Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle

We will refrain from gathering more testimonies here (1). This worship was not unique to the Persians. The Greeks had their sacred fire consecrated at Delphi, at Athens, and elsewhere; it was lit by the rays of the sun. The Romans had their temple of Vesta, where priestesses were charged with maintaining the eternal sacred fire. The Jews themselves kept a perpetual fire in their temple, just as the Persians did in their pyraia fire temples (2). It was the same among the Macedonians, the Sarmatians, the Medes, and among all the nations of the North (3). Finally, even today, the Guebres Zoroastrians, descendants of the ancient disciples of Zoroaster, worship the element of fire. They have a temple at Surat which, by its simplicity (4), reminds us of the customs of the people who built it; it is a cottage containing the sacred fire, which is continually maintained by priests. We see, therefore, that there is no era in which we do not find the worship of Nature more or less widespread in Persia; sometimes without images or symbols; sometimes with the simple symbol of an eternal fire, like that which moves and gives life to the Universe; and sometimes also with all the pomp of ceremonies and the richness of decorations in temples, statues, and images.

If we move further toward the East, toward the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, we will see the same worship flourishing there. The Banians a caste of Indian merchants or traders have the greatest veneration for the river Ganges (5); they regard it as a God, and they perform sacrifices to it with small lit lamps, which they set out every evening upon the current of the water (6); out of devotion, they also throw gold, pearls, and precious stones into it. The peoples who live along its banks regard it as a supreme favor,

the happiness of dying in its waters, being persuaded that by this act, all their sins are erased. The banks of the Ganges are lined with a kind of chapel and with pagodas, especially near Benares, where the great college of the Brahmins is located; the devout go in procession to the Ganges to perform their ablutions. In ancient times, horses and oxen were sacrificed to the Indus river as if to a God; when the sacrifice was finished, a kind of small golden bushel, similar to those used to measure wheat, was thrown into the river. This ceremony was practiced at the moment when the days began to lengthen the winter solstice. Alexander the Great sacrificed victims on its banks to the sun, which had illuminated his victory over Porus (6). According to Clement of Alexandria, the sun was the great divinity of the Indians (7). Most people, says this author, struck by the spectacle of the heavens and the regular movements of the stars, and deceived by the testimony of their senses, which was the only thing they believed, made Gods of them and worshiped the sun, as the Indians do. Lucian adds that the Indians, in rendering their homage to the sun, turned toward the East, and keeping a profound silence, they performed a kind of dance imitative of the movement of that star (8). Stephen of Byzantium asserts that they consecrated themselves especially to the sun (9); their gymnosophists literally "naked philosophers," referring to ancient Indian ascetics contemplated the luminous disk of this God with a fixed eye, as if they wished to discover there, says Solinus (10), the secrets of divinity. Apollonius of Tyana, looking over the different objects represented by order of Porus in a temple in India, enters into some details regarding the art of painting and its purpose (11). Painters, he says, paint all the objects that Nature offers to their eyes, and which

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are under the sun; sometimes the sun itself, as we see in this temple, where it has been represented on a quadrige a chariot drawn by four horses. He speaks expressly of a temple consecrated to the sun that was seen in these places; and the king tells him that he never drinks wine except when he sacrifices to the sun (1). The Indians, wishing to go before Phaotes, their new king, light the torches they must carry in his procession at the altar of the sun. When Apollonius arrived at the Hyphasis river (2), which was the limit of Alexander's conquests, he found altars there with an inscription in honor of Jupiter-Ammon and the Indian sun, of Hercules, Apollo, etc.

The Arab Sharistani attributes the same religion to the Indians as to the Arabs, that is to say, Sabisme Sabeanism, or star-worship (3); and Abulfaraj counts the Indians among the seven great nations who professed this religion. It is not surprising that one also found there a great number of divinities that the Greeks had borrowed from Phoenicia and Egypt, such as Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, Minerva, etc.; Apollonius was surprised to find them in the middle of India, honored with the same forms of worship and images that these Gods had in Greece. We have shown above, in the article on Greece, that all of this was only a Sabeanism disguised under the mysterious veil that the Egyptians and other learned nations spread over it. They also had their sacred fire, which they drew from the rays of the sun, and which they went to seek on the summit of a mountain (4), which they regarded as the central point of India; but they did not keep it enclosed, so that its flame could leap up like a ray reflected by water.

The Brachmanes Brahmins, to render a more pleasing worship to the sun (5), walked on a ground strewn with herbs and flowers almost to the height of two cubits, persuaded that the higher they are raised above the ground, the more acceptable the offering they make. They pray to the sun during the day to ensure that the hours he generates by his revolution flow happily for the land of India (6). Even today, the Brahmins perform their sandinavé Sandhyavandanam, a daily ritual of prayer and purification; at sunrise, they go to draw water from a pond (7), and they throw some toward the sun to show him their respect and gratitude for having kindly reappeared and chased away the darkness of the night. The worship of the sun and the moon, divinities of the ancient Indians, is still the only worship held by those Indians who, always distant from other men, live in the woods and on the mountains. They pay the greatest homage to the God of fire, and they maintain a fire on the mountain of Tirounamaly Tiruvannamalai for which they have the greatest veneration. The learned Father Kircher regards the worship of the sun and of fire as the first and greatest worship of India (8). He says that most of the festivals established by the Indians throughout the course of the year have this star as their object, and that their religion resembles almost in everything that of the Persians and the Egyptians, from whom they seem to have borrowed it. He even claims that the sacrifice they make of their person by throwing themselves, their wives, or their children into the flames of a pyre comes from their ancient veneration for fire, and from the persuasion that they are throwing themselves into the bosom of divinity itself; it is the same opinion that makes them desire to die in the middle of the waters of the Ganges, one of their great divinities.

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