Mohsan Fani exhibits the remarkable notions, dogmas, customs, and ceremonies of twelvereligions, and their various sects, without giving more of their origin and genesis than the names of their founders. The very first principle of all religion is referred, by some, to a primitive Divine revelation; by others, to a natural propensity of the human mind to super­stition. However this may be, history confirms the suggestions of psychology, that admiration was one of the principal sources of religious feelings; how should man not be struck with the glories of the sky? Therefore, the adoration of stars was one of the most ancient religions. It needed no prophet: it is “the poetry of heaven,” imprinted in eternal charac­ters of fire upon the ethereal expanse. Prometheus, enumerating the benefits which he bestowed upon untutored barbarians, says:*

According to all traditions, astronomy was one of the first sciences cultivated by men.* The stars not only occasioned the institution, but also served to announce the regular return, of religious feasts; thus they became, as called by Plato, “the instru­ments of time,” men were at once induced and taught by religion to count months and years. Astronomy, in her feast-calendars, consecrated upon an altar the first fruits of her labors.

Upon the star-paved path of heaven man was conducted to the sanctuary of the supreme Being. In general, the first feeling of “the Divine (<Arabic>),” seizing the human mind with its own supernatural power, elevated it at once above the material con­cerns of the nether world; thus, sublime ideas of the Deity, the universe, and the immortality of the soul preceded the invention of many arts and sciences relative to the comforts of social life. This is con­firmed by the account, contained in the Dabistán, of the most ancient religion of the Persians, which is founded upon transcendental ideas of the Divinity: “Except God himself, who can comprehend his origin? Entity, unity, identity are inseparable properties of this original essence, and are not adventitious to Him.” So the Desátir, with which the Dabistán generally so fully agrees, that we can scarce doubt that the author of the latter had the former before his eyes.

No sooner has man acquired the consciousness of mental freedom, than he endeavors to expand beyond himself the first vague feeling of the Divine; not satisfied to admire all exterior marvel, he desires to understand and to name its interior moving cause: this is something immaterial; it is a soul, such as acts in himself. Among the ancient Ira­nians, the “first creation of the existence-bestowing bounty” was the intellectual principle, called Azad Bahman, “the first intelligence;” he is also the first angel; from him other spirits or angels proceed. Every star, every heavenly sphere has its particular intelligence and spirit or angel. In the lower region, each of the four elements owns its particular guardian; vegetables, minerals, animals have their protecting angels; the conservative angel of man­kind is Farun Faro Vakshur. It is not without reason, that this religion was called “the religion of light.” As the supreme Being

So also he peopled the vast extent with the “sons of light, the empyreal host of angels,” who not only moved and governed the celestial orbs, but also descended into the elemental regions to direct, pro­mote, and protect his creation. Not a drop of dew fell without an angel. The Hindus and Greeks ani­mated universal nature; the Persians imparadized the whole creation by making it the abode ofangels. Hence demonology in all its extent. But, “among the most resplendent, powerful, and glorious of the servants who are free from inferior bodies and matter, there is none God's enemy or rival, or disobedient, or cast down, or annihilated.” “This important passage of the Desátir* I shall have occasion to refer to hereafter.

Human souls are eternal and infinite; they come from above, and are spirits of the upper spheres. If distinguished for knowledge and sanctity, while on earth, they return above, are united with the sun, and become empyreal sovereigns; but if the proportion of their good works bore a closer affinity to any other star, they become lords of the place assigned to that star; their stations are in conformity with the degrees of their virtue; perfect men attain the beatific vision of the light of lights, and the che­rubine hosts of the supreme Lord. Vice and depravity, on the contrary, separate souls from the primitive source of light, and chain them to the abode of the elements: they become evil spirits. The imperfectly good migrate from one body to another, until, by the efficacy of good words and actions, they are finally emancipated from matter, and gain a higher rank. The thoroughly-depraved descend from the human form to animal bodies, to vegetable, and even to mineral substances.

So far we see the well-known dogma of trans­migration ingeniously combined with the Sidereal religion. Here is exhibited a singular system of heavenly dominion, maintained by every star, whether fixed or planetary, during periods of many thousand years. A fixed star begins the revolution, and reigns alone, the king of the cycle, during a millenium, after which, each of the fixed and planetary stars becomes its partner or prime-minister for a thousand years; the last of all is the moon, for a millenium. Then the sovereignty of the first king devolves to the star which was its first associate. This second king goes through the same course as the first, until this becomes for a thousand years his partner, and then his period is also past. The same is the course of all other stars. When the moon shall have been king, and all stars associated with it and its reign too past, then one great period shall be accomplished. The state of the revolving world recommences, the human beings, animals, vegetables, and minerals, which existed during the first cycle, are restored to their former language, acts, dispositions, species, and appearances; the world is renovated, that is to say, forms, similar to those which passed away, reappear. This system, copied from the Desátir,* expresses nothing else but the general vague idea of long heavenly revolutions, and periodical renovations of the same order of things in the nether world.

The Dabistán* adds a mode of computing as pecu­liar to the followers of the ancient faith: they call one revolution of the regent Saturn a day; thirty such days one month; twelve such months one year; a million of such years one fard; a million fard one vard; a million vard one mard; a million vard one jad; three thousand jads one vad; and two thousand vád one zád. To these I must subjoin salam, sha­mar, aspar, radah, aradah, raz, araz, biaraz, that is, eight members of a geometric progression, the first of which is 100,000, and the coefficient 100. But these years are revolutions, called farsals, of thirty common years each. There are besides farsals of Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moon, a day of each being the time of their respective revolution.

