still used for worship, near the altar of which, about three feet high, a large hollow cane conveyed the gas up from the ground, burning at the mouth with a blue flame. Here were generally forty or fifty poor devotees, come on pilgrimage from their country to make expiation for themselves and others, and subsisting on wild celery, &c. These pilgrims are described as marking their foreheads with saffron, and having great veneration for a red cow; they wore little clothing, and the holiest of them kept one arm on their heads, or continued unmoved in some other posture; they are described as Ghebers, or Gours, the usual Moslem term for Fire-worshippers.[1]
In general, this name of Ghebers is applied to the Zoroastrians or Parsis, whom a modern European would all but surely point to if asked to instance a modern race of Fire-worshippers. Classical accounts of the Persian religion set down fire-worship as part and parcel of it; the Magi, it is recorded, hold the gods to be Fire and Earth and Water; and again, the Persians reckon the Fire to be a god ((
Greek characters)).[2] On the testimony of the old religious books of the Parsis themselves, Fire, as the greatest Ized, as giver of increase and health, as craving for wood and scents and fat, seems to take the distinctest divine personality. Their doctrine that Ardebehist, the presiding angel or spirit of fire, is adored, but not the material object he belongs to, is a perfect instance of the development of the idea of an elemental divinity from that of an animated fetish. When, driven by Moslem persecution from Persia, Parsi exiles landed in Gujarat, they described their religion in an official document as being the worship of Agni or Fire, thus claiming for themselves a place among recognized Hindu sects.[3] In modern times, though for the most part the Parsis have found toleration and prosperity in
