Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 35

xxxii
THE GÂTHAS.
That such a Mazda-worship once existed in primeval Iran seems certain, and that it was greatly earlier than Zarathustrianism. It is also very probable that some form of it survived unadulterated by Zarathustrianism. And this is as probable à priori when we reflect on what might have happened, as it is when we seek for an explanation of the burial of a Mazda-worshipper in a tomb.
As the Asura (Ahura) worship extended into India with the Indians as they migrated from Iran, a form of Asura worship arose in Iran which added the name of Mazda to the original term for God. In the East it began to acquire additional peculiarities out of which, when Zarathustra arose, he developed his original system, while in other parts of Iran, and with great probability in Persia, it retained its original simplicity. At subsequent periods only, the Zarathustrian form spread, first at the Gâthic stage, and later a second time, and from a centre further West, as the Zarathustrianism of the later Avesta which is reported by the Greeks. Either then Darius was a Mazda-worshipper, like his fathers, following an original and independent type of Mazda-worship, or he was following a mutilated Gathic Zarathustrianism, which may not yet have forbidden burial?, he and his chieftains adhering to this ancient form, while the masses yielded to the novelties, as the patrician Jews held to Sadduceeism after the masses had become Pharisees, and as the patrician Romans clung to Paganism after Rome had become Catholic. In either case it seems to me that the Mazda-worship of the Inscriptions might be severed from the later Zarathustrianism; and that it must be so severed on some theory or other, all with one voice seem to agree.
In deciding for the North-east 3 as the scene of Zarathustra's personal labours, and for the Gathic dialect as its more particular form of speech, I am not, I trust, solely
1 Compare even the Scythic name Thamimasadas, cited by Professor Rawlinson (Herod. 3rd edit. iii, p. 195). Were branches of the Scyths themselves in a sense Mazda-worshippers, or could the name have been borrowed ?
And which insisted less upon the personality of Satan. * The name Bactrian cannot be considered as more than a convenient expression.
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