l in the great task of
maintaining their ritual purity. The whole of life is dominated in
this work by the ideas of purity and defilement; the great business
of life is to avoid impurity, and when it is contracted to remove it
in the correct manner as quickly as possible. Purity here is not
primarily sanitary or even moral; though such considerations were no
doubt indirectly present. Impure is what belongs to the bad spirit,
whether because he created it, as he did certain noxious animals, or
because he has established a hold on it as he does on men at death. A
man is impure, not because he has exposed himself to the infection of
disease, not because he has contracted a stain on his conscience, but
because he has touched something of which a Daeva has possession, and
so has come under the influence of that Daeva. Purification,
therefore, and the act of healing consist of exorcisms of various
kinds. This notion of purity plays a great part in other old
religions also; it is here that we see its original meaning most
clearly. Another great feature of the doctrine of purity in the
Vendidad is that the elements, fire, earth, and water, are holy, and
to defile them in any way is the most grievous of sins. As everything
which leaves the body is unclean, a man must not blow up a fire with
his breath, and bathing with a view to cleanliness is not to be
thought of. The disposal of the dead was a matter of immense
difficulty, since corpses, being unclean, could be committed neither
to Fire nor to the Earth. They are ordered to be exposed naked on a
building constructed for that purpose on high ground, so that birds
of prey may devour them; and a great part of the Vendidad is taken up
with directions for purification, after a death has taken place, of
the persons who were in the house, of the house itself, of those who
carried the corpse, and of the road they travelled, etc.

[Footnote 9: _S. B. E._ vol. iv.]

How this Doctrine Entered Mazdeism.--This system was not in force in
the time of Darius and Artaxerxes (when the dead were buried or, as
in the case of Croesus, burned) though the ideas were appearing at
that period on which it is founded; and it is plain that it has no
necessary or vital connection with the religion of Zarathustra. But
in later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, in
its course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usages
with which, though foreign to its own nature, it