I thought it necessary to repeat these extravagant numbers, because it is by them that the reigns of the first ancient dynasties are measured.* The first earthly ruler of the present cycle, who with his wife survived the great period to become the first ancestor of a new innumerable population, was Mahabada. This name seems of Sanscrit derivation.* In his reign we find traced the first ground-lines of all human societies; agriculture and the arts of life are invented; villages and cities organised; four classes of society established — priests, warriors, agricul­turists, and tradesmen. The names of these classes are in the Dabistán much like those of the four Hindu castes, but the Desátir and the Shahnamah have other denominations, belonging to an ancient Persian dialect,* for these divisions, which origi­nated in the indispensable wants of a rising society. This institution connects itself with the principles of social morality: men are bound to each other by the laws of justice and mutual kindness, which is extended even to all innoxious creatures. To Maha­bad the Desátir was sent, a celestial code, and his faith was maintained through the whole series of his fourteen successors; the number of whom reminds us of the fourteen Indian Manus; they are said to have reigned six hundred and six trillions of years.

To the Mahabadians succeeded Abad Azar, who soon withdrew from government, and devoted him­self to solitude and piety. After him, the hitherto fortunate state of society changed into war, confu­sion, and anarchy. His son, Jai Afram, was called to the throne, and restored peace and order in the world, giving his name to a new dynasty. After this, four other princely families are named, that of Shai Abad, Shai Giliv, Shai Mahbul, and Yasan.* I shall not count the many millions of years during which they ruled; all that is said of their reigns appears nothing but a repetition of the first; a period of peace, order, and happiness is followed by war, disorder, and misery, until a revolution renews the state of things. Such traditions of a progress and regress in virtue and happiness, and of repeated changes from one condition to another, are not destitute of general truth. The moral is not, more than the physical world, exempt from revolu­tions. These, although their date cannot be deter­mined, have left behind them undeniable traces, and without a reference to them, we could not explain so much of the strangeness, incoherence, and heterogeneity in the history of men and nature.

Thus I have slightly sketched the principal fea­tures of the religion which prevailed among the first Persian dynasties; these, not mentioned in other historical books, are we know peculiar to the Desátir and Dabistán, which appeared to sir W. Jones an unexceptionable authority for believing the Iranian monarchy “the oldest in the world.” Upon this, W. Erskine remarked:* “Shall I be forgiven for saying, that the history of letters seems to me scarcely to afford an instance of a more perverted judgment on historical evidence?” Silvestre de Sacy too* “banishes among the most absurd fables the dynasties of the Mahabadians, and of their successors, which sir William Jones, and after him some other Orientalists, have too hastily adopted, and of which they would to-day blush, since their titles have been produced.” More recently, William von Schlegel* said: “It would be useless to conceal to the public that that learned man, endowed with talents so rare, was totally deficient in historical criticism:” This was inferred, because he had admitted, and used in some of his considerations, as genuine, a forgery of Wilford's Pandit. Besides, “he received without diffidence, and even welcomed with enthusiasm, the traditions contained in the Dabistán, a modern Persian book, written with the intention to claim for Persia the pre-eminence over India with respect to the antiquity of religious revelations.”

As to “the intention” mentioned, I hope to be able to justify Mohsan Fani. With respect to the Mahabadian dynasties—the light recently acquired upon the ancient history of Persia, reflect rather favorably upon that part of sir William Jones's opinion, that this country, in its wide extent, was once the original seat of many nations now settled in dis­tant regions. So much, at least, may be considered as established: 1. that the limits of history are to be removed further back than those before fixed; 2. that in the earliest times primitive nations, related by language to each other, had their origin in the common elevated country of central Asia, and that the Iranians and Indians were once united before their migration into Iran and India.* This great fact presents itself, as it were, upon the border of a vast abyss of unknown times.

For these a measure was sought. Hence we meet with extravagant, but perpetually recurring chrono­logical statements. The Mahabadian ages are nei­ther better nor worse, as to accuracy, than the Indian yugs, the Chaldean,* or other periods. In order to reduce them to their true value, we must consider them as nothing else than expressions of the ideas which the ancients entertained of the antiquity of the world and human society, in which they cannot be easily refuted, and at least are not absurd. Such ideas originated, when man, curious after his past, had long ceased to be a listless barbarian; but the earliest civilisation is a late product of slow-working time, the memory of which could have been pre­served only by monuments. The most ancient of these however are but recent in our historical knowledge, the limits of which are far from being those of antiquity. The duration of ante-historical empires, in printless but extensive spaces of times, escapes research and computation. As men, however, bear with impatience vague and loose ideas, the Persians, as well as other nations, determined the past by numbers formed from the multiplication of some astronomical periods known in early times, as has been observed:* this appears to me at once the whole truth and falsehood of those statements. In the utter impossibility to reconcile the discordant data of different nations, we must content ourselves to take up the general ideas and facts in which they all agree, whilst in the particulars they all differ. Thus, in laying down maps of countries little known, we are satisfied with tracing the general direction of some rivers and mountains, and abstain from topo­graphical details.