Meanwhile, the assembled
multitudes prostrate themselves without and offer up their silent
adoration. "Yet, after all," musingly said the Parsee, "the universe
is the throne of the invisible God, of whom fire is but the emblem,
and we worship Him most acceptably with our eyes fixed on the east
when the sun rides forth at morning in his celestial chariot of fire."
This form of worship those curious in such matters may see on any
bright morning at Bombay, where whole crowds of Parsee men, women and
children rush out at sunrise to greet the king of day and offer up
their morning oblations. I was not surprised at the avowed preference
of my Parsee friends for out-door worship, since it is well known that
the ancient Persians not only permitted few temples to be erected to
their gods, and held in abhorrence all painted and graven images, but
they laid it to the charge of the Greeks, as a daring impiety, that
"they shut up their gods in shrines and temples, like puppets in a
cabinet, when all created things were open to them and the wide world
was their dwelling-place." It was probably religious zeal, even more
than revenge against the Greeks, that induced the burning of the
temple at Athens by Xerxes, led on, as he may have been, by the
fanatical zeal of the Magi who accompanied him.
Plutarch speaks of the Persians, in common with the Chaldeans and
Egyptians, as worshipers of the sun under the name of Mithra, whom
they regarded as standing between Ormuzd, "the author of good," and
Ahriman, "the author of evil," occupied alternately in aiding the
former and subduing the latter.
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