Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/104

92 India. The occasional mention of Aryan enemies may be partly reminiscences or records of an earlier time and partly references to intertribal warfares, of which there was evidently no lack. It must be borne in mind that all the Vedic hymns appear to have been composed in northern India, and principally in the region now known as the Panjâb. In none of these poetical productions do we find any distinct remembrance of a trans-Himalayan origin or any definite allusion to a former residence outside of India. This circumstance proves that at the time of the supposed migration from the North the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans must have been rude barbarians, destitute not only of written records, but also of the ability to preserve and transmit from generation to generation traditions of great events in their own tribal or national history. The savage has a short memory for whatever lies beyond the sphere of his individual experience.

One of Zarathustra's chief injunctions was to "listen to the soul of the earth," and to "succor and foster the life of Nature." This is to be done by cultivating and fertilizing the soil; since the increase of its productivity augments the sum of vitality in the world and contributes to the ascendency of the voumanô or good mind, synonymous with vis vitalis or living force, and aids in securing the supremacy of Ahuramazda. Instead of bowing down in servile fear before the phenomena of Nature, the Mazdayasnians are directed to revere and cherish her kindly and beneficent spirit, so that "the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose."

Angrô-Mainyush and his satellites, the devas, on the other hand, are constantly striving to resist and to thwart this purpose and to keep the earth in her native state of virginal wildness and ruggedness by investing her with the dread sanctities and superstitions of a crude polytheistic physiolatry, by assaulting and ravaging the cultivated settlements of the Ahuryan agriculturists, and by fomenting and fostering the spirit of primeval savagery, personified as Akemmanô, or the evil mind. In the sacred books and traditions of both factions, and more especially in those of the reformatory party, are frequent traces of this social rupture and religious schism, and of the deadly hostility naturally existing between nomadic hordes, that still adhere to a life of pasturage and pillage, and men of more advanced ideas, who dwell in fixed habitations (gaêthas) and devote themselves to husbandry.

I am well aware that M. James Darmesteter and other representatives of what might be called the meteorological school of Avestan scholars deny the historical reality of a religious schism of the kind here described, and would reduce Zarathustra and all