Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 26

INTRODUCTION.
xxiii
vails, so much so that as regards it I differ slightly even from my eminent friend and predecessor. As such differences on the subject of the Avesta are however matters of course, I freely state my impressions. Who was then the person, if any person, corresponding to the name Zarathustra in the Gathas? Did he exist, and was he really the author of these ancient hymns ? That he existed as an historical - person I have already affirmed; and as to the hymns ascribed to him and his immediate associates, I have also no hesitation. Parts of these productions may have been interpolated, but the Gathas, as a whole, show great unity, and the interpolations are made in the spirit of the original. And that Zarathustra was the name of the individual in which this unity centres, we have no sufficient reason to dispute. The name is mentioned in the most sacred connections, as well as in those which depict the reality of the prophet's sufferings; and there is no reason at all why it should have come down endeared to humanity, unless it belonged to one, who, in the presence of a Sovereign and a kingdom, could impress his personality with greatly more defined distinctness upon his contemporaries than either that Sovereign or any of his adherents 1. That any forgery is present in the Gathas, any desire to palm off doctrines upon the sacred community in the name of the great prophet, as in the Vendidad and later Yasna, is quite out of the question. The Gathas are genuine in their mass, as I believe no scholar anywhere now questions.
For the characteristics of this great teacher, I refer to the hymns themselves, which stand alone, of their kind, in literature. Nowhere, at their period, had there been a human voice, so far as we have any evidence, which uttered thoughts like these. They are now, some of them, the great commonplaces of philosophical religion ; but till then they were unheard (agusta).
And yet we must say of Zarathustra, as of all our first announcers, that while he antedates all whose records have come down to us, he was probably only the last visible link
--
-
See especially the remarks preceding Y.L.
Digitized by
Digitized by Google