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Hindu beggars, so dirty that they seemed to have returned to dust before death; three fakirs, armed with round-bladed daggers with which they were wounding themselves apparently in the most reckless manner, so as to send streams of blood flowing to the ground, and redly tattooing the ashes with which their naked bodies were covered; Parsees with their long noses curving over their moustaches, clothed in white, sending one's thoughts back to Ormuz, to Persia, to Zoroaster, to fire-worship and to the strangeness of the fate which drove them out of Persia more than a thousand years ago, and which has turned them into the most industrious traders and most influential citizens of a land in which they are still exiles; Chinese, Afghans the Highlanders of the East Arabs, Africans, Mahrattas, Malays, Persians, Portuguese half-bloods; men that called upon Mohammed, men that called upon Confucius, upon Krishna, upon Christ, upon Gotama the Buddha, upon Rama and Sita, upon Brahma, upon Zoroaster; strange carriages shaded by red domes that compressed a whole dream of the East in small, and drawn by humped oxen, alternating with palanquins, with stylish turnouts of the latest mode, with cavaliers upon Arabian horses; half-naked workmen, crouched in uncomfortable workshops and ornamenting sandal-wood boxes; dusky curb-stone shopkeepers, rushing at me with strenuous offerings of their wares; lines of low shop-counters along the street, backed by houses rising in many stories, whose black pillared verandahs were curiously carved and painted: cries, chafferings, bickerings, Mussulman prayers, Arab oaths extending from "Praise God that you exist" to "Praise God although you exist;" all these things appealed to the confused senses.
It is believed that Abraham introduced fire-worship among the Jews from Ur in Mesopotamia, a land in which lights are still venerated, and fire altars are worshipped as containing the Deity. The real essence of fire which was identical with the life-principle was holy. The "Lord" of the Israelites was in the fire which descended on Mt. Sinai, Exodus xix., 18.
Every morning when the sun shone, and at its reappearance after the rain, he prostrated himself in a patch of sun-light this and the abuse of the life-buoy becoming ceremonies in his fire-worship. In time he became such a menace to the hogs that they climbed the wall at the high ground and disappeared in the country beyond. And after them went the cowardly dingoes that preyed on their young.
Children raced, shouting in the light, perpetuating unconsciously the fire-worship of Asia by leaping across outer edges of the blaze. It rose and showed the bowered homes of Kaskaskia, the tavern at an angle of the streets, with two Indians, in leggins and hunting-shirts, standing on the gallery as emotionless spectators.
Thus, Jove was the power of the heavens, which, of course, centred in the sun; Apollo is admitted to have been only another name for the sun; Æsculapius represents his healing virtues; Hercules his saving strength; and Prometheus, who gave fire to men, as Vulcan, the god of fire, was probably connected with Eastern fire-worship, and so in the end with the worship of the sun.
"It was Rassen who on the Mountain supplanted the primeval fire-worship whereof the flaming pillars which light its Sanctuary remain as monuments, by that of Hes, or Isis, or rather blended the two in one.
Their fire-worship interests me, for it was till lately our own religion, and I even to-day know of an old lady in an out-of-the-way corner of our West Highlands who, till quite recently, went through various genuflexions every morning old forms of fire-worship as the sun rose; and in the Outer Isles we have still many remains of our fore-fathers' worship woven into the untruthful jingling rhymes of the monks.
Cambyses had converted the temples of his father into places of fire-worship, and had burnt thousands of human victims; rejoicing in the splendour of his ceremonies and in the fierce love of blood that grew upon him as his vices obtained the mastery over his better sense.
The worship of light, either in its pure essence or in the forms of sun-worship and fire-worship, because the sun and the fire were causes of light, was among the earliest and most universal superstitions of the world. Light was considered as the primordial source of all that was holy and intelligent; and darkness, as its opposite, was viewed as but another name for evil and ignorance. Dr.
Parsism is often called fire-worship, and the elements of earth and water also obtain extreme sanctity in it, but of this also there is in the oldest books little trace. The variety in the literature no doubt reflects a variety in the religion of Iran.
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