from the more southern side, from the more southern quarters, a sweet scent more sweet-scented than other winds. Then inhaling that wind with the nose, the soul of the pious man considers, Whence blows the wind, the most sweetscented wind that I have ever inhaled with the nostrils? Advancing with this wind, there appears to him what is his own religion [or law, the rule of life to which he has conformed] in the figure of a beautiful maiden with a dazzling face. . . . Then the soul of the pious man speaks to her, asking, What virgin art thou, whom I have seen here as the most beautiful of virgins in form? Then answers him his own law, I am, O youth, thy good thoughts, good words, good deeds, and good religion, on account of which good religion in thy own possession everyone has loved thee for such greatness, and goodness, and beauty, and perfume, and victoriousness, which overcomes enemies, as thou appearest to me. . . soul of the pious man first advanced with a footstep placed upon good thought; secondly, upon good word; thirdly, upon good action; fourthly, upon the eternal lights. To him spoke a pious one, previously deceased, asking, How, O pious one, didst thou die? how come away from the fleshly dwellings, from the corporeal world, to the spiritual life, from the perishable to the imperishable? how long will have been thy blessing? Then said Ahura-Mazda, Ask not him whom thou askest, who is come along the fearful, terrible, tremendous path, the separation of body and soul." (Hadokht Nask II.; cf. Arda Viraf IV., 8-35; Mainyo-i-Khard II., 110—157.)

...

The

In the Pazand, sadis or sedish is the term for this period of three

days, or nights, that the soul remains near the body after death. The Sanscrit equivalent is trirátrin. In the book of the Mainyo-i-Khard (Spirit of Wisdom) it is written:

"He who is a world-adorning and spirit-destroying man is so destroyed, in a single punishment of the three days, as a raging fire when water comes upon it." (ib. XXI., 10.)

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"Which is the good work. To wish good for everyone. and to be undoubting about the existence of God, and the religion, and the soul, and heaven, and the account that is in the three days, and the reality of the resurrection of the dead and the final body." (ib. LXIII., 1-7.)

"Be not reliant on life; since death occurs at last, and dogs and birds destroy the corpse, and the bones fall to the ground; and during three days (and) nights, the soul sits on the top of the head of the body." (ib. 11., 110-114.)

In the former part of this paper reference was made to the traces of relationship and similarity existing between the Aryan doctrines and those which belong to what Christendom has accepted as its own religious traditions.

The Aryan approaches the question of the birth-process of death in a detailed and picturesque, we had almost said matter-of-fact, way. The following passage will exemplify the deeper intensity of religious feeling in the Hebrew.

"Come and let us return unto the Lord; for He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will He revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord; His going forth is prepared as the morning, and He shall come unto us as the rain, as

the latter and former rain unto the earth."

This singular fragment appears in the book of Hosea (vi. 1, 3) quite detached from any context. If we analyse the passage it will be difficult to see what it means if it does not belong to the same kind of prophetic or visionary depiction of after-death experience as we have cited from the Zoroastrian books.

By the loose manner of Hebrew speech the phrase "after two days" is apparently reckoned as equivalent to "after three days" and also to "on the third day," as may be seen from what is quoted above when compared with Esther iv. 16, and v. 1, and also with the following:

"Come again unto me after three days. . . . They came on the third day, as the king bade, saying, 'come again on the third day.' Chron. x. 5 and 12.)

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The confusion is caused by fractions of days being counted as wholes. From a few moments before a particular day begins to a moment after it is passed, the period is one of three days, for it breaks into three separate davs.

