so terrible, that the Blessed, looking down upon it from their celestial
battlements, will be moved to tears of pity. And then the massive mountains and
the solid rocks shall be melted by the heat, and streams of liquid gold shall flow,
in which both the pure and evil shall receive a regenerating bath. Ahriman and
his devs shall share in the universal happiness, and all created life shall swell the
song of praise sent up in honour of Ahura-Mazda.
While we are unable to doubt that in the Zendavesta, as it has come down to us,
may be traced the direct influence of the Hebrew creed, and that ideas and
principles of a still later date were borrowed more or less closely from
Christianity, we can as little doubt that Zarathustrianism had no inconsiderable
effect on the Jewish popular belief. The Jewish prophets, after the Captivity,
would seem to have adopted much of what may be called their poetic language
and machinery from the writings of the Magian teachers. The Talmud contains
unmistakable evidence of its indebtedness to the same source. The Angelology
of the Jewish doctors originated, probably during the captivity of the Tribes in
Babylonia, in the Magian superstitions; and it was then that the complete angelic
hierarchy was evolved, with its seven great archangels corresponding to the
seven Amchaspands of the Zendavesta. It was then that for the first time the
Jewish popular creed recognised the existence of two antagonistic hosts of
spiritual beings, arrayed against each other in everlasting battle. Then was
developed the fancy of a guardian angel attending every individual to shelter him
from the malignant hostility of his Dev or demon. So that much of the
mythology which Milton employs so effectively in “Paradise Lost,” having
borrowed it from the traditions and legends of the Hebrew race, came originally
from the far East, and was invented by the followers of Zarathustra. The
Miltonic and popular conception of Satan, so unlike the Biblical representation
of the great Destroyer, was largely coloured from the Magian sketch of Ahriman,
the Power of Darkness.
It is certain that the grand and lofty Hebrew revelation of the One GOD was
modified and debased by its contact with the Magian teaching. It has been well
remarked that wherever any approximation had been made to this sublime truth
of the existence of the one great First Cause, either “awful religious reverence”
or “philosophic abstraction” had removed the Creative Power absolutely out of
the range of human sense, and supposed that the intercourse of the Divinity with
man, the moral government, and even the actual creative work, had been carried
on by the intermediate agency of, in Oriental phrase, an Emanation, or, in
Platonic language, of the “Wisdom,” “Reason,” or “Intelligence” of the