The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like,[397] though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian “space.” For “space” has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The world-as-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world-feeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean _cavern-astronomy_, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.

The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man’s sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universally dominates the waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that “Semitic” primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man.

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew _Ruach_ and _nephesh_, Persian _ahu_ and _urvan_, Mandæan _monuhmed_ and _gyan_, Greek _pneuma_ and _psyche_) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture--Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandæans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. _Ruach_ means originally “wind” and _nephesh_ “breath.”[398] The _nephesh_ is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the “upward.” The _ruach_ belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment,[399]) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out.[400] From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the _ruach_. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the “elect,” a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (1 Cor. xv) the meaning of the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and darkness.[401] For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.[402] In the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he appears as _Nus_ or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed to _Physis_.[403] Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is, western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan[404] with Persian-Eastern bases of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form (though quite independently of him) in Islam.

But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and ever the same. The man _possesses_ a soul, but he only _participates_ in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them--Hellenism and Buddhism--distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its entirety.

Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one _soma_ among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a _part of a pneumatic “We”_ that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the _individual_ judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern-world--the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions. While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another; whereas the Faustian willing “I” in its wide world feels itself confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere; the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable root-feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered, by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world--there emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other Cultures.

The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light-sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its “Word,” is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda’s light-gleaming soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his Holy Spirit (_spenta mainyu_) converses with the Evil Spirit (_angra mainyu_, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu, which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramæan Apocalyptic remained permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani, it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent, _living_ Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of Christ.[405] This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God (_kalimah_), the Holy Spirit (_ruh_), and the “light of Mohammed.”

For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from the world-creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock[406] “formed of white pearls” and walled about by veilings. But the peacock is the Envoy of God and the prime soul[407] as early as the Mandæans, and it is the emblem of immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The light-diffusing pearl that illumines the dark house of the body is the Spirit entered into man, and thought of as substance, for the Mandæans as in the Acts of Thomas.[408] The Jezidi[409] reverence the Logos as peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.

Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. _The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling._[410] Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas. Another is the tale of the “treasure-cave” in which, deep under the hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the bones of Adam.[411] Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is--a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety--if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus’s world-image. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis--of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much.