med into one. About
him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of
doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became
Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy culminated in a
superstition. That is the history of creeds.

II

ORMUZD

"The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of
things."

So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra.

"And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked.

"There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was
repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in
the course of a conversation that the _Avesta_ reports. In a similar
manner _Exodus_ provides a revelation which Moses received. There
Jehovah said: _'ehyeh '[)a]sher 'ehyeh_. In the _Avesta_ Ormuzd said:
_ahmi yad ahmi_.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each
means _I am that I am_.[8]

[Footnote 6: Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393].

[Footnote 7: Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.]

[Footnote 8: Exodus iii. 14.]

The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative
priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has
assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra
lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are
perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides.
The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew
Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated: _He who
causes to be._ The original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura-mazda. Ahura
means _living_ and mazdao _creator_. The period when _Exodus_ was
written is probably post-exilic. The period when the _Avesta_ was
completed is assumed to be pre-Cyrian. It was at the junction of the
two epochs that Iran and Israel met.

But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may
confuse, the one reported in _Exodus_ is alone exact. In subsequent
metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained. Whereas, save
to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian
sky, has gone. A time, though, there was, when from his throne in the
ideal he menaced the apathy of Brahm, the majesty of Zeus, when even
from the death of deaths he might have ejected Buddha and, supreme in
the Orient, ruled also in the West. Salamis prevented that. But one
may wonder whether the conquest had not already been effected, whether
for that matter th