DURST, the great reformer of the sect of the Persian Magi, between whose doctrines and those of BRAHMA I shall hereafter, in many points, trace a striking resemblance, amidst the gloom of a cavern, composed his celebrated system of theological institutions, which filled twelve volumes, each consisting of a hundred skins of vellum, and was called the ZENDAVESTA.* The renowned philosophers, Epictetus and Pythagoras, who was himself the scholar of Zoroaster, sought wisdom in the solitary cell. Even the venerable prophets of the true religion took up their abode in the solitudes of the desert; and the herald of the MESSIAH, whose meat was the locusts and the wild honey which those solitudes produced, declares himself to be "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." In later ages, the crafty impostor Mohammed, in order more effectually to establish the pretended sanctity of his character, thought it necessaay to shun the society of men, and retired to fabricate his daring impositions * Dr Prideaux, who, next to the learned Hyde, has given the most ample account of Zoroaster and his tenets, informs us, that the word Zend-avesta signifies Fire-kindler. See Prideaux's Connections, vol. i. p. 317, oct. edit. 1721. See also Dr Hyde, Hist. Vet. Relig. Pers, cap. xxvi, p. 330. Edit. Oxon. 1760. + Prideaux's Connections, vol. i. p. 224. " in "a lonely cave, amidst the recesses of Mount Hara." GROVES, sacred to religion and science, were famous over all the East.. Abraham is said to have " planted a grove in Beershebah, and to have called there upon the name of the Lord."* But his degenerate posterity afterwards prostituted the hallowed grove to purposes of the basest devotion. They were upbraided, by the prophets, with burning incense and offering oblations, under every oak and green tree, to the gods of the Phoenicians and the neighbouring nations. It was against the groves, polluted by such idolatrous sacrifices, that the most awful anathemas of offended heaven were, in holy writ, perpetually denounced. Amidst the ardours of a torrid clime, those sylvan solitudes could not fail to afford the most grateful retreat; but, according to the united attestations of the antients, their inmost recesses were often polluted by the most dreadful rites. The ScYTHIANS, also, who never erected temples to the Deity, in their colder regions, celebrated the mysteries of their sanguinary superstition. under groves of oak of astonishing extent and of the profoundest gloom. Some of those oaks, Gen. xxi. verse 23. according according to Keysler, who has diligently investigated the antiquities of that northern race, and traced them among their descendants in Europe, were of a prodigious magnitude, and were always plentifully sprinkled with the blood of the expiring victims. However vast the dimensions of those oaks might have been, it is hardly possible they could have exceeded in size that wonderful Indian tree under which we are told, by the antients, that four hundred horsemen might take shelter at once. This was doubtless the sacred BATTA, or banian-tree of the moderns, under the ample shade of whose radicating branches, Tavernier informs us, that the Hindoos of modern times delight to reside, to dress their victuals, and erect their pagods. Of one of this species, growing near Surat, he has given an engraving, with a number of FAKEERS, the gymnosophists of the antients, in every dreadful posture of penance and distortion. The Druids of Gaul and of • See Keysler's Antiquitates Septentrionales, Dissert. 3. + Consult Strabo, lib. xv. p. 659, and Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. xii. c. iv. in regard to the immense bulk of the Indian trees, especially of the FICUS INDICA. See the engraving, Voyage de Tavernier, tom, įv. p. 118, edit. à Rouen, 1713, and p. 166 of the London folio edit. Mona, the immediate descendants of the antient CELTO-SCYTHIANS, retained the same veneration for groves of oak; and, according to the Roman historians, in the early periods of that empire, practised the same tremendous species of superstition, devoting to the gods, with many horrid ceremonies, the unhappy captives* taken in war. Lucan,† describing the Massilian grove of the former, enumerates circumstances which make us shudder as we read, the gloomy, damp, impenetrable, grove, where no sylvan deity ever resided, no bird ever sang, no beast ever slumbered, no gentle zephyr ever played, nor even the lightning. could rend a passage. It was a place of blood and horror, abounding with altars reeking with gore of human victims, by which all the the * Victima seems to be derived à victo, the person conquered in battle, and therefore doomed to sacrifice. + Lucus erat, longo nunquam violatus ab ævo, Lucan's Pharsalia, lib. iii. p. 400. & seq. trunks trunks of the lofty and eternal oaks, which composed it, were dyed of a crimson colour: a black and turbid water rolled through it in many a winding stream no soul ever entered the forlorn abode, except the priest, who, at noon and at midnight, with paleness on his brow and tremor in his step, went thither to celebrate the horrible mysteries in honour of that terrific deity whose aspect he dreaded more than death to behold, That a country, like India, whose JUNGLES, at this period of general cultivation, form in some places an impervious barrier, and whose sages have ever affected both the austerity and seclusion of anchorites, should once have abounded with the noblest groves, calculated for every purpose of superstition as well as instruction, is a supposition neither irrational nor incredible, Indeed, many very extensive and beautiful groves* yet remain in Hindostan, though now applied to other purposes. Whatever may have been urged in favour of the high antiquity of BENARES, as the original seat of Hindoo literature, and the most favoured residence of the Brahmins, it seems to be a fact, In the SACONTALA, an antient Indian drama, the Brahmins are represented as residing in the bosom of a deep forest. authenticated |