FOOTNOTES:

[49] 'Erân, das Land zwischen dem Indus und Tigris, Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Landes und seiner Geschichte.' Von Dr. Friedrich Spiegel. Berlin, 1863.

VIII.

THE MODERN PARSIS.[50]

I.

t is not fair to speak of any religious sect by a name to which its members object. Yet the fashion of speaking of the followers of Zoroaster as Fire-worshippers is so firmly established that it will probably continue long after the last believers in Ormuzd have disappeared from the face of the earth. At the present moment, the number of the Zoroastrians has dwindled down so much that they hardly find a place in the religious statistics of the world. Berghaus in his 'Physical Atlas' gives the following division of the human race according to religion:

Buddhists31.2 per cent.
Christians30.7 "
Mohammedans15.7 "
Brahmanists13.4 "
Heathens 8.7 "
Jews 0.3 "

He nowhere states the number of the Fire-worshippers, nor does he tell us under what head they are comprised in his general computation. The difficulties of a religious census are very great, particularly when we have to deal with Eastern nations. About two hundred years ago, travellers estimated the Gabars (as they are called in Persia) at eighty thousand families, or about 400,000 souls. At present the Parsis in Western India amount to about 100,000, to which, if we add 5,500 in Yazd and Kirman, we get a total of 105,500. The number of the Jews is commonly estimated at 3,600,000; and if they represent 0.3 per cent of mankind, the Fire-worshippers could not claim at present more than about 0.01 per cent of the whole population of the earth. Yet there were periods in the history of the world when the worship of Ormuzd threatened to rise triumphant on the ruins of the temples of all other gods. If the battles of Marathon and Salamis had been lost, and Greece had succumbed to Persia, the state religion of the empire of Cyrus, which was the worship of Ormuzd, might have become the religion of the whole civilised world. Persia had absorbed the Assyrian and Babylonian empires; the Jews were either in Persian captivity or under Persian sway at home; the sacred monuments of Egypt had been mutilated by the hands of Persian soldiers. The edicts of the great king, the king of kings, were sent to India, to Greece, to Scythia, and to Egypt; and if 'by the grace of Auramazda' Darius had crushed the liberty of Greece, the purer faith of Zoroaster might easily have superseded the Olympian fables. Again, under the Sassanian dynasty (226-651 a.d.) the revived national faith of the Zoroastrians assumed such vigour that Shapur II, like another Diocletian, could aim at the extirpation of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the persecuted Christians in the East were as terrible as they had ever been in the West; nor was it by the weapons of Roman emperors or by the arguments of Christian divines that the fatal blow was dealt to the throne of Cyrus and the altars of Ormuzd. The power of Persia was broken at last by the Arabs; and it is due to them that the religion of Ormuzd, once the terror of the world, is now, and has been for the last thousand years, a mere curiosity in the eyes of the historian.

The sacred writings of the Zoroastrians, commonly called the Zend-Avesta, have for about a century occupied the attention of European scholars, and, thanks to the adventurous devotion of Anquetil Duperron, and the careful researches of Rask, Burnouf, Westergaard, Spiegel, and Haug, we have gradually been enabled to read and interpret what remains of the ancient language of the Persian religion. The problem was not an easy one, and had it not been for the new light which the science of language has shed on the laws of human speech, it would have been as impossible to Burnouf as it was to Hyde, the celebrated Professor of Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, to interpret with grammatical accuracy the ancient remnants of Zoroaster's doctrine. How that problem was solved is well known to all who take an interest in the advancement of modern scholarship. It was as great an achievement as the deciphering of the cuneiform edicts of Darius; and no greater compliment could have been paid to Burnouf and his fellow-labourers than that scholars, without inclination to test their method, and without leisure to follow these indefatigable pioneers through all the intricate paths of their researches, should have pronounced the deciphering of the ancient Zend as well as of the ancient Persian of the Achæmenian period to be impossible, incredible, and next to miraculous.

