[66] He assumes that Vohu Mano (Good Thought) is the Neo-Platonic Logos, and if so, that the other Amesha Spentas are of post-Alexandrian development, and he goes on to find parallels for them too in the rest of the seven emanations enumerated by Philo. However, even if the parallels are so close as to compel the conclusion that the character and functions ascribed to the Amesha Spentas in their latest form are due to Neo-Platonic influences—and even this is not shown very convincingly—it by no means follows that the very conception of the seven celestial powers is due to the same source.
[67] We have here, in Persia, an anticipation of the Neo-Platonic æons before the time of Plato himself—a conception which can hardly be referred to the earlier theory of the kind propounded by Hesiod.
[68] Vendîdâd, Introduction, p. liv, and see p. lxi. For the dead casting no shadow, cp. Plutarch’s Vision of Thespesios.
[69] Op. cit., p. lxv.
[70] Article ‘Chaldæa,’ in Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. iii.
[71] Revelation xv. 2, and cf. Fis Adamnáin, ch. II.
[72] Herodotus, Euterpe, ii. 156.
[73] Dill, op. cit., p. 561.
[74] Athenian colonists were settled in the Nile delta in the seventh century B.C. at latest, and at an even earlier date intercourse had been maintained between Greece and Egypt by the medium of Greek traders to the Nile, and Greek mercenaries in the Egyptian service. The cult of Isis was introduced into Attica, at the Peiraios, in the fourth century B.C. (Foucart, Associations réligieuses, etc., p. 83), and extended over the Grecian islands and the mainlands of Greece and Ionia.
[75] Budge, Book of the Dead, 1901, 1. lxv., and Ib. lxvii. sqq. Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 1879, pp. 180-1.