| The period of rudimental units, vegetables, and reptiles | 16,000 | years. |
| The period of mankind | 16,000 | — |
| Both periods | 32,000 | — |
| Multiplied by | 00,002 | — |
| Total | 64,000 | years. |
Section IV. On certain customs, forms of speech, and traditions of this sect.—Mahmúd has treatises and rules conformable to the law of the prophet; but he interpreted the Koran according to his own creed. Of his established customs are the following: One living in solitude is called váhed, “recluse.”[15] Praises are due to the man devoted to this state, whose whole life is spent in holiness, poverty, and retirement; who feels no inclination for connexion; takes little, and no more than necessary, food; such a man will rise to perfection, and become a “váhed,” attaining the divine dignity which leads to that of a “teacher.” If the pious person feels himself inclined to connexion with a woman, let him enjoy her once in his whole life; if he cannot otherwise, once in one year; if he requires more, once in forty days; if this be not enough, once in a month; if still more, once in a week.
A váhed is reported to have given the following information: When one descends from the state of a man to the state of an irrational animal, or from that to a vegetable, or from a vegetable becomes a mineral; in this manner, by reaction of impressions and dispositions, he receives in each state a mark (mahs), which he bears from formation to formation:
“Fear the intelligence of the believer, because he sees by the light of God.”
Mahs[16] in the dictionary is interpreted “a computer,” but in the idiom of this tribe it signifies (as just said) that every individual, in his disposition and action, bears a vestige of the disposition of a former state. It is a part of their persuasion, that, when an individual enters for the first time in a society, the name of whatever in the three kingdoms of nature he first brings upon his tongue, is supposed to be the ihśa, or “mark,” that in a former state he had been the very thing the name of which had fallen from his tongue.
These sectaries hold, that pilgrims exercise the profession of cheats, wearing a garment marked with stripes, which they call the vest of Kerbála; and that they practise but hypocrisy and deceit. When, according to their low disposition, they descend to the state of brutes, they become animals, which the Hindus call Galharí, “squirrel;” and when transformed into vegetables, they become striped pumpkins, or weak jujube-trees; when they undergo the transformation into minerals, they are onyxes. In this sense this sect interprets the mahs, or “mark.” Lawyers and governors, who wash hands and mouth, friends of white garments, become geese, which at every moment plunge their head into water; in the state of vegetables, they assume the form of sticks for rubbing teeth, of reading-sticks, and of mats to cover the place of prayer; and in the state of minerals, they figure as hard stones, stones of sepulchres, and magnets. The glow-worms are torch-bearers, who, descending by degrees, came to take this shape. A dog, having been in his former state a Turk of the tribe Kazelbásh,[17] and his crooked sword having become his tail, betrays his Turkish origin by coming forth at the call khach: which in Turkish means “forth.” These sectaries further say, that the iron by which a prophet or a saint has been killed, is that which acquires excellence.
“Saints, when they desire the voyage to the eternal kingdom,
Desire from the edge of thy blade the takbír,[18] ‘magnifying exclamation,’ of death.”