: 



XKXD AVESTA, 



X.KX1TH SECTOR. 



10 :o 



two great principles, Aknra-Ma:tla, or " the good," and A xffm-ifiiini/n, 

 or " the evil principle." The genii subordinate to the former are the 

 Anirtta-fifMlar, six of whom are named in the Yas'na, namely : Yolm- 

 manA, who protects living beings ; Asha-vahista, or the genius of fire ; 



hn-vairya, or the genius of uietala; S'pcnta-ftrmaiti, r the 



(female) genius of earth ; Haurvat', or the genius of water ; and 



Auirrrtat'. or the genius of trees. They are severally opposed by the 



demons, subordinate to Angro-Maiuyu, by Akomand, 



Andar, S'aurva, NAonghaithi, Tauru, and Zairichn. Other driuoni. 



:n the tenth Fargard of the Vendidad. Hoth these principles 

 vl.i'-K in tlie more philosophical language of the second part of the 

 Yas'na (thu G&th&s) are also conceived of as the principles of existence 

 and Ui'ii i .\i.-Unce, of life and death, of good and evil pervade crvatii n 

 and are in permanent strife. The worshippers of fire belong to Almra- 

 Mnzda, whereas the worshippers of the Dacras arc possessed by Angro- 

 Mainyu, the spirit of evil. 



It i.- the latter class of deities which throws a strong lighten the 

 obscure antiquity of the sacred books of Zoroaster. The Daevas arc in 

 subfetacce and name the Devas of the Hindus. To the Litter, how- 



they are the good and friendly gods, protectors of men, and 

 worshipped by them in sacrificial acts. The religion of Zoroaster 

 assumes, therefore, the character of being antagonistic to the Hindu 



: and, in accordance with this view, we find that Indra, one of 

 the principal V.-.idik gods, and one of the principal Hindu gods of the 

 l.-.tt i literature, is in the A vesta the Daeva Andar ; that the Ndsatyax, or 

 .\- 1\ Ins "f the Hindus, are the Daeva Naonghaithi ; and S'arva, a later 

 name of S'iva, is the Daeva S'aurva. It would seem, therefore, that /- 

 roaster belonged to a period of antiquity when great religious dissensions 

 had already separated, or begun to separate, the two sister nations of the 

 Hindus and Parsees ; but it would be hazardous to extend this inference 

 tn .-.ny allegatii n of date, or even to the assumption that Zoroaster pre- 

 rcdi-d' the Vaidik songs of the Ulgveda poetry ; for though a belief has 

 been recently expressed that the vior&farailathti, in a K'igveda hymn, 

 is the Sanskrit form for the name Zarathustra, this bold conjecture is 

 noways warranted, neither by a sound comparison of both words nor 

 by the context in which faradashti occurs ; whereas, on the contrary, 

 there nre circumstances which seem to indicate that Zoroaster inveighed 

 n^iinst that form of Hindu worship which belongs to a period posterior 

 t that of the K'igveda hymns. It is remarkable, for instance, that 

 tin i:gh there is a manifest tendency ill the Avesta to invert the cha- 

 racter of the friendly deities of the Hindus, the Zend Ahura, which 

 emphatically occurs an a propitious name in Ahura-Mazda, corresponds 



ning and form with the word Asura of the K'igveda ; whereas 

 this same word Atura means a demon in the literature of the Hindus 



icnt to the Vaidik poetry, and then only is the counterpart of 

 the Avesta word. 



The worship taught by Zoroaster seems to have been of the simplest 

 kind, the adoration of fire by means of hymns and offerings, chiefly, if 

 not exclusively, taken from the vegetable kingdom. An essential con- 

 comitant of the sacrifice is the juice of the Haoma, or the Soma plant, 

 which occupies an important part also in the Vaidik rites. [Vnu.J 

 Thin worship however must not lie confounded with the complicated 

 ritual of lattr periods of the Pareee creed, which assumed a similar 

 development to that Lasnl by the Hindus on the K'igveda text, and is 

 indicated by several portions of the Avesta, which cannot be looked 

 upon as its earliest part. 



I art evidently consists of the fccond division of the Yas'na, or 



! has, for some of them are quoted several times in the remaining 



.' nf the Avesta. But whether all the Giithas precede the first 

 part of the Yas'na and the rest of the A vesta, and whether the dialect 

 in which they are wiitteu differs from the language of the rest merely 

 on account of local peculiarities, as Professor Westergaard holds, or on 

 a < nut of its earlier date, as other scholars assume, is a question which 

 it MMild be difficult to decide in the present imperfect state of Zend 

 philology. Nor would it be safe to say whether Zoroaster, to whom 

 the 'niginal Avtsta i ascribed, composed all or any of the remains in 

 which the present collection Las comedown to us. Dr. Haug.it is 

 true, who has given us a translation of the Gathos, says in a lecture he 

 delivered at Pona, on the 1st of March, 1861 : " I shall now give the 

 proofs that these collections of ancient songs (the Gathns), or at least 



! thrni. \uie really composed by Zaratlmstra himself, with some 



'. -.* which will throw light on the origin of the religion. 1. 



in those portions of the Zend-Avesta which are written in the 

 r.tii d Zend language (or it might perhaps more properly be called 

 Uactrian) we find Zarathustra spoken of in the third person ; now in 

 these songs he is speaking in the first person, and sometimes calling 

 himeetf by his own name, so says he in one passage (Yas'na, -13,8) : 

