Italo Pizzi Quotes

The Daēvi of Zoroastrianism are not in origin other than the Devis of the correspondent, indeed related Indian mythology and theology. Other than the Indian Devi are good deities, protective friends of man, where the Iranian Daēvi are evil beings, true evil geniuses. This is probably due to the fact that some religious cleaver, as can reasonably be assumed, troubled Aryan or Indo-Iranian society or life before the exchangeable separation, that is, that ancient religious concepts had to gradually change and alter deeply for reasons that it is very difficult, not impossible, to trace.

His reign began on a day when the sun entered Aries, and lasted thirty years. To him were submissive not only all the men, but also all the beasts of the campaign that paid homage to him.

The<nowiki>'</nowiki> Hadesta' which we now have it, is far from what it was supposed to be at one time when it formed as a wide and vast encyclopedia. Nor was it the sacred code, the sacred book of all Irans, yes good of a single part of the nation. He was not of the Persians in antiquity, because from what Herodotus says about their religion, and from what is evident from the inscriptions of the Achaemenids, it appears that they professed a very similar religion, but not that of the <nowiki>'</nowiki>Avesta. The Persians, on the other hand, embraced it much later, that is, after the Vulgar Era, when the Sassanids solemnly proclaimed it, with the 'Avesta', the official religion of the kingdom.

Dahaka means the snake that bites. In the naturalistic sense, it is the aerial monster that, according to the primitive concepts of a naturalistic religion, contends the celestial spaces to the Gods of light, and yet rejoins his brother of the Rigveda who is the serpent Ahi. L<nowiki>'</nowiki>Avesta', adjoining the frightening and horrible traits due to the imagination of the vulgar, designates it from time to time as the worst and most eliitial Drugia that Anra Mainyu has created, and describes it with three heads, with three jaws, with six eyes; but then, rising

He was, on earth, propagator of faith and initiator among the men of agriculture.

Firdusi describes the miserable state of Iran under the scepter of Dahàk. Every guilt, every sad work, was lawful then, while every virtue was persecuted.

There is no well-founded reason to accuse Alessandro of the dispersion of the 'Avesta' and the consequent loss of many among the books of it, even if the Parsi accuse him of this, they who usually call him, for the hatred they have, the cursed. Coming from hatred, the accusation cannot be entirely right, and on the other hand it is known that Alexander was not intolerant of the religions of the peoples he visited and defeated, he did not deal with either their rites or their beliefs, which, while he had many other things to expect, he cared little or nothing. Indeed, if they cared, they cared in a favorable sense, because it is also known that the Macedonian soldiers who had followed him in the East, accused him, as crude as they were and uncultured, of assuming Asian customs and rites, the Persians in particular.

He has few dogmas, but he brings to the faithful very high teachings; he admits the future life, he promises the coming, at the end of the world and when the dead will rise again, of a Savior, he announcing the prize that will touch the good, and the penalty of the wicked.

In ethical and moral respect, Mithra is regarded as a jealous custodian of the covenants that mortals conclude among themselves, a displeaunted of justice and mutual faith, a punisher of traitors and frighteds; and Xenophon attests that the Persians used to swear in his name.

However, the Iranian ingenuity was not extinguished; which on the contrary, as always happens when a civilized people is subject to a stronger, but still barbaric and crude, those crude and barbaric inhabitants of the desert all, or almost everything, had to learn what is about political, military and literary art.

Talking about the merits of Firdusi is certainly not light and easy; but having to keep our word about it, we will start with the language which by the Persian writers who came after him, was increasingly corrupt with Arabic words. Firdusi instead knew how to use the real Persian language by abstaining, as much as he could, from the Arabic words that were introduced into Persia after the conquest of the Arabs. His way of expressing himself is robust, nervous and devoid of those games of words and those uncertain grigami that we so often encounter in the imitatory poets of the Arabs, such as Hâfiz, Khâkâni, Saadi and Giâmi. They met again often in their songs, figures and really grandiose similarities, which, however, never touch the monstrous like those that are needed in Indian poems, especially if of old age, as are the Purâni, nor do they go to the ridiculous and the silly like some of the Arabic and Persian poetry that imitated it on. (pp. 121-122)

If it was rightly said that India gave the world the priests, and that Greece and Rome gave the civil man, no less rightly it can be said that Persia gave instead the type of man who believes, who works, who fights.

If not even the Arabs, the Muslims all, of whatever nation they were, had the pride in the Middle Ages of finesse and splendor in life, of skill sought in everything that touches pomp and luxury, from the fantastically crafted palaces to the most delicate essences and scents, of all costs they owe to the Persians from whom they took it and appropriated Even the science that came to us from Asia in the Middle Ages, in great part was Persian; and Persians are almost all philosophers, doctors, astronomers, mathematicians, whose names we read in the pages of our middle age, such as Agazel and Alrasi, Albatenio, Avicenna, Alfarabi. They wrote their works in Arabic, this being the learned language of the Muslim empire; and we therefore, with manifest error, called them Arabs and yet we consider them to be so.

The Book of Kings is a faithful image of the ingenuity, soul and heart of the Persian people, if not of our times, at least of that age when he had not yet been impregnated by the Muslim doctrines, and still felt the beneficial strength of the ancient religion of Zoroastro, infiant, energetic and, after Christianity.

Three moments of maximum splendor had the Iranian culture and civilization, and these are pted and added up, so to speak, in three equally glorious and illustrious names that are Zarathustra, Dario, Firdusi. The first two belong to the ancient age, and one is a great legislator, also the founder of a novel religion; the other is a great prince, unifier of the patrio kingdom. He belongs to the third to the Middle Ages, and is a great poet, worthy of standing next to the majors of the West.