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Updated: June 29, 2025
Such canons are found in Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, and in minor bodies like the Essenes, Mormons, and others, but not among the Chinese, Greeks, and Romans; Brahmanism occupies a middle ground it regards the Veda and the accessory books as entitled to great reverence, but has never drawn the line between sacred and nonsacred writings so sharply as has been done in the group named above.
Moreover, "she tells men the everlasting laws, which no one may abolish," or, in other words, imparts to them the eternal principles of morality. She is sometimes represented as standing next to Ormazd in the mythology, as in the profession of faith required of converts to Zoroastrianism.
Though the morality of the Manichees was pure, and though their religion is regarded by some as a sort of Christianity, there were but few points in which it was an improvement on Zoroastrianism.
Besides these two a great number of lesser gods are mentioned; the latter, apparently the old local gods and spirits here subordinated to the supreme god, are unimportant in the official cult. The souls of the departed also become objects of worship. +740+. It thus appears that Zoroastrianism was a reform of the old polytheism.
The official religion of the state was that practiced by Cyrus and his predecessors in their native land. The essential doctrines of the religion, commonly known as Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, presented a sharp contrast to the beliefs that still were current in Babylonia, and it was inevitable that with the influx of new ideas, the further development of Babylonian worship was cut short.
The religion never recovered itself was never reinstated. It survived, a longer or a shorter time, in places. To a slight extent it corrupted Zoroastrianism; but, on the whole, from the date of the fall of Babylon it declined. "Bel bowed down; Nebo stooped;" "Merodach was broken in pieces."
Certainly there were Buddhists in India long after this time: even a great Buddhist king in the seventh century: but it seems more than probably that the spirit of intolerance went east with the eastward cyclic flow we have noted this evening: from Christianity to Zoroastrianism: from Zoroastrianism under the Sassanids to Brahminism under the Guptas.
But Zoroastrianism was never more eagerly studied than in the first centuries of the Christian era, though without anything of the disinterested and almost scientific curiosity of the earlier times. Religious and philosophic sects, in search of new dogmas, eagerly received whatever came to them bearing the name of Zoroaster.
There are suggestions of Pythagoreanism and possibly of Zoroastrianism; it can only be said that various ideas were in the air of Palestine, and that the Essene formulation was effected under conditions and at a time not known to us. Essenism seems not to have affected the Jewish religious ideas of the time.
Zoroastrianism touches the Veda in its theistic construction, and is remarkably like Judaism in its organization. Christianity is Jewish on one side and Græco-Roman on another. Islam has Christian and Jewish conceptions attached to the old-Semitic view of life.
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