212 Idolatry and Philosophy of the Zabians. 
that eclipses, the return of comets, transits,* &c., were carefully no- 
ted, and furnished that mass of mythology, which so bewildered the 
Greeks and Romans. 
It is remarkable that the Egyptians, in their drawings of Osiris and 
Typhon, painted the former of a yellow color, and held Typhon to 
have been red, the incipient color of the hemisphere of darkness. 
The Zabians, says Maimonides, (in Moreh Nevochim) offered sheep 
and oxen and other clean animals to Ormusd, but they sacrificed bats 
and owls, and other unseemly creatures loving darkness, to Ahriman. 
Those animals of the summer months, were held to be sacred, but 
those of the winter, unholy. The Chaldeans divided each sign of 
the zodiac into imaginary periods of one thousand years each, or the 
whole into twelve thousand years. They considered that the world 
had from the commencement, been under the astrological influence 
of Ahriman, but that when the six thousandth year should be com- 
plete, the government of the world would be given to Ormusd, as 
soon as he appeared as Aries the ram. 
We now enter upon another part of the religion of the Zabians, 
which like the former is a mere offspring of human imagination. It 
is the natural history of Man, and firstly, it is one of those innate 
ideas, of which I have already spoken, which every one is conscious 
of, that he exists doubly, and consists of a material and immaterial 
body and soul. It followed from the Pantheistic faith of the Chal- 
deans, that there should be some pervader, some vivific instigator, 
in the body of man, perhaps they supposed his presence was more 
concentrated, than as it existed in things around. They however 
emphatically distinguished it from matter. They signified the com- 
mon pervading essence by the import of soun, and that superabun- 
dance with which man was gifted beyond all other creatures by the 
import of MIND. 
If tradition afforded them no light, perhaps it was on these grounds 
that they judged of the immortality of the soul. They knew that 
it was a law, stamped by the great Architect of all things, upon mat- 
ter, that it was not subject to annihilation by man. The elements” 
at which philosophers arrived, were unchangeable and indestructible. 
By combination they might put on fresh forms, and vary every mo- 
ment in aspect, but whilst they are so liable to change, they are in- 
* It has been supposed that the Hindoo accounts of the beanies of Vishnu 
Mahadeva are fabulous descriptions of the return of comet 
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