VI
THE FAITH OF IRAN
THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew.
In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the knowledge of good and evil? The early Iranians must have broken off from the united body of the Aryans at a time when they spoke a common language, which though not Sanscrit, was very like it. The affinities between Sanscrit and the dialect called with irremediable inaccuracy “Zend” are of the strongest. From this we conclude that, on their establishment in their new home, the Iranians differed little from the race of whose customs the Rig-Veda gives—not a full picture—but a faithful outline. Pastoral folk, devoted to their flocks and herds, but not unlearned in the cultivation of the earth and the sowing of grain, they had reached what may be called the highest stage of primitive civilisation. Though milk, butter and cooked corn formed their principal food, on feast days they also ate meat, chiefly the flesh of oxen and buffaloes, which they were careful to cook thoroughly. The progressive Aryans, who called half-raw meat by a term exactly corresponding to the too familiar “rosbif saignant,” denounced the more savage peoples who consumed it as “wild men” or “demons.” They kept horses, asses and mules; horses were sacrificed occasionally; for instance, kings sacrificed a horse to obtain male issue. The wild boar was hunted, if not in the earliest, at least in very early times. The dog was prized for its fidelity as guardian of the house and flocks, but there is no trace of its having been protected by extraordinary regulations such as those which later came into force in Iran. On the other hand, the name of dog had never yet been used in reproach. It seems to have been among Semitic races that the contempt for man’s best friend arose, but it is morally certain that it arose nowhere till dogs became scavengers of cities. It was the homeless pariah cur that gave the dog the bad name from which have sprung so many ugly words registered in modern vocabularies. Even now, when Jew or Moslem uses “dog” in a bad sense, he means “cur”; he knows quite well the other kind of dog—he knows Tobit’s dog, which, bounding on before the young man and the angel, told the glad tidings of his master’s return; Tobit’s dog which was one of the animals admitted by Mohammed into highest heaven. But “pariah dog” became synonymous of pariah, and notwithstanding the present tendency to attribute the opprobrium of the pig to original sanctity (and consequent reservation), I am inclined to think that the pig likewise came to be scorned because he was a scavenger. In some Indian cities herds of wild pigs still enter the gates just before they are closed at dusk, to pass out of them as soon as they are opened in the morning: during the night they do their work excellently, and by day they take a well-earned sleep in the jungle. They deserve gratitude, for they keep the cities free from disease, but, like other public servants, they scarcely get it.
In Vedic times every home had its watch-dog, whose warning bark was as unwelcome to lovers as it was to robbers. The Rig-Veda preserves the prayer of a young girl who asks that her father, her mother, her grandfather, and the watch-dog may sleep soundly while she meets her expected lover: a charming glimpse of the chaste freedom of early Aryan manners. The newly-wedded wife enters her husband’s house as mistress, not as slave; the elders say to the young couple: “You are master and mistress of this house; though there be father-in-law and mother-in-law, they are placed under you.” If that was not quite what happened, yet the principle was granted, and there is much in that. The bride rode to her new home in a car drawn by four milk-white oxen; when she alighted at the threshold, these golden words were spoken to her: “Make thyself loved for the sake of the children that will come to thee; guard this house, be as one with thy husband; may you grow old here together. Cast no evil looks, hate not thy spouse, be gentle in thought and deed even to the animals of this home.” Bride and bridegroom are exhorted to be of one heart, of one mind, “to love each other as a cow loves her calf,” a simple and true metaphor full of the country-side, full of the youth of the world.
If these were the customs and this was the life which the Iranians may be supposed to have taken with them, what was the religion? The early Aryans had a Nature-cult more spiritualised under the form of Varuna and more materialised under the form of Indra. Some students of the Avesta have thought that here could be found the elements of the Dualism which formed the essential doctrine of Mazdaism. But it is almost certain that no real Dualism existed in oldest Iran. The Avesta once contrasts the worshippers of God with the worshippers of Daevas, of those who breed the cow and have the care of it with those who ill-treat it and slaughter it at their sacrifices. But Indra-worship has no connexion with devil-worship, nor does this or similar texts prove that devil-worship, properly so called, ever flourished in Iran. Other religious reformers than Zoroaster have named the devotees of former religions “devil-worshippers.” For the rest, there is reason to think that in the Avesta the term was applied to Turanian raiders, not to true Iranians.
Photo: Mansell.
ASSYRIAN GOD CARRYING ANTELOPE AND WHEAT-EAR.
British Museum.
In an Assyrian inscription, Ahura Mazda is said to have created joy for all creatures: a belief which Mazdean Dualism impugns. So far as can be guessed, the earliest Iranian faith was the worship of good spirits—of a Good Spirit. Less pure extra-beliefs may, or rather must, have existed contemporaneously, but they remained in the second rank. The cult of good spirits was the home-cult of shepherd and herdsman offered to the genii of their flocks and herds. While these genii answered the purpose of the lares or little saints everywhere dear to humble hearts, it is probable that in character they already resembled the Fravashis or archetypes that were to play so great a part in Mazdean doctrine. The cult of the Good Spirit, the national and kingly cult, was the worship of one God whose most worthy symbol, before Zoroaster as after, was the sun and whose sacrament with men was fire. The early Iranian had no temple, no altar: he went up into a high place and offered his prayer and sacrifice without priest or pomp. If we wish to trace his faith back to an Indian source, instead of bringing on the scene Varuna and Indra, it will be better to inquire whether there were elements of the same faith underlying the unwieldy fabric of Vedic religion. The answer is, that there were. The grandest text in the Rig-Veda, the one text recognised from farthest antiquity as of incalculable value, is the old Persian religion contained in a formula: “That Sun’s supremacy—God—let us adore Which may well direct.”
“Enable with perpetual light,