Mazdeism

“ The Ecpyrosis or final conflagration is always present in orthodox Mazdeism, where it inspires its Apocalypses, and is in effect the necessary conclusion to the drama which begins with the assault on the world of light by Ahriman. ”

“ But if the first impression be astonishment, the second is horror, and the third pity. There is evident so much force, or rather such an abuse of force, that often the noblest characters and the strongest constitutions are ruined. The life appears hardy and dangerous to these; they would make prodigies of themselves; bound to debauchery as Mazeppa to his horse, they gallop, making Centaurs of themselves and seeing neither the bloody trail that the shreds of their flesh leave, nor the eyes of the wolves that gleam in hungry pursuit, nor the desert, nor the vultures. ”

“ I regarded thee as the most excellent, O Mazda, whom thy people have to worship in spirit, as the father of the pious, since I saw thee with my eye, as the eternal law-giver of the world, living in his works. Since thou of old, O Mazda, didst create all beings and spirits according to thy will, and gave them reason and a material body, all men, the wise and the unwise, cause their voices to sound, each according to his heart and mind; he who strives after wisdom proves in his spirit on which side is error. ”

“ He has lived all lives, and through his blood and brain have crept the shadow and the chill of every death, and his soul, Mazeppa-like, has been lashed naked to the wild horse of every fear and love and hate. The imagination hath a stage within the brain, whereon he sets all scenes that lie between the morn of laughter and the night of tears, and where his players body forth the false and true, the joys and griefs, the careless shadows, and the tragic deeps of human life. ”

“ Perhaps Miss Blake thought she had been "appointed" to watch the Maze gates in the shade of the dark night, to track the private steps of her unsuspicious host, Karl Andinnian! There is no sophistry in this world like self-sophistry; nothing else so deceives the human heart: more especially when it is hidden under a guise of piety. ”

“ When the law of Wickedness is thus annihilated, the divine law of Righteousness will pervade the entire world. Even the wicked souls who had revolted from Mazda in the corporeal world and gone over to the Evil Spirit will after the retribution come over to Mazda and acknowledge his sovereignty. As the great shepherd, Ahura Mazda will bring back into the fold of righteousness all those persons who, led astray by the rach-tempter, had left his flock. ”

“ The celestial spirits and the supporters of piety are compelled constantly to baffle their ever renewed enterprises. The strife continues in the heart and conscience of man, the epitome of the universe, between the divine law of duty and the suggestions of the evil spirits. Life is a merciless war knowing no truce. The task of the true Mazdean consisted in constantly fighting the evil in order to bring about the gradual triumph of Ormuzd in the world. The believer was the assistant of the gods in their work of purification and improvement. ”

“ The Evil Spirit has taught them to mislead men through evil thought, evil word, and evil deed. [15] The Daevas instigate the enemies of settled life to give the cattle to violence. [16] Mazda best remembers the misdeeds of these recreants and he judges accordingly. [17] When the two primal spirits of good and evil came together at the beginning of creation the demons chose evil and rushed with one accord to bring destruction to mankind. [18] The wicked are the beloved of the demons, for they are the ones that renounce the Good Mind and revolt from the wisdom of Ahura Mazda and Righteousness. ”

“ The law worketh wrath; all men are born equal; God is the direct source and owner of all things: with these three cardinal doctrines, Mazdak embarked upon his utopian career, pursuing the fatal phantom of his logic. ”

“ The Father of Creation! the Bridegroom Of the Spirit! hath He not written that Death has dominion only over sin? And thou would'st know if other worlds have felt The curse that fell upon, and blighted thine. Poor simple child of clay! no doubt thou know'st The story of the Eden of thy sire, And think'st that there, in its fresh, stainless breast, The baleful seeds of evil first were sown, Which since have spread so fearfully abroad,— When the sad doom, that came on him and his, Was but the spray, cast from the wave of fate, Which just then reached thy newly finished orb. ”

“ The Religion of Mazda indeed, O Spitama Zarathustra! takes away from him who makes confession of it the bonds of his sin; it takes away the sin of breach of trust; it takes away the sin of murdering one of the faithful; it takes away the sin of burying a corpse; it takes away the sin of deeds for which there is no atonement; it takes away the worst sin of usury; it takes away any sin that may be sinned. In the same way the Religion of Mazda, O Spitama Zarathustra! cleanses the faithful from every evil thought, word, and deed, as a swift-rushing mighty wind cleanses the plain. ”

“ Nothing can be more hopelessly vulgar, more unlike the majestic development of a system of grandly unintelligible conclusions from sublimely inconceivable premisses, such as delights the magian heart. In fact, Zadig’s method was nothing but the method of all mankind. Retrospective prophecies, far more astonishing for their minute accuracy than those of Zadig, are familiar to those who have watched the daily life of nomadic people. ”

“ All human souls will be subjected to a collective judgment before the ultimate renovation of the world. The souls will have to undergo the great ordeal by fire and molten metal, to which reference has already been made. [8] At the time of the final Dispensation Ahura Mazda will judge the souls of the righteous and the wicked by the test of his blazing fire. ”

“ If he wants to live so that he can yet hope to work as the prophet of Mazda and found his excellent religion, he should leave his homeland. He asks Mazda to point him the land to which he should flee. [61] When all hopes seem to be blighted, he bids farewell with heavy heart to the place of his birth. He does not know to what land he should turn and he turns to wherever Mazda may take him. He walks and walking thinks, dreams, falls into a reverie, stops, wakes up, hastens his steps. ”