We will refer presently to the Hebrew word used in Hosea to denote resurrection, and dwell for a moment here on its Greek equivalent in the Septuagint. The Greek verb is ἐξανίστημι, literally forth-up-stand, using the English verb both transitively and intransitively; and the construction differs slightly from that of the Hebrew original, being in place of "in the third day he will make us upstand," "in the third day we shall forth-upstand," or, to paraphrase the compound, "emerge on a higher plane erect." By a comparison of words the English reader may find the pith of the meaning of this one. We have two well-known

words compounded of the Greek verb signifying to stand, apostasy and ecstasy, and may transliterate others, from the compound verb above cited, viz., anastasy and exanastasy. A common measure is manifest in these words. Apostasy is offstanding in the sense of defection; ecstasy is outstanding in the sense in which (in the Persian passage already quoted) the spirit is described as finding its body a loose garment, which, under certain conditions, it is possible to stand out of. Anastasy is upstanding used in many senses, and is the well-known word which is usually and inaccurately translated resurrection. The invariable German rendering of the word is auferstehung, to which our AngloSaxon "upstanding" is the exact equivalent. The word ex-ana-stasy or out-up-standing combines the notion of ecstasy, or the spirit's freedom, with that of anastasy or its elevation. Whoever originally applied this Greek term to the subject of what is denominated resurrection, had evidently the clearest understanding of the metaphysics of the expression.

The word resurrection is confusing, for it implies re-rising, or rising again, which is a thought quite compatible with the Parsi conception of a primal state of existence to which the spirit returns at death; but that is not what is intended by those who currently use the word. If it is designed to mean a re-establishment of the physical organism, that sense is not to be found in the Greek term as originally employed.

The Aryan influences acting upon the Hebrews evidently tended to relax in some degree the reverential intensity with which the Hebrew mind had been wont to regard the mysteries of life. The following passage from the Talmud represents the mood of the Jewish

Rabbis of Pumbadita,* and shows us how they regarded the process of death as any other of nature's processes might have been regarded. There is no lack of reverence, but less of the strained hush of awe than accompanies the utterances of their older prophets :

"Rabba, assisting at the agony of Rab Nachman, said to him, Master, I would that thou would'st appear to me after thy death. Rab Nachman appeared unto him. Rabba asked of him, Hast thou suffered much?-As a hair that one should draw out of a cup of milk." (Moed Katan, 28a.)

It is naturally to be expected that ancient Rabbinical literature will show definite traces of the Mazdayasnian lore relative to the threefold period of death's gestation of the soul. The following may serve as instances:

"Tradition of the son (disciple) of Caphra :-The utmost force of woe continues not, save unto the third day; for, during a threedays' space, the soul wanders around its sepulchre, expecting to return into the body. When it sees that the aspect of the countenance is become fixed, it recedes and relinquishes the body." (Bereschith R. c. 7.)

"For the entire space of three days the soul flies above the body, expecting to return." (Vajikra R. XVIII.)

"For three days there is vehemence of woe, because up to this point the form of the face is recognised." (Koheleth R. XII. 5.)

"Why, after a three-days' space, can the poor creature lay aside woe? After a three-days' space the flesh corrupts, and its looks

are changed." (Tanchuma, f. 47, 1;" compare also Job xiv. 22).

"They make no attestation respecting a dead person except within three days after his death. After the three days' time they do not attest concerning him, inasmuch as the aspect of his face is altered." (Jebamoth f, 120, 1.)

In the Johannine story of Lazarus (John xi. 17, 39) the fourth day is adduced as affording conclusive evidence of death.

The myth of Jonah, probably disfigured as it is from its original, may occur to us as having been cited in relation to this doctrine of the triple period occupied by the death process. The interior of the whale as a residence affords a somewhat powerful metaphor for three days of death, for there would indeed be there neither good seafaring nor good dry land, but a veritable suspension of realisable existence.

According to such studious Rabbis among the modern Jews as are conversant with Bible, Talmud, and Gospels alike, and hold out yearning and sadly unregarded hands towards their Christian fellows, the expression "the son of man" denotes man in general, but as viewed in his immortal aspect; and so comes to signify a man docile to the inspiration of the soul, and superior to the suggestions of

matter.

In this general sense, or rather in a particular sense typifying the general sense, would by them be understood such expressions as these: "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so will the son of man be three days and three nights

in the heart of the earth." (Matt. xiii. 40.)

"Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up [literally awaken it].

He spoke of the temple of his body." (John ii. 19, 21, cf. Matt. xxvi. 61).

"The Son of Man is about to be delivered up into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and the third day he will be raised [literally, awakened]." (Matt. xvii. 22.)

