n that conception of a law of continual
progress unknown to antiquity, to which our modern society is so
invincibly attached, but which is, we should never forget, an idea due
to Christianity.

Zoroastrianism was unlike other pagan religions in this, that it could
not fail to admit and preserve the ancient tradition of a first sin.
Rather would it have been forced to construct for itself an analogical
myth, had it not found such in the primitive memories that it bent to
its own doctrines. The tradition squared, indeed, but too well with its
system of a dualism having a spiritual basis, although as yet but
imperfectly freed from confusion between the physical and moral worlds.
It explained quite naturally how man, a creature of the good God, and
consequently originally perfect, should have fallen under the power of
the evil spirit, thus contracting a taint which in the moral order
subjected him to sin, in the material to death, and to all the miseries
that poison earthly existence. Thus the notion of the sin of the first
authors of humanity, the heritage of which weighs constantly on their
descendants, is a fundamental one in Mazdean books. The modification of
legends relative to the first man even resulted in the mythic
conceptions of the later periods of Zoroastrianism, in attaching a
rather singular repetition of this first transgression to several
successive generations in the initial ages of humanity.

Originally--and this is at present one of the points most solidly
established by science--originally in those legends common to Oriental
Aryans before their separation into two branches, the first man was the
personage that the Iranians call Yima, and the Indians Yama. A son of
Heaven and not of man, Yima united the characteristics that Genesis
divides between Adam and Noah, fathers both, the one of antediluvian,
the other of postdiluvian humanity. Later, he appears as merely the
first king of the Iranians, but a king whose existence, as well as that
of his subjects, is passed in the midst of Edenic beatitude in the
paradise of Airyana-Vaedja,[53] the dwelling-place of the earliest men.
But after a time when life was pure and spotless, Yima committed the sin
which weighs on his descendants, and in consequence of that sin, lost
his power, was cast out of Paradise, and given up to the dominion of the
serpent, the evil spirit Angromainyus,[54] who finally brought about
Yima's death by horrible torments.[55] It is an ech