While the scholars of Europe are thus engaged in disinterring the ancient records of the religion of Zoroaster, it is of interest to learn what has become of that religion in those few settlements where it is still professed by small communities. Though every religion is of real and vital interest in its earliest state only, yet its later development too, with all its misunderstandings, faults, and corruptions, offers many an instructive lesson to the thoughtful student of history. Here is a religion, one of the most ancient of the world, once the state religion of the most powerful empire, driven away from its native soil, deprived of political influence, without even the prestige of a powerful or enlightened priesthood, and yet professed by a handful of exiles—men of wealth, intelligence, and moral worth in Western India—with an unhesitating fervour such as is seldom to be found in larger religious communities. It is well worth the serious consideration of the philosopher and the divine to discover, if possible, the spell by which this apparently effete religion continues to command the attachment of the enlightened Parsis of India, and makes them turn a deaf ear to the allurements of the Brahmanic worship and the earnest appeals of Christian missionaries. We believe that to many of our readers the two pamphlets, lately published by a distinguished member of the Parsi community, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, Professor of Guzerati at University College, London, will open many problems of a more than passing interest. One is a Paper read before the Liverpool Philomathic Society, 'On the Manners and Customs of the Parsees;' the other is a Lecture delivered before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 'On the Parsee Religion.'

In the first of these pamphlets, we are told that the small community of Parsis in Western India is at the present moment divided into two parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. Both are equally attached to the faith of their ancestors, but they differ from each other in their modes of life—the Conservatives clinging to all that is established and customary, however absurd and mischievous, the Liberals desiring to throw off the abuses of former ages, and to avail themselves, as much as is consistent with their religion and their Oriental character, of the advantages of European civilisation. 'If I say,' writes our informant, 'that the Parsees use tables, knives and forks, &c., for taking their dinners, it would be true with regard to one portion, and entirely untrue with regard to another. In one house you see in the dining-room the dinner table furnished with all the English apparatus for its agreeable purposes; next door, perhaps, you see the gentleman perfectly satisfied with his primitive good old mode of squatting on a piece of mat, with a large brass or copper plate (round, and of the size of an ordinary tray) before him, containing all the dishes of his dinner, spread on it in small heaps, and placed upon a stool about two or three inches high, with a small tinned copper cup at his side for his drinks, and his fingers for his knives and forks. He does this, not because he cannot afford to have a table, &c., but because he would not have them in preference to his ancestral mode of life, or, perhaps, the thought has not occurred to him that he need have anything of the kind.'

Instead, therefore, of giving a general description of Parsi life at present, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji gives us two distinct accounts—first of the old, secondly of the new school. He describes the incidents in the daily life of a Parsi of the old school, from the moment he gets out of bed to the time of his going to rest, and the principal ceremonies from the hour of his birth to the hour of his burial. Although we can gather from the tenour of his writings that the author himself belongs to the Liberals, we must give him credit for the fairness with which he describes the party to which he is opposed. There is no sneer, no expression of contempt anywhere, even when, as in the case of the Nirang, the temptation must have been considerable. What this Nirang is we may best state in the words of the writer:

'The Nirang is the urine of cow, ox, or she-goat, and the rubbing of it over the face and hands is the second thing a Parsee does after getting out of bed. Either before applying the Nirang to the face and hands, or while it remains on the hands after being applied, he should not touch anything directly with his hands; but, in order to wash out the Nirang, he either asks somebody else to pour water on his hands, or resorts to the device of taking hold of the pot through the intervention of a piece of cloth, such as a handkerchief or his Sudrâ, i. e. his blouse. He first pours water on one hand, then takes the pot in that hand and washes his other hand, face and feet.'

