Essay on the Sacred Fire and on the Vestals

of this Kingdom; it was among them that the worship of Fire began.

A flawed understanding of physics and vain reasoning regarding what ought to be adored corrupted this worship, which was so pure in its origin and surely worthy of the Being to whom it was offered, since He had not yet ordained the specific worship He required. Fire was soon regarded as the principle of all things, because it animates and devours everything. The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the entire host of Heaven ceased to be simple images of the Divinity and directly received vows, homages, and sacrifices. The first era of the establishment of Sabeism Sabeism refers to the ancient religion involving the worship of celestial bodies (stars and planets). cannot be known; it appears only that it preceded the birth of Abraham. Some scholars, especially Doctor Hyde Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), an English orientalist and author of a famous work on the religion of the ancient Persians., believe that this Patriarch undertook to bring his contemporaries back to the purity of primitive worship; according to them, his efforts extended mainly to the Persians. I am unaware of the reason for this preference, since they were not his compatriots like the Chaldeans, and because religion was infinitely less altered among them than in Babylon.

These peoples, known in the Old Testament under the name of Elamites, also date back to a very remote antiquity; they embraced the worship of the Chaldeans; they also received Sabeism from them, but its superstitions made little progress there. If they added some absurd ceremonies to their religion, they preserved the

substance, the essential dogma of the unity of God. They always conceived of this Being as invisible, infinite, all-powerful, and uncreated; they did not allow images of Him to be drawn; they never used metals or stone to represent the God they revered; they built no Temple for Him; they did not suffer the Master of the Universe to be enclosed within a narrow precinct. They believed Him present everywhere and invoked Him everywhere; they did not imagine that there were privileged places from which He heard them better. It was only after several centuries that they sacrificed upon mountains; weakness sought to draw closer to the Divinity, and superstitious ignorance believed it could achieve this by leaving the plains. They also had Pyreia Pyreia: from the Greek 'pyr' (fire), these were open-air fire temples or enclosures used by ancient Persians where they nourished the sacred Fire; but these Pyreia were not exactly Temples; one saw there neither ornaments nor magnificence; it was an enclosure of walls, simple, without pomp and without roofs; in the middle rose an altar upon which one saw the sacred brazier. They did not enclose the Divinity there; they placed there the symbol of His purity. It [the fire] could only be preserved in places specially destined for this use; it had to be within reach of those whose zeal wished to maintain it. These Pyreia were only established later, and by Zoroaster.

Toward the decline of the ancient Empire of the Persians, some of their Kings introduced the worship of Venus; but this worship was condemned by its...
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