They also assert that the stars were holy personages, who, on leaving this world of gloom, through the efficacy of religious mortifications became luminous bodies, ascending from the lower depths of this abode of the elements to the zenith of the crystalline sphere; nay, their birth-place, name, family, with the names of their fathers and grandfathers, are carefully enumerated in the sacred volumes of this sect. Thus they say that Sanicher (the slow-traveller) or Saturn, is the son of the glorious Luminary; and Mirrikh or Mars, the son of the Earth; the world-enlightening sun, the issue of _Kashyapa_, the son of Maríchí, the son of Brahma; Zóhrah (or the regent of Venus) the son of _Bhrigu_; and _Utáred_ (Mercury) the son of _Kamer_ (the regent of the moon). Some however maintain the moon to be the son of Attri the Holy, but, according to others he is sprung from the sea of milk. [57]*These opinions contain a marked allusion to the tenets held by the distinguished Parsi sages, namely, that the intellectual soul has a relation to that sphere with which its good actions are connected: they consequently apply the denomination of Sun to the spirit of one united to the sun, and his father is entitled “the father of the Sun.”* The writer of this work once observed to Shídósh, the son of Anosh: “Perhaps they mean by the sires of the stars, their presiding intelligences, as in the technical language of philosophers, the name of sires is also given to the intelligences, on which account Jesus called the Almighty ‘Father.’” According to them the elements are five in number, the fifth being the Akas (or ether), which word in its common acceptation means “the heavens;” but according to the learned it implies empty space, or space void of matter. One of their distinguished doctors, _Sumitra_, son of the Ray of Kalinga, holds that _Akas_, which the Greek Platonists call _space_, is simple and uncompounded. Damudar Das Kaul, a learned Brahman of Kashmir, also holds Akas to signify _space_; and space is understood by the Platonists among the Yonian to be an extent void of any substance (a vacuum), which may be divided into parts, _the totality_ of which _parts_ may be equivalent to that extent of the general vacuum which is congruous and equal to it, in such a manner as to comprise every particle of that extent which is the space in every _particular_ division of the general space. There is an extent interposed between two things, and this extent is void and free of matter. According to their account, no better interpretation of _Akas_ than that which is conveyed by the word space, can be offered.[58]