Strange as this process of purification may appear, it becomes perfectly disgusting when we are told that women, after childbirth, have not only to undergo this sacred ablution, but have actually to drink a little of the Nirang, and that the same rite is imposed on children at the time of their investiture with the Sudrâ and Kusti, the badges of the Zoroastrian faith. The Liberal party have completely surrendered this objectionable custom, but the old school still keep it up, though their faith, as Dadabhai Naoroji says, in the efficacy of Nirang to drive away Satan may be shaken. 'The Reformers,' our author writes, 'maintain that there is no authority whatever in the original books of Zurthosht for the observance of this dirty practice, but that it is altogether a later introduction. The old adduce the authority of the works of some of the priests of former days, and say the practice ought to be observed. They quote one passage from the Zend-Avesta corroborative of their opinion, which their opponents deny as at all bearing upon the point.' Here, whatever our own feelings may be about the Nirang, truth obliges us to side with the old school, and if our author had consulted the ninth Fasgard of the Vendidad (page 120, line 21, in Brockhaus's edition), he would have seen that both the drinking and the rubbing in of the so-called Gaomaezo—i. e. Nirang—are clearly enjoined by Zoroaster in certain purificatory rights. The custom rests, therefore, not only on the authority of a few priests of former days, but on the ipsissima verba of the Zend-Avesta, the revealed word of Ormuzd; and if, as Dadabhai Naoroji writes, the Reformers of the day will not go beyond abolishing and disavowing the ceremonies and notions that have no authority in the original Zend-Avesta, we are afraid that the washing with Nirang, and even the drinking of it, will have to be maintained. A pious Parsi has to say his prayers sixteen times at least every day—first on getting out of bed, then during the Nirang operation, again when he takes his bath, again when he cleanses his teeth, and when he has finished his morning ablutions. The same prayers are repeated whenever, during the day, a Parsi has to wash his hands. Every meal—and there are three—begins and ends with prayer, besides the grace, and before going to bed the work of the day is closed by a prayer. The most extraordinary thing is that none of the Parsis—not even their priests—understand the ancient language in which these prayers are composed. We must quote the words of our author, who is himself of the priestly caste, and who says:

'All prayers, on every occasion, are said, or rather recited, in the old original Zend language, neither the reciter nor the people around intended to be edified, understanding a word of it. There is no pulpit among the Parsees. On several occasions, as on the occasion of the Ghumbars, the bimestral holidays, the third day's ceremonies for the dead, and other religious or special holidays, there are assemblages in the temple; prayers are repeated, in which more or less join, but there is no discourse in the vernacular of the people. Ordinarily, every one goes to the fire-temple whenever he likes, or, if it is convenient to him, recites his prayers himself, and as long as he likes, and gives, if so inclined, something to the priests to pray for him.'

In another passage our author says:

'Far from being the teachers of the true doctrines and duties of their religion, the priests are generally the most bigoted and superstitious, and exercise much injurious influence over the women especially, who, until lately, received no education at all. The priests have, however, now begun to feel their degraded position. Many of them, if they can do so, bring up their sons in any other profession but their own. There are, perhaps, a dozen among the whole body of professional priests who lay claim to a knowledge of the Zend-Avesta: but the only respect in which they are superior to their brethren is, that they have learnt the meanings of the words of the books as they are taught, without knowing the language, either philosophically or grammatically.'

Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji proceeds to give a clear and graphic description of the ceremonies to be observed at the birth and the investiture of children, at the betrothal of children, at marriages and at funerals, and he finally dismisses some of the distinguishing features of the national character of the Parsis. The Parsis are monogamists. They do not eat anything cooked by a person of another religion; they object to beef, pork, or ham. Their priesthood is hereditary. None but the son of a priest can be a priest, but it is not obligatory for the son of a priest to take orders. The high-priest is called Dustoor, the others are called Mobed.

The principal points for which the Liberals among the Parsis are, at the present moment, contending, are the abolition of the filthy purifications by means of Nirang; the reduction of the large number of obligatory prayers; the prohibition of early betrothal and marriage; the suppression of extravagance at weddings and funerals; the education of women, and their admission into general society. A society has been formed, called 'the Rahanumaee Mazdiashna,' i. e. the Guide of the Worshippers of God. Meetings are held, speeches made, tracts distributed. A counter society, too, has been started, called 'the True Guides;' and we readily believe what Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji tells us—that, as in Europe, so in India, the Reformers have found themselves strengthened by the intolerant bigotry and the weakness of the arguments of their opponents. The Liberals have made considerable progress, but their work is as yet but half done, and they will never be able to carry out their religious and social reforms successfully, without first entering on a critical study of the Zend-Avesta, to which, as yet, they profess to appeal as the highest authority in matters of faith, law, and morality.

We propose, in another article, to consider the state of religion among the Parsis of the present day.

August, 1862.