Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 52

THE GÂTHAS,
THE five Gåthas of Zarathustra and his immediate followers are placed here before the other parts of the Yasna on account of their higher antiquity. There existed no other Yasna for years or centuries beside them.
The more remarkable circumstances connected with them have been already discussed in the Introduction.
If it is necessary to recall any of them here, the most prominent would be that they are undoubtedly the productions of a small group of influential men who are referred to in them for the most part by name; that Zarathustra, everywhere else nearly or quite a demi-god, is here a struggling and suffering man. He is a prophet, or a divinely appointed instructor, but thoroughly human and real, so far as his situations become apparent.
Secondly, their historical tone may be emphasised. Their doctrines and exhortations concern an actual religious movement taking place contemporaneously with their composition; and that movement was exceptionally pure and most earnest. Their tone is therefore everywhere serious. Nearly all myths are dropped, and likewise, as perhaps their most striking peculiarity, even the old Aryan gods, who reappear in the later Yasna, Vendidad, and Yasts, are, save one, wholly absent.
The movement in its reformatory character seems to have thrown them out, not perhaps with definite intention, but because the minds of the devout enthusiasts excluded them as having inferior interest, in view of the results immediately before them.
So far as a claim to a high position among the curiosities of ancient moral lore is concerned, the reader may trust himself freely to the impression that he has before him an anthology which was probably composed with as fervent a desire to benefit the spiritual and moral natures of those to
[31]
Digitized by Google
Digitized by