Crossword-Solution: AVESTIC 7 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

This Soma juice has the same importance in Vedic and Avestic sacrifices as the juice of the grape had in the worship of Bacchus.

They have, however, did they know it, a more notable proof of their descent from the Medes in the very language they talk, for it is the nearest of all the dialects to the Avestic of Zoroaster himself.

This idea, as will be shown later, is met with among the Phrygian Ophites, where “a Man and a Son of Man” were said to be the origin of all subsequent things, as in the Avestic literature of Persia where Gayômort, the son, according to one story, of the Supreme God Ahura Mazda by his daughter Spenta-armaiti, is made at once the pattern and the source of the whole human race.

Cumont is, therefore, doubtless right when he thinks that Mithraism was derived not from Mazdeism, but from Magism or the religion of the Magi, the tribe of Medes whose domination was put an end to by Darius the son of Hystaspes, and whose name was afterwards given to a priestly caste and has passed into our own language as the root of the word “magic.” That these Magi practised a religion different from that taught in the Avestic literature is plain enough.

That the higher of these in this case was the Garôtman or abode of Infinite Light of the Avestic literature, there can, it would seem, be no question; but what was the lower? Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves imposed upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by the absence of written documents, it is probable that this lower division of the universe was our earth.