The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of NatureVolney, C.-F. (Constantin-François)
Religion
The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of Nature
Volney, C.-F. (Constantin-François)
Ethics; History -- Philosophy; Religions; Revolutions
"Such also was Zoroaster; who, five centuries after Moses, and in the
time of David, revived and moralized among the Medes and Bactrians, the
whole Egyptian system of Osiris and Typhon, under the names Ormuzd and
Ahrimanes; who called the reign of summer, virtue and good; the reign of
winter, sin and evil; the renewal of nature in spring, creation of the
world; the conjunction of the spheres at secular periods, resurrection;
and the Tartarus and Elysium of the astrologers and geographers were
named future life, hell and paradise. In a word, he did nothing but
consecrate the existing dreams of the mystical system.
XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans.
"Such again are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans;
who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic
system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a
principle that the body is only a prison where the soul lives in an
impure confinement, that life is only a dream, an illusion, and the
world only a passage to another country, to a life without end, placed
virtue and perfection in absolute immobility, in the destruction of all
sentiment, in the abnegation of physical organs, in the annihilation of
all our being; whence resulted fasts, penances, macerations, solitude,
contemplations, and all the practices of the deplorable delirium of the
Anchorites.
XII. Brahmism, or Indian System.
"And such, too, were the founders of the Indian System; who, refining
after Zoroaster on the two principles of creation and destruction,
introduced an intermediary principle, that of preservation, and on
their trinity in unity, of Brama, Chiven, and Vichenou, accumulated the
allegories of their ancient traditions, and the alembicated subtilities
of their metaphysics.
"These are the materials which existed in a scattered state for
many centuries in Asia; when a fortuitous concourse of events and
circumstances, on the borders of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean,
served to form them into new combinations.
XIII. Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun, under the
cabalistical names of Chrish-en, or Christ, and Ye-sus or Jesus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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