the preceding pages. The real meaning of the legend was well understood by the Gnostics and Manicheans, and those Christian Fathers who were brought into contact with Eastern ideas through them.[88] The Persians, who were indebted to the Chaldeans for many of their religious ideas, possessed the story of the fall in a form agreeing more closely with that which may have been the original of the Hebrew legend. According to the _Boundehesch_, one of the sacred books of the Parsees, a tree gave birth to the primeval man _Meschia_. The body of this androgynous being afterwards became divided, one part being male and the other female—_Meschia_ and _Meschiana_,[89] as the man and woman were called—were at first pure and holy, but seduced by Ahriman, who had metamorphosed himself into a serpent, they rendered to the Prince of Darkness the worship which was due only to Ormuzd, the God of Light. Meschia and Meschiana thus lost their primitive purity, which neither they nor their descendants could recover without the assistance of Mithra, the god who presided at the mysteries or at the initiations—that is to say, at the way of rehabilitation which is opened before those who seek earnestly the salvation of their souls.[90] At the instigation of Ahriman, the man and woman had, for the first time, committed, in thought, word, and deed, the carnal sin, and thus tainted with original sin all their descendants.[91] Lajard, referring to this legend, adds in a note: “Le triple caractère que presente ici le péché originel est très nettement indiqué dans le passage cité du Boundehesch. Il y est accompagné de détails que font de ce passage un des morceaux les plus curieux de ce traité. Quelques-uns de ces détails ... rattache à ce même mot (serpent) ou à sa racine la dénomination des parties sexuelles de la homme et de la femme.” The Persian account of the fall and its consequences agrees so closely with the Hebrew story when stripped of its figurative language that we cannot doubt that they refer to the same legend,[92] and the use of figurative language in the latter may well lead us to believe that it was of later date than the former.[93] In Ahriman, who was known to Persian teaching as “the old serpent having two feet,” we evidently have the origin of the speaking serpent of Genesis, while in “the seed of the woman who shall bruise the serpent’s head,” the follower of Zarathustra would have seen a reference to Mithra, just as the Christian finds there a prophecy of Christ. Even the antagonism between the Cherubim and the Serpent can be found in Persian teaching, for it was to the malignant action of the Serpent Az that the death, not only of the first man, but of the “primeval bull,” was due.[94] The latter was formed by Ormuzd after the creation of the heavens and the earth, and that from which proceeded the material prototypes of all the beings “who live in the water, on the earth, and in the air.”[95]