SACRED ISLES IN THE: WEST. 7? 



to Siam, along the belt I mentioned before. According to the ^Sdmba- 

 purdna, they excelled in their religious worship of the sun, and of course 

 of the sacred fire, which are to this day the chief objects of the worship 

 of the modern Magi in Persia, and also in India, though in a lesser de-' 

 gree. It does not appear however, that Magism ever made any consi- 

 derable progress in Europe; or what is most likely, it soon came to decay, 

 from the unwarrantable use the professors of it made of their superior 

 knowledge : for it appears that neither the Greeks nor Latians, borrowed 

 the words Mag as, Mogus and Mogia from the east. Besides Mag a does 

 not appear to be a Sanscrit word ; having no satisfa6tory root in that lan- 

 guage ; but it has one, in the old Irish, in which it signifies divine, andds 

 also a name of God, according to the learned General Valancey. The 

 Telchines are supposed to have been Magi, and not without reason : and 

 Salmasius refers the origin of the Magi to a certain Mochos, a sage, who 

 lived in the west long before the Trojan war. Mag a, the father of the 

 Magas, or Maiigas, was the offspring of the sun by SuRfcNUH, daughter 

 of Twashta' or Vulcan. He was the brother of the AsvAnou-Cuma'rau 

 or Dioscuri, who were peculiarly worshipped in the west, on the shores of 

 the Atlantic. Considered as an individual, they appear to be ^Esculapiu* 

 orAscLEPius: ioY,\n Sanscrit, ^sW-n^/i/^a signifies the chief of the race 

 of AsVr. This epithet might, indeed, be applied to their father, the sun ; 

 and i^scuLAPius, according to some, was a form of the sun himself: and 

 Twashta' is considered, in the east, not onl}^ as a god, but as a form of 

 the sun likewise. According to Sanchoniathon, Magus and Amynus 

 were the grand-sons ofTECHNixEs, (the Twashta' of the Hindus, for the 

 two denominations arc of the same import.) Technites, or the artist, as 

 well as the LaLin verb Texo, the obsolete Tcuxo, now Tcukho, in Greek, 

 are derived from the Sanscrit Tiusha. Twashta , like TechkiteS; stands 



U 