“ In his account of his own dealings with spirits and magic, there is much curious mixture of half-doubting marvel and self deceit, probably not unconnected with influences baffling the human intellect, so apparent in the kindred delusions of Mesmerism, that strange development of the age of civilization, in no respect differing from the superstitions usually considered as the peculiar characteristics of the Middle ages. ”

“ And when he has grown to the age of a Hana, or of a Zaurura, or of a Pairista-khshudra, then the worshippers of Mazda shall order a man strong, vigorous, and skilful, to cut the head off his neck, in his enclosure on the top of the mountain: and they shall deliver his corpse unto the greediest of the corpse-eating creatures made by the beneficent Spirit, unto the vultures, with these words: 'The man here has repented of all his evil thoughts, words, and deeds. ”

“ Exalting our conception of these beings as mere objects, or as mere physical agents, as much as he could, it would have been suicidal in the poet to attempt to realize history as it must be among such beings. No human mind could do it. He had, therefore, except where the notion of physical superiority assisted him, to make events follow each other just as they would in a human narrative. The motives, the reasonings, the misconceptions of those beings, all that determined the succession of events, he had to make substantially human. ”

“ O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is the first that rejoices the Earth with greatest joy? Ahura Mazda answered: "It is he who digs out of it most corpses of dogs and men." O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is the second that rejoices the Earth with greatest joy? Ahura Mazda answered: "It is he who pulls down most of those Dakhmas on which the corpses of men are deposited. Let no man alone by himself carry a corpse. ”

“ There were suggestions of an awful region which the soul might enter, of a transmutation that was unto death, of evocations which could summon the utmost forces of evil from their dark places—in a word, of that sphere which is represented to most of us under the crude and somewhat childish symbolism of Black Magic. ”

“ I have the cold consciousness of the fall of perdition, deceit and insolubility.
You learned men will argue about me. Some of you will say that I am mad, others will demonstrate that I am normal, and will admit only certain limitations in the name of degeneracy. With all your learning, however, you cannot demonstrate my madness or my normality as clearly as I can. My mind has returned to me, as you shall be convinced. It lacks neither in power nor in keenness. Excellent, energetic thought, giving even its enemies their due! ”

“ The instant they begin to perceive and understand what they are doing, they begin to feel the fang of the worm. If the frivolous wicked world, which now takes so much pleasure in its wickedness, could be forced to do here what it will be forced to do hereafter, namely, to eye its sin while it commits it, to think of what it is doing while it does it, the billows of the lake of fire would roll in upon time, and from gay Paris and luxurious Vienna there would instantaneously ascend the wailing cry of Pandemonium. ”

“ But, it was the ethical part of his doctrine which at first caused a great revolution, and at last the destruction of the teacher and his numerous disciples, Mazdak bade all men to be partners in riches and women, just as they are of fire, water, and grass; private property was not to exist; each man to enjoy or to endure, in his turn, the good and bad lots of this world. ”

“ It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined—nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way—would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw—or believe I saw. ”

“ Men think that this child who hath just perished is fallen into the water by chance; and that it is by the same chance that this house is burned; but there is no such thing as chance; all is either a trial, or a punishment, or a reward, or a foresight. Remember the fisherman who thought himself the most wretched of mankind. Oromazes sent thee to change his fate. Cease, then, frail mortal, to dispute against what thou oughtest to adore.”
“But,” said Zadig—as he pronounced the word “But,” the angel took his flight toward the tenth sphere. Zadig on his knees adored Providence, and submitted. ”

“ Hence it follows that there is no other hell than mundane pain produced by purely mundane causes, as thorns, &c.; the only Supreme is the earthly monarch whose existence is proved by all the world's eyesight; and the only Liberation is the dissolution of the body. By holding the doctrine that the soul is identical with the body, [5] such phrases as "I am thin," "I am black," &c., are at once intelligible, as the attributes of thinness, &c., and self-consciousness will reside in the same subject [the body] ”

“ Especially are death and a dead body unclean. A corpse may not defile earth, fire nor water. So, as everyone knows, Mazdæans put dead bodies on their Towers of Silence, to be eaten by vultures. Burial, and still more cremation, are horrible to them. They have also a great aversion to any kind of asceticism. Life and pleasure are gifts of Ahura Mazda; not to enjoy them is positively sinful: it is perhaps the only religion which considers fasting actually wicked. They hate celibacy. ”

“ The magic system—interesting to us as having influenced the later Jewish creed and mediately the Christian—referred like most developed creeds to a particular founder, Zerdusht (Zarathustra of the Zend) , may have thus originated. Mankind, in seeking a solution for that most interesting but unsatisfactory problem, the cause of the predominance of evil on the earth, were obliged by their ignorance and their fears to imagine, in addition to the idea of a single supreme existence, the author and source of good, antagonistic influence—the source and representative of evil. ”

“ For the Law of the Universe has decreed that for every Action there is an equal and opposite Reaction. No account may be taken of madness--even though it be Divine. It avails not one jot when the time comes to foot the bill. By that time the madness has passed, like a dream in the night; and cold sanity is the judge before which a man must stand or fall. ”

“ His fine but fatal organization, which rendered him so susceptible of impressions, whether of good or evil, and which left him at times no shelter against ‘horrible imaginings,’ or against those real inflictions, calumny and slander, plunged him too frequently into fits of listless melancholy, when, disabused of all illusion, he saw the species to which he belonged in all the nakedness of its inherent infirmity. ”

“ To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have set my life. ”