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Rh for the highest aims comprehensible to mankind from the remotest antiquity.

Zrvan was extolled above Ormazd, who was ranked by them as a mere manifestation of Time. The one was elevated by debasing the other. The personal God who could be loved and feared, who responded to the gentle aspirations of the human heart, was dethroned to make room for a monistic principle that might answer the stern canons of cold intellectualism, but which evaporated into an unthinkable abstraction and mercilessly left its hapless votaries without a word of solace or hope. Affection, love and devotion, however, can centre about some personality only. We find in the authoritative teachings of the Zoroastrian Church that Ormazd knows no peer, and he always sits supreme at the head of the divine hierarchy.

These modern votaries of Zrvan were, however, not to be confounded with the Zarvanite sect of old, which looked to Zrvan Akarana as a personality as much defined as Ormazd. We have already seen that, in postulating impersonated Time as the originator of Ormazd and Ahriman, the sect aimed at supplanting Zoroastrian dualism by monotheism, in order to save their religion from the so-called stigma of dualism. Not so the theosophists, who grafted this new feature on the pure teachings of Zoroaster. They did not personify Time, but reckoned this abstract principle of Time as higher than Ormazd himself, because, in common with all mystic schools, they held the idea of an impersonal God as the highest category of philosophical thought.

Zoroastrianism declared by the theosophic claim to be incomplete without the doctrine of transmigration of souls. From first to last Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, shows no sign of this theory of rebirth. But this dogma occupied a pre-eminent place among the theosophists, being, in fact, one of the most conspicuous characteristics of their doctrines. To teach man to attain liberation from the bondage of rebirth was the ultimate aim of their ethics. It was not regarded by the theosophists as one of the many solutions put forward by the human mind to solve the mysteries of the life after death, but as the only rational explanation that satisfied human instinct of justice, and the only solution of the anomalies in this world. They persuaded themselves that the theory was fast becoming a recognized truth in the West, and that, at no distant