Deus Armenicus 🦅

«The peoples of the Orient give the inhabitants of Armenia (Arminyah) the name Armen and Armeny. The Romans and Greeks called this same people Parthians. According to the Arab and Persian geographers, the land is divided into Upper and Lower Armenia. The first, and the northernmost, lies between the lands of Allen and Khozar; it is known as Shirwan. Lower Armenia constitutes the southernmost region. People praise their upright character, extol their intelligence, their skill in commercial enterprise, and their tireless diligence and their uninterrupted industriousness, a fund of [natural/innate] goodness that enables that facilitates their interaction with strangers and which stifles all quarrelling amongst them, provided that self-interest does not come into play. The faults attributed to them are those common to almost all nations: a fondness for a good meal, wine, and, above all, money. Yet, in fairness, it must be acknowledged that there are no people more capable of deep religious sentiment or more steadfast in their adherence to the teachings of Christianity. Indeed, their churches are the most beautifully [adorned/decorated] in the whole of Orient.» - Sitten, Gebräuche und Trachten der Osmanen: Nebst einem Abrisse der osmanischen Geschichte, von A. L. Castellan; Mit Erläuterungen aus morgenländischen Schriften von Herrn Langlès, Aus dem Französischen übersekt, Erster Theil, Leipzig, 1815.

«The oldest memories of the Zend people point to the Armenian Highlands; the Hara Berezaiti, upon which Zarathustra consulted Ahura Mazda, can hardly be any mountain other than Ararat and the ridges surrounding it. "From there," says the Avesta, "Ahura Mazda causes the waters to flow in the swift course of the horse"; there lies 'the exalted, highest sources of the waters." Indeed, the mightiest rivers of western Asia originate there, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Cyrus, the Araxes, and countless smaller watercourses that feed them; and their beds are not capable of containing the infinite quantity of water streaming down from the mountain walls, resulting in the formation of many, in some cases mighty, alpine lakes. And so that no doubt may remain concerning the location of the Hara Berezaiti, the Avesta teaches that all the water of the rivers reunites in a great lake, the Vurukasha, after it has flowed into the hot lake Puitika, in which it is boiled and freed from all impurities: here only the land of Atropatene with its naphtha springs, to the west of the Caspian Sea, can be meant, whose name itself signifies as much as Zend âthrô pâta, protector of the fire. The name of 'the Mountain of God' itself can at least be Armenian, for the Armenian barz-r (where 'r' is a suffix) means "high." It should be added that the Zend religion arose under the influence of the Shemitic spirit. "Zarathustra," says Spiegel (Ausland 1867, p. 347), "is entirely a Semitic prophet. The Avesta is not, as it were, a product of his spirit, but the word of God, which he received from God Himself. The time of his appearance, the places where he can most suitably proclaim his teaching, all this is determined from the beginning by the heavenly council. Even in the external circumstances of his life, for example, in Zarathustra's meeting with God on a mountain, much recalls the Shemitic prophets." "The names of the gods in the religion of Zarathustra are, as in the Shemitic religions, transparent and lead to abstract concepts which express the [meaning/sense] of dominion, purity, fullness, and the like." Many passages of the Avesta read like Psalms. Where else, then, could this religion have arisen but at the southern foot of Ararat, between the upper Tigris and the upper Araxes, where Thogarma, or Armenia, bounded on Arphachsad, the original homeland of the Israelites. Its Armenian origin/Ihr armenischer ursprung. In contrast to these reasons which speak for the Armenian-Medean origin of the Zend religion, the weight of those which point to Bactria as the scene of Zarathustra's activity is not great enough. The surviving tiny remnants of the Avesta belong to a late, very late recension, from the first half of the 3rd c. AD, when the Neo-Persian empire arose. After the same had succumbed to the attacks of the Arabs, a Parsi community took what was still extant of the sacred books to Gujarat, to where they had fled; and there Anquetil du Perron found it around the middle of the previous century. Supposing, however, that we had the original recension in the ruins of the Avesta, which no one thinks, and assuming that the sacred books of the Aranians were first written in the east and in the eastern dialect of Aranian: does it follow from this that the religion itself had its origin there? Did the religion of the Israelites arise in Judah? Is Mount Sinai in Judah because the sacred documents of the Israelites were composed in the kingdom of Judah? Homer's songs arose on the western coast of Asia Minor; but the religion of the Hellenes did not therefore take its origin there, Olympus lies in Europe, on the border between the world of the barbarians and the world of the Hellenes.» - Forschungen Im Gebiete Der Alten Völkerkunde, von Johann Gustav Cuno, Berlin, 1877.

