With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future to write a history of the _Magian group of religions_. It forms an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. A mutual give-and-take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripening, transformation--overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections--fill these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon the others being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures change; in the depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all the languages of this world of religions it is always itself that it brings to expression.

In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived. There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews, and Chaldeans. An image of creation of the same kind that later was to be the preface of the Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with that an orientation, a direction, a goal of desire, was set. Something was descried in the far future, indefinitely and darkly still, but with a profound certainty that it would come. From that time on men lived with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.

The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth’s destiny and man’s were one, burst forth everywhere--we cannot say what land or people it was that created them--mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents itself, complete at one stroke. Satan’s temptation of the Saviour[440] is told as a tale. But simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear before this certainty of an implacable--and imminent--limit of all happening, before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the “hour,” directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and a new import to the word “Destiny.” Man’s attitude before the Deity suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian) Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia. It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings _about_ the God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it stirred the Jewry of Maccabæan time--most of the psalms were written then--and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay between the Classical and the Indian worlds.

The third upheaval came in the time of Cæsar and brought to birth the great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and once only, in its young morning.

Now arose in the Persian, the Mandæan, the Jewish, the Christian, circles of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as well--just as in the Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages of Chivalry--the Grand Myth. In this Arabian Culture religious and national heroism are no more distinctly separable than nation, church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings, angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all nature is a battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing, became _the veritable epic of the Christian nation_, and by its side there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended romances (Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century sprang up everywhere from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,[441] and the insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the Late-Classical cult-legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras, Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).

With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems. Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis--in the very broadest sense, the great Contemplation--the author of the John Gospel, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early Fathers, up to Irenæus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St. Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under Ardeshir (226-241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high-priest Tanvasar above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate from the peasant’s piety of the countryside, which still lingered in the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian, Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.

Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It had been decided--the most important religious result of the second century--that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of theology. A _modus vivendi_ with historical actuality had been reached, the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of mature Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that it sets itself to establish.

Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and confession (_patet_). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the _new_ Avesta; under Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine, law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was--most significantly--preserved complete.

A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological creations of all times--for which in 276 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity--a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[442] He conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians was--independently of the current languages--Pehlevi.

In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek[443]) a theology that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the Aramæan-Chaldean sun-religion and the Aramæan-Persian Mithras cult into one system, whose first great “Father” was Iamblichus (_c._ 300)--the contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in 295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually, at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true “Father”) received in dreams elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the _Timæus_ and the Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary for the believers of the Neopythagorean community, which it needs a keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity--and the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four divine elements.

Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the “Synagogue”) with Aramaic as its written language. Against these great and firm foundations Jewish-Christians (such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandæans, and likewise Chaldeans (unless we regard Manichæism as a reconstruction of that religion) were unable to hold their own. Breaking down into numberless sects, they either faded out in the shadow of the great Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the last Marcionites and Montanists were absorbed into Manichæism. By about 300, outside the Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichæan Churches no important Magian religions remained in being.