ARTICLE IV. THE AVESTA AND THE STORM-MYTH.

Ormazd et Ahriman, leurs origines et leur histoire. Par JAMES
DARMESTETER. Paris.
Paris. Librairie Franck.

It is now more than a century since the sacred writings ascribed to Zoroaster were brought to light by Anquetil-Duperron, yet little is known, at this late day, about the inner meaning and genesis of the religious movement which produced them. This is due not merely to the darkness in which the beginnings of all creeds are veiled, but also to more immediate reasons, not the least of which is the following: Only a very small part of the Avesta dates from the early and aggressive stage of the faith, and the very peculiarities which denote the antiquity of that scanty portion have rendered its interpretation little more than guess-work; so it is still left in the hands of the student of languages, who, well equipped as he may be for his special duties, is less fitted for, and less interested in, the fleeting and more delicate phenomena of the religious sentiment. Still, the work of dissection is nearly at an end, and the once diverging theories of interpretation are slowly drifting in one direction; and when the philologists leave the ground, it is time for the student of religions to enter the field. When the work which we propose to discuss appeared, headed with alluring promises of light to be cast upon the origins of the Iranian gods, and heralded by some as holding the most progressive views of the Avesta, we hoped with reason that the hour had come for reading openly in those obscure and sacred characters; our hopes rested on a misunderstanding: the work meets our longing for disclosures respecting Zoroaster's religion by denying the existence of both the religion and its apostle.

M. Darmesteter, its author, has no small claim on our consideration known by certain brief but suggestive studies in Iranian mythology, he is, moreover, the chosen interpreter of the Avesta in the collection of sacred writings planned by Max Müller. This choice, a quasi-official recognition of his scholarship, is

not belied by the more external merits of our work: this latter is brimming with erudition; the style, impetuous and fulgent at times, is often terse, and always clear; while the attractive symmetry of the plan gives a high impression of the author's literary abilities. To be sure, much of the smoothness of his gait is due to his marching triumphantly amidst his arguments, without heeding or even mentioning opposite views. This, however, is a peculiarity of his method, for nothing can be plainer than his conclusions: Ormazd and Ahriman are twins, born at a distance of several centuries; one, the good principle, deriving immediately from the supreme Asura, the Aryan god of the infinite and luminous heaven; while Ahriman is no other than the dark demon of the clouds, magnified on Iranian soil, traced in black from the bright outline of his antitype. And what those theses leave untouched, stands in the boldest relief in the body of the work: our book is an open and forcible attempt to apply the doctrine and processes which go by the name of evolution to the Mazdeic faith, in order to prove that the dualism of the Avesta has its roots in the conceptions of an anterior, Indo-Iranian period, and that both Zoroaster and his gods were born out of the atmospheric myths.

It is not the first time that the stormy gods of the clouds. have been made to father a whole scheme of myths: the attractiveness of the researches instituted by Kuhn, in his "Descent of Fire," and by M. Müller, in his first studies in comparative mythology, have made them numerous followers, who have turned our folklore, nursery tales, and popular floras into a monotonous reiteration of the same fire-myth. Yet, even supposing those researches to be too hasty or sweeping, their authors were, at least, experimenting in anima vili, on acknowledged fables; there was parity from type to copy. But our author attempts more: dealing with what was thought to be one of the exponents of the highest beliefs of man, with a religion, he applies the same levelling process to it as to idle legends. This process is utterly inadequate; and its use must awaken the suspicion that M. Darmesteter belittles the purer elements of Mazdeism, or else entertains a most unbounded faith in the transmutableness of vile metals into sterling gold.

Still, we would fain let this or any other application of the evolving process stand on its merits; in fact, we all must make room for evolution, in religions as well as in fables, though we may disagree as to the starting-point and the length of the course. But there are conditions imposed upon a writer out of the very nature of his subject, and from which no plea for freedom can exempt him. To make it clear that the storm-myths of an Indo-Iranian period have, in the course of their growth, originated the religion and myths of the younger branch, the author should, it seems, mark the stages of the process, and, eliciting the earliest conceptions of the Mazdeic faith, bring out evidence that they are the outcome of a previous naturalism; for it stands to reason that they, being nearest to the source, will bear the original stamp more deeply imprinted on their faces; then would it be in order to prove a further growth into the later conceptions. Such a march, however, would do away with M. Darmesteter's thesis. For, instead of finding the earlier documents of the Mazdeans more in keeping with old Vedic lore, the reverse is easily shown; affinity exists between the extreme times; the heroes of the clouds resume a certain importance in the Minor Avesta and the more recent Pehlvi literature; but as you ascend the current, and the language shows by its archaisms a nearer approach to the origins, the spirit grows different-or, to speak as tersely as our author's theses, the distance increases as you go near: mythical reminiscences become scarcer, and the conceptions more spiritual; the infinite hierarchy of the gods is reduced to a duality, and this, even, seems to invite to a farther step towards unity; a self-conscious, moral tone prevails; we touch upon a religion. While Vedism is an apotheosis of nature, slowly drifting to the abstract notion of deity, Mazdeism, on the contrary, pure at its origins, is at a later stage submerged under a reflux of the myth.

