"Magian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... B.C.).—For a short time, a pretender, a Magian, who called himself Smerdis, and professed to be the brother of Cambyses, usurped the throne. Cambyses is said to have put an end to his own life. After a reign of seven months, during which he kept himself for the most part hidden from view, Smerdis was destroyed ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Hermippus in his commentaries on the secret doctrines of the Magi. The Iranians themselves averred that he had given the world twenty-one volumes—the twenty-one Nasks of the Avesta,* which the Supreme Deity had created from the twenty-one words of the Magian profession of faith, the Ahuna Vairya. King Vishtaspa is said to have caused two authentic copies of the Avesta—which contained in all ten or twelve hundred chapters**—to be made, one of which was consigned to the archives of the empire, the other ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... been buried in 845, when the Emperor Wu-Tsung issued an edict, still extant, against the vast multiplication of Buddhist convents, and ordering their destruction. A clause in the edict also orders the foreign bonzes of Ta-T'sin and Mubupa (Christian and Mobed or Magian?) to return to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and Isis, And Apis! that mystical lore, Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis Of fever, is studied no more; Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles The arch of yon firmament vast Looks calm, like a host of white angels On ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope. It is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less sacred. In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... ones allow it. They believe that all souls were created in Adam, and therefore partake of his fall. Every kind of philosophy known at the time of its compilation is more or less introduced into the Talmud, and all more or less tinged with Magian superstition. From this superstition grew the mysticism of the Jewish schools. All the arts and sciences, under some form or other, are alluded to, and references to historical events abound in its pages. When it is dangerous to speak of them openly they are veiled under some figure known only ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Is this the Magian who would so pervade The world invisible, and make himself Almost our equal? Can it be that thou Art thus in love with life? the very ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. they deified the crocodile of the nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or as least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the proud Otanes, one of the seven was he Who laid the Magian traitor low, and set their country free; And he bade him man a gallant fleet, and sail without delay, To the pleasant isle of Samos, in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... surely you belong, Giver of golden days and golden song; Nor is it by an all-unhappy plan You bear the name of me, his constant Magian. Yet ah! from any other that it came, Lest fated to my fate you be, as to my name. When at the first those tidings did they bring, My heart turned troubled at the ominous thing: Though well may such a title him endower, For whom a poet's prayer implores a poet's power. The ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... the Egyptian OSIRIS, and PHANES, God and Principle of Light; from which, broken by the Sacred Bull of the Japanese, the world emerged; and which the Greeks placed at the feet of BACCHUS TAURI-CORNUS; the Magian Egg of ORMUZD, from which came the Amshaspands and Devs; was divided into two halves, and equally apportioned between the Good and Evil Constellations and Angels. Those of Spring, as for example Aries and Taurus, Auriga and Capella, were the beneficent ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... waters, till, one day, as they sat, there came a ship and moored to the side of the island, to fill up with water, whereupon they[FN63] looked at each other and spoke. The master of the ship was a Magian and all that was therein, both men and goods, belonged to him, for that he was a merchant and went round about the world. Now covetise deluded the old man, the owner of the island, and he went up [into the ship] and gave the Magian ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... Of kingdoms that fall, which are dreams not things, And the Kingdom built by the King of kings. Of Him he spake who reigns from the Cross; Of the death which is life, and the life which is loss; How all things were made by the Infant Lord, And the small hand the Magian kings adored. His voice sounded on like a throbbing flood That swells all night from some far-off wood, And when it ended—that wondrous strain - Invisible myriads ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... heedful not to kiss my hand. On the contrary, begone with all speed. For, methinks, you are winsome of face, albeit black as the Magian King that bore the frankincense and myrrh; and it is not becoming I should look on you longer, seeing how danger is forever dogging the lonely man's steps. Wherefore suffer me now to leave you, commending you to God's care. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... and reserves.— The dream's untuned. Ah! vanished chords thereof! Ah! keen divisions of the jangled nerves That strung so long the gracious lutes of love!— Hurry to sell old magian Lamps for new, Though beauty's moonlike domes dissolve and pass: If all things change, ye would be changing too, Crazed hearts that know not your desire, alas! Still, through these wintry treasons that forswear ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... in its eldest cell The Human Heart—lies mute the Oracle, Save where the low and mystic whispers thrill Some listening spirit more divinely still. There, in the chambers of the inmost heart, There, must the Sage explore the Magian's art; There, seek the long-lost Nature's steps to track, Till, found once more, she gives him Wisdom back! Hast thou—(O Blest, if so, whate'er betide!)