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Updated: May 10, 2025
'This servant, in order to gain first-hand information and experience, entered into the ranks of various religions; that is, outwardly I became a Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, and Zoroastrian.
The Zoroastrian zeal of this king was great, and he regarded it as incumbent on him to check the advance which Christianity was now making in his territories. He issued severe edicts against the Christians soon after attaining his majority; and when they sought the protection of the Roman emperor, he punished their disloyalty by imposing upon them a fresh tax, the weight of which was oppressive.
This work, the Zendavesta, while it may contain fragments of a very ancient literature, took its present shape in the time of Artaxerxes, and was probably then first collected from the mouths of the Zoroastrian priests and published by Arda-Viraf.
The second clause of it, if not all, will here become memorable to you literally illustrating, as it does, the very manner of the defeat of the Zoroastrian Magi, on which Giotto founds his Triumph of Faith. I write the leading sentences continuously; what I omit is only their amplification, which you can easily refer to at home.
The principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a Parsee funeral is Purity. By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried.
As a good Zoroastrian, he was naturally anxious to exhibit the superiority of Ormazd to all the "gods of the nations;" and, as the temple of Ammon in the oasis had the greatest repute of all the African shrines, this design would be best accomplished by its pillage and destruction.
The Zoroastrian creed was, little by little, superseded among the Parthians by a complex idolatry, which, beginning with an image-worship of the Sun and Moon, proceeded to an association with those deities of the deceased kings of the nation, and finally added to both a worship of ancestral idols, which formed the most cherished possession of each family, and practically monopolized the religious sentiment.
In the year 854-55 he deputed one of his nobles to bid a Zoroastrian chieftain "break his Magian girdle and embrace Islam, which he did and thereupon received a robe of honour from the Khalif." At page 157 we notice the extortionate practices of a Magian. "In the time of the Arabs we find an actual principality whose ruler bore the title of Masimogan or the elder of the Magians.
In his own judgment he kept his vow, but not in that of his natural advisers. It is satisfactory to find that the Zoroastrian priesthood, speaking by the mouth of the chief Mobed, disclaimed and exposed the fallacy of this wretched casuistry. The Ephthalite monarch, on learning the intention of Perozes, prepared to meet his attack by stratagem.
To the “high priests” of the Zoroastrian Faith He, furthermore, proclaimed that “the Incomparable Friend” is manifest, that He “speaketh that wherein lieth salvation,” that “the Hand of Omnipotence is stretched forth from behind the clouds,” that the tokens of His majesty and greatness are unveiled; and declared that “no man’s acts shall be acceptable in this day unless he forsaketh mankind and all that men possess, and setteth his face towards the Omnipotent One.”
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