barring them out at once from the gates of heavenly mercy and every benefit of earthly compassion. It is doubtless a relic of the abominable Cuthite doctrines, of that relentless race, whose bloody worship outraged all the dictates of humanity, and who, in their infernal orgies, offered up even their sons and their daughters to devils. Besides the promise of entering at large. into the Brahmin initiations, I have repeatedly pledged myself in the course of this extensive review, or rather history, of the Asiatic theology, to compare the greater Mithratic mysteries, as far as they are known, with those which were celebrated in the cavern-temples of India, and there, cannot be a better opportunity for making that comparison than what the present chapter affords, in which we are considering the Brahmin doctrine of the regeneration of the soul, by a severe course of progressive penances rising above each other in horror and anguish. The principal feature of similitude is the unexampled tortures which the respective candidates underwent in their progress through either dreadful ́ ordeal. shall begin with describing the probationary discipline endured by the Brahmin during his progress through the four degrees of the Char Pp 3 I Asherum. Asherum. I shall then proceed to detail the severities submitted to by the Mithriacs, and the reader, who will take the trouble of turning, while he reads these accounts, to the description in the first chapter of the Indian Theology of the Grecian mysteries in honour of Ceres, celebrated at Eleusis, and to that of the Egyptian pomp sacred to Osiris and Isis at Philae, in the second, will find that he has nearly the whole of the mysteries, performed in the antient world, brought at once before his view in this Dissertation, detailed from the best authorities, and portrayed with no unanimated, but I trust with no exaggerating, pencil. Abul Fazil, the secretary of Sultan Akber, from the sacred books of the Brahmins, to which he had access, as well as from the oral accounts of those Brahmins, who reposed à confidence in the minister of their most lenient monarch of Mohammedan extract, has inserted, in the third volume of the Aycen Akbery, a very ample description of the Char Asherum, of which I shall immediately submit the substance to the reader. The veneration antiently entertained both in India and Persia for the SUN and FIRE, together with many of their consequent su perstitions, டன்ட perstitions, engaged a considerable portion of the first chapter of the Indian Theology. I did not presume to determine in which of those nations that worship first commenced, but referred it to a Chaldaic origin; to that people who earliest practised the Sabian idolatry. I cited classical authority in proof that horses were, in Persia, sacrificed to the sun, in addition to which, I might have added that direct assertion of Justin, from Trogus Pompeius; solem unum Deum esse credunt et equos Deo sacratos ferunt. From Sanscreet books, I also produced evidence of the existence, in antient eras, of an ASWAMMEDHA-JUG, or horse-sacrifice, in India. It is to be feared that both the Mithratic and the Suryatic rites were stained with a more horrid species of sacrifice, the blood of men. This abominable rite, so universally prevalent in the antient world, took its rise from the idea, that, the nobler was the victim offered, the more propitious and benignant was rendered the deity adored. With how dreadful a profusion human blood was antiently shed on the altars of India has already been related; that the caverns of the furious Mithriacs were little better than vast sepulchres of sacrificed men is evident, not only from Porphyry's Pp 4 second second book, De Abstinentia,* in which the dreadful pangs of hunger and thirst, and various other miseries undergone by the emaciated candidate during initiation, are enumerated; but is farther evinced by a very curious fact, related in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, a Christian writer who flourished in the fifth century, shortly after the final extinction of the Mithratic superstition at Rome, by order of Gracchus, præfect of the prætorium. In this author's time, the Christians of Alexandria having discovered a cavern that had been consecrated to Mithra, but for a long period closed up, resolved to explore it and examine what remnants of that superstition it contained, when, to their astonishment, the principal thing they found in it was a great quantity of human skulls, with other bones of men that had been sacrificed, which were brought out, publicly exposed, and excited the utmost horror in the inhabitants of that great city.† This general though dreadful feature of resemblance between the Mithratic and Suryatic devotees having been thus again brought before the view of the reader, I proceed, in * De Abstinentia, lib. ii. p. 71, et seq. the the first place, from that authentic register, the Ayeen Akbery, to present him with the account of THE BRAHMIN CHAR-ASHERUM, DEGREES OF PROBATION. OR FOUR THE FIRST DEGREE, or BRAHM-CHAREE.This state may be entered into by the young Brahmin noviciate, so carly as the eighth year, when the first ceremony of initiation is the putting on of the sacred zennar, or cord of three threads, in memory and honour of the three great deities of Hindostan. Those who refuse to admit the hypothesis, so amply detailed in the former chapter, relative to what I suppose to be the genuine origin of those three deities, must continue to consider them as the three elements personified; carth, fire, and air; which latter element condensed, according to the Brahmins, is water. These, say the antagonists of that hypothesis, are the principles of which all bodies in nature, and man himself, are composed. These These were, therefore, considered as first principles, and in that sense deified by a race plunged in materialism. I have thus ingenuously stated the oppositeargument, |