Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man by Johann von Herder

Author:Johann von Herder [Herder, Johann von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, epub
ISBN: 9781518764332
Google: 7BnTjwEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2016-02-10T23:00:00+00:00

For these reasons, there was not a single nation on which the empire of Persia had a happy influence: it destroyed, and did not build up, it compelled the provinces to pay disgraceful tributes, one to the queen’s girdle, another to her headdress, a third to her necklace, but it did not bind them together by better laws and institutions. All the splendor, all the superhuman pomp, all the divine homage, of these monarchs are now no more; their favorites and satraps are dust, like themselves, and the gold they extorted is perhaps equally buried in the earth. Their very history is a fable, a fable which, coming from the mouth of a Greek and of an Asiatic, can scarcely be reconciled. Even the ancient languages of Persia are dead, and the sole monuments of its magnificence, the ruins of Persepolis, remain, with their elegant letters and colossal figures, hitherto inexplicable. Fate has taken vengeance on these sultans; they are swept away from the face of the earth as if by the pestilent simoom, and where their memory survives, as among the Greeks, it survives with disgrace, the basis of more famed and more to be admired greatness.

Time has favored us with no mental production of the Persians except the books of Zoroaster, if they could be proved to be genuine.210 As a whole, however, they agree so little with many other accounts of the religion of these people, they bear, too, such evident marks of a mixture with later opinions of the brahmins and Christians that the groundwork alone can be admitted to be genuine, and this admits of easy explanation. The ancient Persians, for example, were, like all rude nations and particularly mountaineers, worshipers of the vital elements of the world, but as they quitted their uncivilized state, and raised themselves by their victories almost to the highest pinnacle of luxury, it was necessary, according to the mode of Asia, that they should have a more refined system or ceremonial of religion.

With this they were furnished by Zoroaster, or Zerdusht, under the auspices of Darius Hystaspes. The ceremonial of the Persian government is evidently the basis of this system. As seven princes stood around the throne of the king, seven spirits stand before God, and execute his commands throughout the world. Ormuzd, the good power of light, had incessantly to contend against Ahriman, the prince of darkness, while every good being aided him in the conflict, a political idea, which the personification of the enemies of Persia, who appear throughout the Zend-Avesta as the servants of Ahriman, as evil spirits, evidently elucidates. All the moral ordinances of this religion, too, are politic: they relate to purity of body and mind, domestic harmony, and reciprocity of kind actions; they recommend agriculture and the planting of useful trees, the extermination of vermin, which appear as an army of evil spirits in bodily form, attention to decorum, early and prolific marriages, the education of children, honoring the king and his servants, love towards the state, and all these after the Persian manner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.