MAGI were the priests of the Persians, Bac trians, Charismians, Aryans, and Sakm. Diogenes Laertius (in Proem, p. 2, Lond. 1664) notices their reverence for fire, earth, and water,—Oiq ;Get 7rop Melt, ILCZI 'yffp, xat Or4p. But Herodotus had, before him, mentioned sacrifices offered on moun tains to Jupiter by the ancient Persians, and their worship of the sun and moon, of the earth, of fire, water, and of the winds ; he adds, also, that they learned from the Assyrians and Arabians to adore Venus, Urania, or celestial, which the Persians called Mtrpa. Strabo, like Herodotus, declares that the Persians neither erected statues nor altars ; they regard,' says he, the heavens as Jupiter, and reverence the sun, which they call Mithra. The moon, also, and Venus, fire, the wind, and water.' Yet in a previous passage of the same book, if the text be correct, he had affirmed that Mars alone was worshipped by the Persians. What they called Jupiter, says Hero dotus, was the whole compass or circuit of heaven, which Strabo, as above quoted, confirms. From both authors it appears that the Persians did not attempt to embody, under the human form, an object of such materiality as the celestial expanse. But Clemens Alexandrianus gives us reason to believe that some of their idols resembled human beings, and the statue of VenusTanais, Tn; A.ppairt; zauccAo;, mentioned by him, represented, without doubt, the female divinity more correctly named Anaitis, that Venus, we may suppose, whom the Persians learned to worship from neighbouring nations, as Herodotus had already declared.
The Magism of the Chaldees, as it prevailed about B.C. 2234, when a Median dynasty sat on the throne of Babylon, was a modification of the doctrines of Zoroaster.
Their cult seems to have been essentially a worship of the elements, and of these fire was deemed the most worthy of representing the deity.
The Magian religion was of a highly sacerdotal type. No worshipper could perform any religious act except by the intervention of a priest or Magus, who prepared the victim and slew it, chanted the mystic strain which gave the sacrifice all its force, poured on the ground the propitiatory libation of oil, milk, and honey, and held the bundle of thin tamarisk twigs, tire Zendu Barsom (Baresma), the employment of which was essential to every sacrificial ceremony. In the time of Darius, the Magi were not the priests of Ormazd, and Darius treated them most unmercifully. After the time of Ardeshir Daraz-dast (Artaxerxes Longornanns), the Magi seem to have converted the rulers to their creed. Professors Westergaard and George Rawlinson regard Magism as in its origin com pletely distinct from Zoroastrianism.—Geo. Rawl. ii. pp. 347-354.