Chapter XVII
CHAPTER XVII.
1. These were his tokens at birth:—One day, one of those five brothers of the Karaps saw Zaratûst, and he looked a long while upwards, downwards, and on all sides around 2.
2. Pôrûshaspô enquired thus: 'What was there when thou lookedst upwards, what when thou lookedst downwards, and what when thou lookedst on all sides?'
3. And he replied thus, namely: 'When I looked upwards, it was for this reason, when I saw that our souls 3 that go up to the sky, will go up to the best
existence 1, owing to the words of this soul. of mankind. 4. When I looked downwards, I saw that, owing to the action of this one, the demon and fiend, the wizard and witch become buried below the earth, and fall paralyzed back to hell. 5. And when I looked on all sides, I saw that the words of this one will extend through the whole earth; and when they have become as the law of the seven regions, each person is kept clothed with a robe (kapâh) of seven skins, in which the glory of the seven archangels has arisen.'
6. And Brâd-rûkhsh the Tûr went forth; when he went to the right side (arakŏ), Zaratûst hastened away to the left, and when he went to the left side, Zaratûst hastened to the right, and he is thereby concealed from Brâd-rûkhsh the Tûr, who has not met with him.
Footnotes
- 147:1
- 147:2
- 147:3
Assuming that the MS. Ladd, 'glory, or destiny,' has lost an initial n, with which it was originally nismâ = Chald. נִשְׁמָא 'the soul;' as the copyists have not been aware of the existence of this Zvâris equivalent for rûbân, 'the soul,' for some centuries, it has been altered into gadâ, by the omission of its first letter, in nearly all but the very oldest existing MSS., such as Kao and M6 in Bd. XV, 3-5, and even there the medial m is really missing, though apparently existing in the final â; the irregularity of using s for sh is common in Pahlavi.