A Comparative View of Religions | Page 6

seduces the first human pair, created by Ahura-Mazda. In the third
period, which begins with the revelation given to Zarathustra,
Ahura-mazda and Angro-mainyus strive together for man. After this
follows, in the fourth period, the victory gained by Ahura-Mazda.
Sosiosh (Saoshyas), the deliverer already foretold in the Vendidad,
appears. The resurrection of the dead, not taught by Zarathustra or in
the Vendidad, takes place. The judgment of the world begins; the good

are received into paradise and the sinners banished to hell. At last, all is
purified, and Angro-mainyus himself and his Dews submit themselves
to Ahura-Mazda, whose victory is celebrated in heaven with songs of
praise.
Thus among the Iranian races, out of the old patriarchal worship of fire
and light, on the occasion of the religious struggle with the Indian Arya,
and under the influence of Zarathustra, there was developed the
doctrine of one supreme God,[3] who, surrounded by the good spirits
of heaven, wages war against evil, whence arose later the moral
opposition between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-mainyus resulting in the
victory of the good principle over the bad. The old dualism of force and
matter, beneficent and destructive powers of nature, light and darkness,
becomes in Parsism moral. The deity, no longer identified with nature,
becomes a personal, spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end
of the world's development is conceived as the triumph of the good.
Hence the high rank which the doctrine of Zarathustra and its further
development holds in the history of religion.
3. THE GREEKS.
As man rises in spiritual development, nature becomes to him a
revelation ever more and more manifold of the divine. To the Greek
(Pelasgi, Hellenes) the whole of nature was living, and his imagination
peopled her everywhere with divine beings, who in wood and field, in
rivers and on mountains (Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, Sileni, &c.), hovered
friendly round him. The Greek was indeed distinguished from other
nations by this richer and more elevated view of nature; but he excelled
them most of all in this, that the divine object which he worshiped was
conceived both in form and character after the human. Zeus, Phoebus
Apollo, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes,
Artemis, were originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets
in Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under the same
names, types of power and lordship, science and art, courage and
sensuous beauty. While Dionysus, Demeter, Hades, and Persephone
remained earthly, and Helios, Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities,
and Oceanus, Poseidon, Amphitrite, Proteus, and Nereus ruled the

waters, Zeus was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who
hurled the bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of men, and
Hera, originally the air, became the protecting goddess of married life;
Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth his arrows, not at first
identified with Helios, became the god of divination and poetry, who
led the choir of the muses; the goddess of light, Athene, became the
contentious goddess of wisdom; Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea,
once the symbol of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled by the
Graces, became the type of womanly beauty and charm, to which the
strength of man, personified in Ares, corresponds. In like manner in the
later mythology, Hephaestus, the god of fire, appeared as the god of the
forge, Hestia, the goddess of fire, as the protector of the household
hearth, and Hermes, the god of the storm and of rain, as the messenger
of the gods, the type of cunning and craftiness, while Artemis, the
goddess of the moon, the fruitful mother of nature, took the character of
the chaste maiden, the goddess of hunting, who with her nymphs and
hounds nightly roamed the fields and woods. The monsters, the Sphinx,
the Minotaur, the Cyclops, the Centaurs, symbols of a yet unhuman or
half human power of nature, were overcome by the Greek heroes,
Perseus, Hercules, Jason, Theseus, OEdipus, the types of human
strength and valor. The religious festivals were enlivened by trials of
men's strength and skill in games, and the historian and poet offered to
the gods the products of human genius. In the religion of the Greeks,
however, the moral element, although not passed over and in the Greek
epic and tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood
nevertheless too little in the foreground, so that the worship of the
divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the feasts in honor
of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by immoral practices. The
conception of a future life, which taken in connection with a future
retribution has a moral tendency, had but little attraction for the Greek,
who rejoiced in the glory of the earth, and saw in nature and in man the
kingdom