miscreant who counteracts purity.  The highest grade in the hierarchy of men belongs of right to the Mage or the athravan, to the priest whose voice inspires the demons with fear, or the soldier whose club despatches the impious, but a place of honour at their side is assigned to the peasant, who reclaims from the power of Angro-mainyus the dry and sterile fields.  Among the places where the earth thrives most joyously is reckoned that “where a worshipper of Ahura-mazda builds a house, with a chaplain, with cattle, with a wife, with sons, with a fair flock; where man grows the most corn, herbage, and fruit trees; where he spreads water on a soil without water, and drains off water where there is too much of it.”  He who sows corn, sows good, and promotes the Mazdean faith; “he nourishes the Mazdean religion as fifty men would do rocking a child in the cradle, five hundred women giving it suck from their breasts.* When the corn was created the Daevas leaped, when it sprouted the Daevas lost courage, when the stem set the Daevas wept, when the ear swelled the Daevas fled.  In the house where corn is mouldering the Daevas lodge, but when the corn sprouts, one might say that a hot iron is being turned round in their mouths.”  And the reason of their horror is easily divined:  “Whoso eats not, has no power either to accomplish a valiant work of religion, or to labour with valour, or yet to beget children valiantly; it is by eating that the universe lives, and it dies from not eating.”  The faithful follower of Zoroaster owes no obligation towards the impious man or towards a stranger,** but is ever bound to render help to his coreligionist.

     * The original text says in a more enigmatical fashion, “he
     nourishes the religion of Mazda as a hundred feet of men and
     a thousand breasts of women might do.”

** Charity is called in Parsee language, asho-dad the gift to a pious man, or the gift of piety, and the pious man, the ashavan, is by definition the worshipper of Ahura-mazda alone.

He will give a garment to the naked, and by so doing will wound Zemaka, the demon of winter.  He will never refuse food to the hungry labourer, under pain of eternal torments, and his charity will extend even to the brute beasts, provided that they belong to the species created by Ahura-mazda:  he has duties towards them, and their complaints, heard in heaven, shall be fatal to him later on if he has provoked them.  Asha-vahista will condemn to hell the cruel man who has ill-treated the ox, or allowed his flocks to suffer; and the killing of a hedgehog is no less severely punished—­for does not a hedgehog devour the ants who steal the grain?  The dog is in every case an especially sacred animal—­the shepherd’s dog, the watchdog, the hunting-dog, even the prowling dog.  It is not lawful to give any dog a blow which renders him impotent, or to slit his ears, or to cut his foot, without incurring grave responsibilities