«The following words provide further insight: "The ancients called the Scythians Aramians, while the Persians call the Scythians Chorsarians": from this it follows that, in the Caucasus region, the territories of these Scythians and the Persians bordered one another. However, The name given to the Persians by the people referred to here as Scythians points to the Greater Armenian region of Chorzene, situated between the upper Cyrus and the upper Araxes (Strabo 528) and to the city of Chorsa located within it (Ptolemy V. 13. 12.), now known as Kars; and bordering this region, likewise within Armenia, Strabo (528) names a region Sakasene and Pliny (VI. 29.) refers to the people known as the Sacassani: phonetically, these names correspond closely to the region referred to as Shikashen in the Armenian writings. Thus, it becomes highly probable that, when Pliny’s sources speak of Arameans, Saka and Scythians, they were in fact referring to the Armenians. This probability is elevated to certainty by the Armenian tradition itself. According to this (St. Martin I 281 f.), Hayk, the leader of the Armenians, the son of Thaglath (who is identified with Thogarma, son of Gomer, in the table of nations), fled from the tyranny of King Belus of Assyria to the mountainous region of southern Armenia; there he founded a kingdom, which he left to his son Armenak; whose fifth descendant Aram accomplished such mighty deeds that the peoples of Armenia came to be named after him. We can, therefore, conclude that Armenian and Aramaean are merely different forms of the same [ethnic name/ethnonym]. The Arameans are none other than Homer’s Arimoi, "among whom, in the depths of the earth, Typhon lies, where the ground groans, lashed by the lightning bolts of Zeus." Long before the earthquake of 1840, geologists had deduced the volcanic nature of Mount Ararat from its rock formations and its structure.» - Forschungen Im Gebiete Der Alten Völkerkunde, von Johann Gustav Cuno, Berlin, 1877.

«Incidentally, one should not expect any significant insight into the pre-Slavic language from this source either; this becomes apparent when examining the twenty-five Scythian words that have been handed down. First, one must ask what Hesychius meant by Scythian: under this heading, he mentions the term ἄγλυ, in the meaning of κύκνος; however, this word is actually Armenian, for it can only refer to the Armenian angł, which indeed carries the meaning indicated.» - Forschungen Im Gebiete Der Alten Völkerkunde, von Johann Gustav Cuno, Berlin, 1877.

«Here, it is not a single picture that captivates our attention, not a newly creative poet's hand, freshly drawing from the ancient store of memories of the Germanic folk spirit, whose artistic deed challenges the interpretive power of sight, but rather it is the grandiose picture as a whole that evokes our astonishment. Goethe’s concrete mode of representation undoubtedly had the [meandering/serpentine] course of the Euphrates and Tigris before his eyes whilst he was writing 'The Song of Mohammed'. But into what generalizing ideality has the poet elevated the river of the Orient, chosen by him as the symbol of all great events, without ever once resorting to a generalization or a non-individualized expression! Here, too, one believes one can hear the primordial sounds from the Aryan homeland, genuine echoes of memories of the mighty hymn to the ideality of the purity- and fertility "goddess" Ardvîçûra Anahita [the great stream, the unblemished], symbolizing the Araxes of Armenia. One might compare the following passage from the Ardvîçûra Yasht (v) in the Avesta, according to Geldner’s translation in Kuhn’s 'Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung', vol. XXV, p. 380: "Mighty and audible from afar, it is as great as all the waters that flow upon the earth, it which, with great force, pours from Mount Hukairya [Ararat] into Lake Vourukasha [Araxes]. All the shores of Lake Vourukasha foam, the very centre foams, when it streams in, when it gushes in, the virginal, beneficent Ardvî [Damp], which has a thousand [channels/rivulets] and a thousand [outflows/outlets], and each of these rivulets and each of these outlets is forty days’ journey long for a well-mounted rider. And the outflow of this One Body of Water branches out into all seven parts of the earth, and flows from this One Body of Water steadily in summer and in winter. And she prepares for me the waters, She, the strength of men and of the women the fruit of the womb and milk." How magnificently this hymn, venerated with religious consecration, to the 'goddess' of the Araxes River, sounds to Aranians in their primordial state! Yet how incomparably more glorious, individualized and idealized does the torrent of imagery in Goethe's hymn rings out to meet us at the beginning, and then the fullness of thought at the end, moving along in mighty compounds, the towers' flame-summmits, marble houses, cedar houses, giant shoulders, in the self-aware calm of the verse measure! But how wonderful, that precisely a river springing from Armenia, the primordial homeland of his people, the original seat of the Indo-Europeans, should have come to mind before Goethe's power of imagery!» - Goethes Bildkraft im Lichte der Ethnologischen Sprach- und Mythen-Vergleichung, von Hermann Brunnhofer, Leipzig, 1890.

Thus, with good reason was Ararat deemed as the Throne of God and the Abode of Divinity. Indeed, many cultures adopted its illuminating ambience, sending many of their heroes, be it Gilgamesh, Alexander the Great or even Quranic Moses to seek the Wisdom of God in Ararat and from the Servant of God stewarding Ararat. Thus it was, thus it shall be.

Indeed, we are sailing to the gods, we are sailing to Return to Ararat, to be elevated to the abode of the divinity.