"We remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, after three days I am raised [literally, am awakened]." (Matt. xxvii. 63.)

"He used to teach his disciples and say to them, The Son of Man is delivered up into the hands of man, and they will kill him, and though killed, after three days he will raise himself up [literally, upstand himself. Here we find the word used for resurrection which was examined above in its form anastasy]. But they understood not the saying, and were afraid to ask him." (Mark ix. 31.)

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These mystical passages leave as we find them; if there be a triplicity in the process of death as the mature soul traverses and solidifies the essence of its experience of childhood, youth, and full age, it would be as true to the Aryan as to the Jew; and any obscurity with regard to it would arise only in the mode of apprehension of so recondite a nativity.

[literally, upstand himself]. The sister replies, "I know that he will in the upstanding (anastasis, auferstehung) in the uttermost day." The final day to the sages meant probably the mortal life's final day

the uttermost hour of each individual on earth; but in the popular view this idea would seem to have brought a spiritual fact into too near and familiar relations for it to be welcomed. A lesson we may safely draw from the life of Jesus is that while standing on this plane he also stood, and stood consciously and with open eyes, on the grander interior plane of spirit. He responds in splendid and majestic utterance: I am, embodied here before you, the upstanding and the life [an idiomatic expression, presumably meaning by its conjunction of substantives, the same as I am, or represent, the anastatic or upstanding life]. He that confides in me [and realises this fact of the higher life], though he die [which is a temporal fact only], yet will he live, and everyone that lives and confides in me will

never die.' In other words, everyone who attains to the realisation of the spiritual fact as it is, will know that death is nothing and life is everything. The day he dies he will begin to awaken in the fitting paradise of his state.

We have brought forward this familiar account not only because it sheds light through the haze that lies upon the Aryan, and also upon the Jewish and Christian doctrines, but because of a somewhat fanciful relation which it contains to our Aryan ancestor.

Kaiômart, as we have found him in the Zoroastrian books, is regarded as "the first fruits of them that slept"-Kaiômart shall rise first [auferstehen, or upstand, as the Germans render the original text], afterwards the rest of mankind.

The reported words of Jesus, "I am the resurrection" (upstanding), we have only in the Greek language. If we had the veritable Aramaic in which he is presumed to have spoken, the expression would have been something like

Anna hou Kaiahmat.

If one of the mages, then, who are related to have discovered by astromancy the cradle of his birth, had been among the auditors of Jesus, it would have sounded to his ears very much as if the mysterious Rabbi of Galilee were identifying himself with the Aryan representative of the life that upstands and vanquishes death. He might have thought that he heard a voice, I am Kaiômart.

This seems to be a curious fancy, and nothing more, though it is not absolutely certain that the Aryan word Kaiômart and the Semitic word Kaiáhmat have no root affinity.

We will give, by the way, an interesting piece of evidence that the word Jesus did use for resurrection was virtually Kaiúhmat. The word to rise, which forms its root, is used in many senses, as indeed is the Greek word anastasis, which signifies insurrection, and even the

rising to one's feet from a chair, as well as upstanding in the sense of reaching the life after death. The Hebrew word employed in the same sense in the passage we have quoted from Hosea is choomun, containing the same root Km with Kaiáhmat. This root Km, Kum, means also to establish, to set upright, to rise, to raise. In Mark v. 41, we find a record of the power of Jesus in restoring a poor girl who was nearly dead. He says, according to the English translation, "Maiden, arise," and by a very rare chance the Aramaic words of this encouraging address are given us, transliterated into Greek: Talitha kum [or kovμ]. This is the identical root of Kaiahmat.*

Kaiômart is a word variously spelled by foreign writers, and very variously derived. We find Kaiomorts, Kehomorts, Kajumert, Kayomers, Kaiomurs, Kajomorts, Kayumart, Gayômard, Gayomars, Gaiomard, Gayomart, Gayô-mareta, Gayômaratan, Gaya-maretan, Gayomarathno, Gaiumardda, Gueiéhémereté, Giomert, &c. It has been said to mean mortal life, beKhai in Hebrew signifies (Nephesh khayá, a living

cause

living.