200 



MRS. WALTER MAUNDER, ON ASTRONOMICAL 



and sublimity of thought and aspiration, compares by no 

 means unfavourably with even the best of the Pseudo- 

 Apocalypses. 



In the third chapter of this Bahman Yast we read : 



43. " Auharmazd said to Zaratust the Spitaman . . . This 

 is what I foretell, when it is the end of thy millennium it is the 

 beginning of that of Hushec/ar. 44. Regarding Hushe^ar it is 

 declared that he will be born in 1600, and at thirty years of age 

 he comes to a conference with me, Auharmazd, and receives the 

 religion. 45. When he comes away from the conference, he cries 

 to the sun with the swift horse, thus : ' Stand still '." (Bahman 

 Yast, III, 43-45.) 



E. "VV. West's comment on this passage is as follows: 



" There seems to be no other rational way of understanding this 

 number (1600) than by supposing that it represents the date 

 of Hushet/ar's birth, counting from the beginning of Zaratust's 

 millennium. According to this view, Hushe^ar was to be born 

 in the 600th year of his own millennium. 



Zaratust, according to tradition at least as early as the 

 Bundahis, was to have three sons, born miraculously after 

 many centuries had passed. These three, Husherfar, Hushe<iar- 

 Mah and Soshyans were respectively to rule over the last three 

 millenniums of the great twelve-fold world time. Here in the 

 Bahman Yast we have it declared that the first of these three 

 sons is to be born in the 600th year of his own millennium ; 

 that is to say, he is " to be revealed " only during the last four 

 hundred years of it. 



The division, then, of the world-millenniums into 600 years 

 and 400 years — 600 before the coming of the Saviour, 400 

 during which He is revealed — is a Magian tradition, and is a 

 sufficient explanation of the 400 years during which, according to 

 IV Ezra, " My son, Jesus, shall rejoice them that remain." 

 Clearly it is neither the Jewish Messiah nor the Christian Jesus 

 who is here described by Pseudo-Ezra, but the Magian 

 Soshyans. 



(a.d. 531--579), or very shortly afterwards, which would account for no 

 later king being mentioned by name ; and secondly, that the epitome 

 now extant was compiled by some writer who lived so long after the 

 Arabic invasion that the details of their inroad had become obscured by 

 the more recent successes of Turanian rulers. . . . The A vesta of the 

 Bahman Vast was probably compiled from older sources (like the rest of 

 the A. vesta) during the reigns of the earlier Sassanian monarchs." 