 "Tarn Zmntlumtra, I shall show myself as a destroyer to the wicked, 

 and a comforter to the good,' 2. From the whole tenor of these songs 

 (chiefly of the second collection, called Gath/l-ustavaiti) we arc led to 

 the opinion that a man of quite an extraordinary stamp stands before 

 u, acting a grand part, not only on the stage of his country's history, 

 but on that of the universal history of the human race. He says 

 that he i* a prophet or a messenger, sent by God to propagate 

 civilisation, esjwcially agriculture and the Hcnsings of a settled state 

 1 1 life (once he is called a prophet of the spirit of tin- . artli. <;eusurv,'i), 

 and to destroy idolatry as ruining the body aa well as the soul" But 

 it is clear that arguments of this kind do not warrant the certainty 



with which the inference is propounded that Zoroaster 1. 

 composed these songs, and that no later wii- ug to 



the tradition he had received, could have indited the poetry which has 

 called forth the foregoing remarks. Questions like these it seems pre- 

 mature to decide at a time when the grammatical laws of the language 

 of the A vesta are not yet definitely known, when no real dictionary 

 of this language is yet in existence, and when the few translators of 

 the Avesta reproach each other, apparently not without good caute. with 

 having misunderstood, or imperfectly understood, the most imp 

 parts of the sacred texts, either from clinging too much t<> t: ulition. 

 which is not always safe, or from neglecting it altogether ; il inventing 

 fanciful meanings of words. Those seriously engaged in the study of 

 the old Parsee texts will not be misled by bold assertions of dates 

 and confident interpretations of texts, but to the general read< i it 

 is wiser to confess that the time is not yet come to decide \\hcthor 

 Zoroaster is the real author of all or any of the fragmentary pnrti..ns 

 of the Avesta which arc the subject of this brief notice, nor to venture 

 upon a guess at the period at which he may have founded tint 

 Parsee religion. All that is really settled by modern investigations is 

 that it would be erroneous to assign to him the date of Darius' father, 

 since it is indubitable that the Kav.i Vistas'pa of the Zend-Avesta, 

 under whose reign Zoroaster lived, is not the Vistas'pa or Hystaspes, 

 who is the father of the celebrated king Darius, the lineage of the 

 latter being totally different to that of the former. When therefore 

 the modern Parsees assign to their prophet the date of 550 B.C. they 

 must be wrong ; and if Zoroaster really lived at any of the remote dates 

 which have been guessed by European writers, this fact would give us the 

 inti resting conclusion that there is a religious community which believes 

 its founder to have existed about 1000 years later than he actually lived. 



ZENITH and NAIMH, two Arabic terms, imported into Europe 

 with astronomy, to signify the point of the heavens immediately above 

 the spectator, and the opposite (invisible) point below him. The 

 latter term, though still mentioned in books on the use of the ;' 

 is quite obsolete among astronomers ; the former is very frequently 

 employed. 



The zenith is the point at which a vertical line cuts the heavens. If 

 the earth were a sphere, thia vertical line, or that in which a plumb- 

 line hangs, would pass through the centre of the sphere. But the 

 earth being a spheroid, thu vertical line, which is everywhere perpen- 

 dicular to the tangent-plane, docs not pass through the centre of the 

 spheroid, but a little nearer to the spectator's side of the equator. 



ZK.X1TH SECTOR. This instrument is, as its name implies, a 

 portion of a divided circle, which is employed in measuring the 

 distances of stars. Picard, in his celebrated operation for determining 

 the figure of the earth, first applied a short arc to a long telescope, 

 thus obtaining at the same time great accuracy with portability. The 

 instrument which he used for measuring the celestial arc between 

 Malvoisine, Sourdon, and Amiens, is figured and described in hi 

 entitled ' Mesure de la Terre;'* the following is a copy of hi^ 

 and description. The instrument is of iron, strengthened with 

 bars, and covered with copper in the places required. The limb con- 

 tains only about the twentieth part of the circumference of a circle of 

 ten feet radius, and is divided by transversal lines [YKIIXIEK] to thirds 

 of a minute. The telescope is ten feet long, and the wires are illu- 

 minated cither from the top or by an aperture on one side < 

 telescope. The plumb-line is enclosed in a tin tube to protect it from 

 the wind, and the observations were always made in a close apartment 

 through an aperture in the roof. 



The figure shows all this sufficiently, and also the foot-screws for 

 setting the axis vertical, which it is when, on turning the instrument 

 round, the plumb-line hangs before the same division of the limb. In 

 making the observation, suppose the axis to be vertical and the limb to 

 be towards the reader, as injiy. 1 (the limb should also be in the [.lain; 

 of the meridian), and the telescope directed to a star, at its transit. 

 Now if we suppose a line to be drawn through the centre, parallel to 

 the line of sight of the telescope, the angle between the line so drawn 

 and the plumb-line is the zenith distance of the star ; but as the point 

 where the arc is cut by the line supposed is not as yet defined, < 

 by its parallelism to an optical and intangible line, there is as yet IM 

 measure. Read off, however, the division on which the plumb-line, 

 beats. Turn the instrument half round on its vertical axis, \\heu the 

 plumb-line remains on its former division, and the telescope points to 

 the sirnc zenith distance, but on the other side of the zenith ; if. 1 1 n, 

 we would observe the same star as before, the sector must be tin in <l 

 on its horizontal axis through twice the zenith distance ; ami 

 plumb-line always keeps parallel to its position, and posse* through tin; 

 centre, the division on which it now beats must be distant from the 

 divi-ion first bisected by twice the angle moved through, that K by 

 twice the star's zenith distance, and the division which bisects the two 

 readings is the zero point, or reading which corresponds to the zenith. 

 It is not necessary that the star should be observed in both positions 

 on the same night, provided the centre and arc of the sector continue 

 to have the same position with regard to the line of sight. In this 

 case, reversion on a following night will serve just as well for d 

 mining the division which corresponds to the zenith direction of the 



* The ftnt edition of this admirable work was published in 1671; there have 

 been numerous reprint* of it pince. 