M. Darmesteter, then, lays nowhere any stress upon the relative age, import, or purity of the sources; to the oldest hymns, the Gâthâs, he devotes one page, in which, and in the same breath, he acknowledges that the concrete and naturalistic mythology is absent from them, and denies any contradiction between them and the rest of the Avesta; all his materials, of

whatever moment or fineness, are thrown into one mass and labelled "legends"-that is "Vedic legends," for there is no room left for an original, native-born conception; gods, prophets, heroes, rites, and myths are moulded out of the same clay; wherever you turn, you are confronted by the iron wall of prehistoric naturalism.

The task of setting forth the claims of Mazdeism to a native growth is not a brief nor an easy one; yet a few moments may serve to contrast M. Darmesteter's views and our own. The first query must be: under what form is the storm-myth usually detected in the Avesta ?

The myth in its favorite Vedic form is well known; it is a drama enacted in the aerial heights, between the god of light and the demon who detains the cows, the heavenly waters, in the cavernous folds of the clouds. The actors are manifold; their names as many as the fantastic shapes the aerial struggle may assume; but the end is the victory of the luminous hero; with his weapon he cleaves the walls of the cavern, and the waters rush joyously down to earth.

In order to identify a subsequent legend with this primitive drama, all the actors ought to be found on the stage; still, evidence resting on phonetical affinity might take the place of some missing or overdisguised personage. Thus did Roth, years ago, identify the two undying adversaries of upper air under the semi-historical features of Thraetaona, the hero of Iran (Feridun of the Shah-nameh), and the snake-headed usurper Dahâka (Zohâk); thus, again, he replaced on King Yima's head the fiery crown once borne by his Vedic brother, Yama. These two names belong to the poetical annals of Iran, but do not stand alone; in truth, the lives of most of the sturdy killers of monsters or usurpers who form the fabulous dynasties of the Pehlvi or Persian epics are almost exact parallels to those mentioned. M. Darmesteter has worked out this conclusion, and not without success, as in the instance of Takhma-Urupa (Tahmurah in the more recent writings), another of the mythical kings of Iran, and the one who, having tamed and saddled Ahriman, spurs him over the flanks of the mountain Hara-barezaiti (Alborj), until, one day, the demon overthrows and devours his rider. This aerial hero, whipping

his uncouth steed through the air, is certainly not unlike Indra hurling his bolt at the back of writhing Vritra. Our writer has endeavored to complete the identification by controvertible etymologies; he renders the name of the mountain over which the fatal ride occurs by 'the sea on high,' an interpretation which is like the entering wedge for a wholesale invasion of stormmyths into the geographical notions of the Avesta; this part of the evidence is not only unreliable, but also superfluous. Takhma-Urupa and all the doughty warriors of his dynasty, Kereçaçpa, Huçrava, Manuscithra, etc., are kings and gods by the same right as Yima and Thraetaona, because we find no analogy for them if not in the close parallelism of those two bearers of naturalistic names.

The myth, in these instances, has greatly deviated from its primitive form, not to speak of its meaning; the moving theatre has been steadied, "has turned mountain;" the cows are no longer the stake of the combat; the personages have assumed historical proportions; every fleeting detail is localized; one knows the place where the battle was fought, the force of the armies, the boundaries of the provinces lost or gained; were it not for the pointed testimony of the syllables, one might almost think we faced real human actors. Nevertheless, though these common features give us a sort of norm for the identification of the storm-myth on Iranian grounds, in no case is the identity perfect. Even in reading the legends in the light of philology, and setting aside mere surface modifications, there clings to them an element which can not be explained away; whether it touches the form only, or affects the substance, it is generally recognizable, it is the Iranian stamp, the native mark. Let us take the case of Yima. His namesake, Yama, appears in Sanskrit literature as the grim monarch of the realm of the dead; this can be explained satisfactorily in the light of the Veda-he is a god still. The Iranian Yima, however, is not only stripped of his god-like attributes, but in the struggle with the demon it is he who succumbs: a fate meted out to many of the heroes of the family, which shows that the Mazdean thought was brooding over the temporal ascendency of the evil powers. But this is not all; there is widespread through the Avesta an undefined conviction that Yima