INTRODUCTION, I.

ascribe to Zoroaster books in which are found numberless names of trees, animals, men, and demons unknown to the ancient Persians; in which are invoked an incredible number of pure animals and other things, which, as appears from the silence of ancient writers, were never known, or at least never worshipped, in Persia? What Greek ever spoke of Hom, of Jemshîd, and of such other personages as the fabricators of that rhapsody exalt with every kind of praise, as divine heroes?" Yet, in the midst of his Ciceronian nonsense, Meiners inadvertently made a remark which, if correctly interpreted, might have led to important discoveries. He noticed that many points of resemblance exist between the ideas of the Parsis and those of the Brahmans and Muslims. He saw in this a proof that Parsiism is a medley of Brahmanical and Muslim tales. Modern scholarship, starting from the same point, reached the twofold conclusion that, on the one hand, Parsiism was one of the elements out of which Mohammed formed his religion, and, on the other hand, that the old religions of India and Persia flowed from a common source. "Not only does the author of that rubbish tell the same tales of numberless demons of either sex as the Indian priests do, but he also prescribes the same remedies in order to drive them away and to balk their attempts." In these words there was something like the germ of comparative mythology; seldom has a man approached the truth so closely and then departed from it so widely.

Anquetil and the Avesta found an eager champion in the person of Kleuker, a professor at the University of Riga. As soon as the French version of the Avesta appeared, he published a German translation of it, as well as of Anquetil's historical dissertations. Then, in a series of his own dissertations, he vindicated the authenticity of the Zend books. Anquetil had already tried to show, in a memoir...

1. 'De Zoroastris vita, institutis, doctrina et libris' (On the life, customs, doctrine, and books of Zoroaster), in the Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae, Goettingen, 1778-1779.
2. 'Zend-Avesta ... according to the French of M. Anquetil Du Perron,' 3 vols. in 4°, 1776.
3. 'Appendix to the Zend-Avesta,' 2 vols. in 4°, 1781.