II
ORMUZD
THE purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of things."
So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra.
"And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked.
"There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in the course of a conversation that the Avesta reports. In a similar manner Exodus provides a revelation which Moses received. There Jehovah said: 'ehyèh 'Ăsher 'ehyèh. In the Avesta Ormuzd said: ahmi yad ahmi.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each means I am that I am.[8]
[6] Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393
[7] Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.
[8] Exodus iii. 14.
The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides. The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew
