What the esoteric wisdom really was we can only conjecture, since there are no sacred books or writings that have come down to us, like the Indian Vedas and the Persian Zend-Avesta.

The Zend-Avesta, or the sacred books of the Persians, are mostly hymns, prayers, and invocations addressed to various deities, among whom Ormazd was regarded as supreme.

What we know about the religion of Persia is chiefly derived from the Zend-Avesta.

In the Zend-Avesta we find no doctrines; but we do find prayers and praises and supplication to a Supreme Being.

The loftiness which modern scholars like Haug, Lenormant, and Spiegel see in the Zend-Avesta pertains more directly to the earlier portions of these sacred writings, attributable to Zoroaster, called the Gâthâs.

These are hence alike called the Indo-European races; and as the same linguistic roots are found in their languages and in the Zend-Avesta, we infer that the ancient Persians, or inhabitants of Iran, belonged to the same great Aryan race.

The Chinese annals also extend back to a remote period, for Confucius wrote history as well as ethics; but Chinese literature has comparatively little interest for us, as also that of all Oriental nations, except the Hindu Vedas and the Persian Zend-Avesta, and a few other poems showing great fertility of the imagination, with a peculiar tenderness and pathos.

[Footnote 1: Nanna, or on the Psychical Life of Plants, 1848; Zend-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the World Beyond, 1851; Physical and Philosophical Atomism, 1855; The Three Motives and Grounds of Belief, 1863; The Day View, 1879; Elements of Aesthetics, 1876; Elements of Psycho-physics, 1860;

It has taken fifty years for his chief book, 'Zend-avesta,' to pass into a second edition (1901).

This is Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little 'Büchlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.' We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean.

Note 9, page 295.Compare Zend-Avesta, 2d edition, vol.

The Zend-Avesta, translated by J. Darmesteter, i. (Oxford, 1880) p. xcii.

Any one can examine for himself the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta and the other Bibles of humanity.

ANQUETIL`-DUPERRON, brother of the preceding, an enthusiastic Orientalist, to whom we owe the discovery and first translation of the Zend-Avesta and Schopenhauer his knowledge of Hindu philosophy, and which influenced his own system so much (1731-1805).

SADDA, the name given to a Persian epitome of the Zend-Avesta.

ZEND, name applied, mistakenly it would seem, by the Europeans to the ancient Iranian language of Persia, or the language in which the Zend-Avesta is written, closely related to the Sanskrit of the Vedas it appears.

ZEND-AVESTA, the name given to the sacred writings of the Guebres or Parsees, ascribed to Zoroaster, of which he was more the compiler than the author, and of which many are now lost; they represent several stages of religious development, and as a whole yield no consistent system.

Tell those unfortunate that the Zend-Avesta religion was never professed by the rural inhabitants of the Roman country.