'Those old Spirits, who are twins, made known what is good and what is
evil in thoughts, words, and deeds. Those who are good distinguished
between the two; not so those who are evil-doers.
'When these two Spirits came together they made first life and death,
so that there should be at last the most wretched life for the bad,
but for the good blessedness.
'Of these two Spirits the evil one chose the worst deeds; the
kind Spirit, he whose garment is the immovable sky, chose what is
right.' [6]
This metaphysical theory follows closely the primitive scientific
observations on which it is based; it is the cold of the cold,
the gloom of the darkness, the sting of death, translated into some
order for the intellect which, having passed through the Dragon, we
find appearing in this Persian Devil; and against his blackness the
glory of the personality from whom all good things proceed shines
out in a splendour no longer marred by association with the evil
side of nature. Ormuzd is celebrated as 'father of the pure world,'
who sustains 'the earth and the clouds that they do not fall,' and
'has made the kindly light and the darkness, the kindly sleep and the
awaking;' [7] at every step being suggested the father of the impure
world, the unkindly light, darkness or sleep.
The ecstasy which attended man's first vision of an ideal life defied
the contradictory facts of outward and inward nature. So soon as he
had beheld a purer image of himself rising above his own animalism,
he must not only regard that animalism as an instigation of a devil,
but also the like of it in nature; and this conception will proceed
pari passu with the creation of pure deities in the image of that
higher self. There was as yet no philosophy demanding unity in the
Cosmos, or forbidding man to hold as accursed so much of nature as
did not obviously accord with his ideals.
Mr. Edward B. Tylor has traced the growth of Animism from man's
shadow and his breathing; Sir John Lubbock has traced the influence of
dreams in forming around him a ghostly world; Mr. Herbert Spencer has
given an analysis of the probable processes by which this invisible
environment was shaped for the mental conception in accordance
with family and social conditions. But it is necessary that we
should here recognise the shadow that walked by the moral nature,
the breathings of religious aspiration, and the dreams which visited
a man whose moral sense was so generally at variance with his animal
desires. The code established for the common good, while necessarily
having a relation to every individual conscience, is a restriction
upon individual liberty. The conflict between selfishness and duty is
thus inaugurated; it continues in the struggle between the 'law in the
members and the law in the spirit,' which led Paul to beat his body
(hypopiaxomai) to keep it in subjection; it passes from the Latin
poet to the Englishman, who turns his experience to a rune--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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