fusion than about that of any other World
Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years. But
Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all
had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then;
it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the
spiritual climate of the world. The _Bundahish,_ the Parsee
account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander;
almost all scholars reject the figure--once more, "it is their
nature to." But you will note that 258 is about as much as to
say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think
the probabilities are strong that the _Bundahish_ is right. The
chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these: Greek
accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and
there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before
Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,--which word is from
Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism. The
explanation is this: you shall find it in H.P. Blavatsky: there
were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last
(as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he
invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a
religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries. Where
then did his predecessors teach?--Where Zal and Rustem thundered
as they might; in the old Iran of the _Shah Nameh,_ the land of
Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru. Too remote for all scholars
even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it
at about 1100 B.C.--we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria"--
which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this
the Persian tradition came--last down to, and through, the period
of the Achaemenidae. What arts, what literature, these latter
may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative
and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is
exceedingly unlikely they had none. Dio Chrysostom, in the first
century B.C., says that "neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the
chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster"; which may
mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a
great Achaemenian poetry. Why then is this culture lost, since
if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that
of the Greeks? Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving
thing; there is nothing in it. Persia now is not contemporary
with Japan; nor modern Ch