"The old Persian devotion to the sun developed, in the course of time, into a highly intellectualized monotheism, and its prophets predicted the coming of a messiah. It was Persian priests, or magi, who came to Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus, as Mathew records. The Parsees of India... are the descendants of Old Believers who refused to yield to when the Calif Omar conquered Persia in the year 641 and ordered the whole population to turn Moslem. ...so late as the Seventeenth Century, after a thousand years of Islam, a Persian reformer, Akbar by name, proposed formally that it be revived. ...every Moslem, facing Mecca when he prays, recalls the days when his ancestors faced the East and the risen sun, just as every Christian goes to church on Sun-day, celebrates Christmas on the dies natalis solis invictus or birthday of Mithra, and employs symbols and ceremonials borrowed from the ancient sun-worship at Easter, the time of the vernal equinox."
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Treatise on the Gods
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