Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 79

lxxvi
VENDIDAD.
of the elements being pushed to an extreme. The elements, fire, earth, and water are holy, and during the Indo-Iranian period they were already considered so, and in the Vedas they are worshipped as godlike beings. Yet this did not prevent the Indian from burning his dead; death did not appear to him so decidedly a work of the demon, and the dead man was a traveller to the other world, whom the fire kindly carried to his heavenly abode 'on his undecaying, flying pinions, wherewith he killed the demons. The fire was in that, as in the sacrifice, the god that goes from earth to heaven, from man to god, the mediator, the god most friendly to man. In Persia it remains more distant from him; being an earthly form of the eternal, infinite, godly light', no death, no uncleanness can be allowed to enter it, as it is here below the purest offspring of the good spirit, the purest part of his pure creation. Its only function is to repel the fiends with its bright blazing. In every place where Parsis are settled, an everlasting fire is kept, the Bahram fire, which, preserved by a more than Vestal care, and ever fed with perfumes and dry well-blazing wood, whichever side its flames are brought by the wind, goes and kills thousands and thousands of fiends, as Bahram does in heaven'. If the necessities of life oblige us to employ fire for profane uses, it must be only for a time an exile on our hearth, or in the oven of the potter, and it must go thence to the Right-Place of the fire (Daityo Gâtu), the altar of the Bahrâm fire, there to be restored to the dignity and rights of its nature *.
At least, let no gratuitous and wanton degradation be inflicted upon it: even blowing it with the breath of the mouth is a crime 5; burning the dead is the most heinous
· Ignem coelitus delapsum (Ammian. Marcel. XXVII, 6); Cedrenus ; Elisaeus ; Recogn. Clement. IV, 29; Clem. Homil. IX, 6; Henry Lord.
'J. Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia, 1698, p. 265. • Farg. VIII, 81-96; 79-80. • Extinguishing it is a mortal sin (Ravaets; Elisaeus; cf. Strabo XV, 14).
. A custom still existing with the Tazik, an Iranian tribe in Easter Persia, (de Khanikoff, Ethnographie de la Perse). Strabo XV, 14. Manu has the same prescription (IV, 53). Cf. Farg. XIV, 8, n. 10.
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