religious and civil.
A.
§ 3. The first object of man is purity, yaozdau: 'purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good".'
Purity and impurity have not in the Vendîdâd the exclusively spiritual meaning which they have in our languages: they do not refer to an inward state of the soul, but chiefly to a physical state of the body. Impurity or uncleanness may be described as the state of a person or a thing that is possessed of the demon; and the object of purification is to expel the demon.
The principal means by which uncleanness enters man is death, as death is the triumph of the demon.
When a man dies, as soon as the soul has parted from the body, the Drug Nasu or Corpse-Drug falls upon the dead from the regions of hell, and whoever thenceforth touches the corpse becomes unclean, and makes unclean whomsoever he touches 3.
The Drug is expelled from the dead by means of the Sag-did, 'the look of the dog:' 'a four-eyed dog' or 'a white one with yellow ears' is brought near the body and is made to look at the dead; as soon as he has done so, the Drug flees back to hell.
1 The outward form of the Vendidâd has been often compared with that of the Books of Moses. But in reality, in the Bible, there is no conversation between God and the lawgiver: the law comes down unasked, and God gives commands, but gives no answers. In the Vendidâd, on the contrary, it is the wish of man, not the will of God, that is the first cause of the revelation. Man must ask of Ahura, who knows everything, and is pleased to answer (XVIII, 13 seq.); the law is 'the question to Ahura,' âhairi frashno.
2 Farg. V, 21, from Yasna XLVIII (XLVII), 5.
Farg. VII, I seq.
In the shape of a fly. The fly that came to the smell of the dead body was thought to be the corpse-spirit that came to take possession of the dead in the name of Ahriman' (Justi, Persien, p. 88).
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