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Updated: May 31, 2025
Abulferage, p. 160. The present Condition of Mohammedanism. In Turkey. The Doctrines believed there. Their Forms of Devotion. Lustrations. Prayer. Mohammedan Sabbath. Fast of Ramadan. Meccan Pilgrimage. Proselytism. Mohammedan Hierarchy. Islamism in Tartary. In Hindustan. In China. In Persia. In Africa. In the Indian Archipelago. The Sooffees. The Wahabees.
The lustrations and purifications, at whatever period their sanctity was generally acknowledged, could scarcely fail of salutary effects. They were supposed to absolve the culprit from former crimes, and restore him, a new man, to the bosom of society.
The vast variety of their deities, said to amount to thirty thousand, with their respective rites of adoration, could not fail to introduce such a number of ceremonies, shews, sacrifices, lustrations, and public processions, as must have employed the people almost constantly from one end of the year to the other.
False religions have next to nothing to say about forgiveness. Sacrifices and lustrations they have, but no assurance of absolution. Systems of philosophy and morals have nothing to say but that the universe goes crashing on, and if you have broken its laws you must suffer.
Spotless cleanliness being required by the rites of ancestor-worship, in the temple, in the person of the officiant, and in the home, this rule of purity was naturally extended by degrees to all the conditions of existence. And besides the great periodical ceremonies of purification, a multitude of minor lustrations were exacted by the cult.
Lustrations and sacrifices were not, however, the only preparatives for inducing the visionary disposition. The priests subjected the patients to various others, which Philostratus affirms to have been very instrumental towards rendering the sleeper's mind clear and unclouded.
He cannot comprehend what drove the fierce Heathen, cowering and humbled, into the fold of the Church; what peopled Egypt with eremites; what lined the roads of Europe and Asia with pilgrim homicides; what, in the elder world, while Jove yet reigned on Olympus, is couched in the dim traditions of the expiation of Apollo, the joy-god, descending into Hades; or why the sinner went blithe and light-hearted from the healing lustrations of Eleusis.
They teach the immortality of souls, and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for; and when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices because they have more pure lustrations of their own; on which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves; yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they entirely addict themselves to husbandry.
It was in the same camp that the deputy of Mecca was astonished by the attention of the faithful to the words and looks of the prophet, by the eagerness with which they collected his spittle, a hair that dropped on the ground, the refuse water of his lustrations, as if they participated in some degree of the prophetic virtue.
Romulus also purified the city with lustrations, which, they say, are even now practised at the Ferentine gate. But before the plague ceased, the people of Camerium attacked the Romans, supposing that they would be unable to defend themselves on account of their misfortune, and overran their country.
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