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Updated: June 15, 2025
It is amazing how much trouble people will give themselves about the question of sacrificing a horse to the sun, or a calf to Auramazda, or an Ethiopian to Nabon or Ashtaroth! And these Magians! They are really no more descendants of the priests in the Aryan home than I am a Greek. Half of them are nearly black they are Hindus and speak Persian with an accent.
A superior smile parted the Magian's lips; he stepped back into the room, followed by Annianus, and replied: "You know how many who call themselves Magians will crowd round Caesar, and the fame of Sosibius, Hananja, and Kaimis, is not much behind mine. Each plies his art by his own formulas, though he may call himself a Pythagorean or what not.
By the way," Adrian continued, as if diverging to another topic, "you met two gentlemen of the road in your explorations yesterday, Magians. Now, if I were a magistrate of the county, like Sir Miles Papworth, my suspicions would light upon those gentlemen. A tinker and a ploughman, I think you said, Mr. Thompson. Not? Well, say two ploughmen." "More likely two tinkers," said Richard.
Rhetoricians with shaven faces, Magians and sorcerers, whose long beards flowed over robes embroidered with strange figures; students, dressed after the fashion of their forefathers in the palmy days of Athens; men of every age, who dubbed themselves artists though they were no more than imitators of the works of a greater epoch, unhappy in that no one at this period of indifference to beauty called upon them to prove what they could do, or to put forth their highest powers.
How then could the principle of evil or anything else arise since there was nothing at first which participated with light in its production and in its being eternal? Here the error of the Magians becomes apparent. They also assert that the first of persons was Kayumarth, though they sometimes say that he was Zarwan the great, and that the last of the prophets was Zaradusht.
Then he rose and walked about the city, seeking news of his brother, till he saw a Muslim, a tailor, sitting in his shop; so he sat down by him and told him his story; whereupon quoth the tailor, 'If he have fallen into the hands of any of the Magians, thou shalt hardly see him again: yet it may be God will reunite you.
But under both kings the old Aryan worship of the Magians had existed among the people, and the Magians themselves had asserted, whenever they dared, their right to be considered the priestly caste, the children of the Brahmins of the Aryan house.
He instituted Magian rites in lieu of the old ceremonies, and established his brother Magians as the priest-caste of the Persian nation. The changes introduced were no doubt satisfactory to the Medes, and to many of the subject races throughout the Empire.
Their ignorance withstood the despotism of Shaw Abbas, who demanded with threats and tortures the prophetic books of Zoroaster; and this obscure remnant of the Magians is spared by the moderation or contempt of their present sovereigns. The Northern coast of Africa is the only land in which the light of the gospel, after a long and perfect establishment, has been totally extinguished.
The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity the ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled from on high the worship in the open air under the blue canopy of heaven the long troops of Magians in their white robes, with their strange caps, and their mystic wands the frequent prayers the abundant sacrifices the long incantations the supposed prophetic powers of the priest-caste all this together constituted an imposing whole at once to the eye and to the mind, and was calculated to give additional grandeur to the civil system that should be allied with it.
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