— Still kept the Guardian Angel by thy side? Can thy Heart's guileless ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty. The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are voluptuous, caressing, and at times perversely ingenuous. What is there religious in those young Magian kings, handsome as women; in that Saint Sebastian, brilliant with youth, who seems merely ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... translation of it, and also of Anquetil's historical dissertations. Then, in a series of dissertations of his own, he vindicated the authenticity of the Zend books. Anquetil had already tried to show, in a memoir on Plutarch, that the data of the "Avesta" fully agree with the account of the Magian religion given in the treatise on "Isis and Osiris." Kleuker enlarged the circle of comparison to the whole ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... windowless world without ray, Only darkening jets on a river of slime, Where harsh over music as woodland jay, A voice chants, Woe to the weak! And along an insatiate feast, Women and men are one In the cup transforming to beast. Magian worship they paid to their sun, Lord of the Purse! Behold him climb. Stalked ever such figure of fun For monarch in great-grin pantomime? See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend; The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat, From ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sculptured from great blocks of marble. The one horn in the forehead seems to Heeren to indicate the Unicorn; the mighty limbs, whose muscles are carved with the precision of the Grecian chisel, induced Sir Robert Porter to believe that they represented the sacred bulls of the Magian religion; while the solemn, half-human repose of the features suggests some symbolic and supernatural meaning. Passing these sentinels, who have kept their solitary watch for centuries, you ascend by other flights of steps to the top of the terrace. There stand, lonely ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... haggled for spices, silks and furs, so they haggled for dignity and honour. And there were wise and learned men from among all peoples; they made speeches, and talked in the public places in praise of their native prophets and gods. The Hindoo praised his Brahma, the Magian shouted about sacred fire, the Semite spoke zealously for his Jehovah, the Egyptian sang the praises of his Osiris, the Greek extolled his Zeus, the Roman called on his Jupiter, and the German spoke in hoarse tones of his ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... who falls under the influence of a Magian, who professes to be an alchemist, and who at length kidnaps him. Having used him with great cruelty the Magian takes him fifteen days' journey on dromedaries into the desert to a high mountain, at the foot whereof the old rascal sews him up in a skin, together with a knife and a small ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... mean time greatly degenerated in their religious faith and observances. Magian rites became mingled with the purer religion of Zoroaster, and even the worship of Venus was not uncommon. Under Cyrus and Darius there was nothing peculiarly offensive to the Jews in the theism of Ormuzd, which was the old religion of the Persians; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... germ—the butterflies of next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. The earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead. Near by were the tents of the gipsies—an Eastern race, whose forefathers perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter—under the power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction—lay bud and germ in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and Summer. Beneath ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the power of God. For when that gate was, in man's judgment, most tightly locked, the Lord opened it. For naught is impossible to Him. Non erit impossibile apud Deum omne verbum. [81] He who brought the Magian kings to the feet of One newly-born, by following a star, that same One brings the other nations to His bosom, when He wills, and opens the door to them so that they may enter into the bosom of His Church. The religious had the greatest hope of seeing the doors of Japon opened ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... the Magian, tis not so; I draw my wine for one and all, A cup for this, a score for that, een as his measures ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... writers say were translated into nearly a dozen different languages. One of these versions was perhaps Greek, for it is generally acknowledged that in the fourth century B.C. the philosopher Theopompus spent much time in giving in his own tongue the contents of the sacred Magian books. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... her head to the latter. "You remind me, good master—if I may say it without offence-you remind me of the priests in Persia who climb their temples at the decline of day to send prayers after the departing sun. Is there anything in the worship you do not know, let me call my father. He is Magian-bred." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Zarathustra-Zoroaster to walk like Bulukiya over the Dalati or Caspian Sea. [FN249] Amongst the sights shown to Bulukiya, as he traverses the Seven Oceans, is a battle royal between the believing and the unbelieving Jinns, true Magian dualism, the eternal duello of the Two Roots or antagonistic Principles, Good and Evil, Hormuzd and Ahriman, which Milton has debased into a common-place modern combat fought also with cannon. Sakhr the Jinni is Eshem chief of the Divs, and Kaf, the encircling mountain, is a later edition ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton |
