[From Herodotus (I. 131 and 132.), and from many other sources, we see clearly that at the time of the Achaemenidae the Persians had neither temples nor images of their gods.  Auramazda and Angramainjus, the principles of good and evil, were invisible existences filling all creation with their countless train of good and evil spirits.  Eternity created fire and water.  From these Ormusd (Auramazda), the good spirit, took his origin.  He was brilliant as the light, pure and good.  After having, in the course of 12000 years, created heaven, paradise and the stars, he became aware of the existence of an evil spirit, Ahriman (Angramainjus), black, unclean, malicious and emitting an evil odor.  Ormusd determined on his destruction, and a fierce strife began, in which Ormusd was the victor, and the evil spirit lay 3000 years unconscious from the effects of terror.  During this interval Ormusd created the sky, the waters, the earth, all useful plants, trees and herbs, the ox and the first pair of human beings in one year.  Ahriman, after this, broke loose, and was overcome but not slain.  As, after death, the four elements of which all things are composed, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, become reunited with their primitive elements; and as, at the resurrection-day, everything that has been severed combines once more, and nothing returns into oblivion, all is reunited to its primitive elements, Ahriman could only have been slain if his impurity could have been transmuted into purity, his darkness into light.  And so evil continued to exist, and to produce impurity and evil wherever and whenever the good spirit created the pure and good.  This strife must continue until the last day; but then Ahriman, too, will become pure and holy; the Diws or Daewa (evil spirits) will have absorbed his evil, and themselves have ceased to exist.  For the evil spirits which dwell in every human being, and are emanations from Ahriman, will be destroyed in the punishment inflicted on men after death.  From Vuller’s Ulmai Islam and the Zend-Avesta.]

“Light alone is pure and good; darkness is unclean and evil.  Yes, maiden, believe me, God is nearest to us on the mountains; they are his favorite resting-place.  Have you never stood on the wooded summit of a high mountain, and felt, amid the solemn silence of nature, the still and soft, but awful breath of Divinity hovering around you?  Have you prostrated yourself in the green forest, by a pure spring, or beneath the open sky, and listened for the voice of God speaking from among the leaves and waters?  Have you beheld the flame leaping up to its parent the sun, and bearing with it, in the rising column of smoke, our prayers to the radiant Creator?  You listen now in wonder, but I tell you, you would kneel and worship too with me, could I but take you to one of our mountain-altars.”

“Oh! if I only could go there with you! if I might only once look down from some high mountain over all the woods and meadows, rivers and valleys.  I think, up there, where nothing could be hidden from my eyes, I should feel like an all-seeing Divinity myself.  But hark, my grandmother is calling.  I must go.”