If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could be no history of truths. If there were one single eternally right religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. But, however highly developed the microcosmic side of an individual’s life may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over the developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, ever betraying the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates and forms all apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a cast of Time’s net over Space.

Not that “eternal truths” do not exist. Every man possesses them--plenty of them--to the extent that he exists and exercises the understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable fixtures--ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premisses and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition can become displaced, he believes. But in reality it is just _one_ surge of life that is lifting his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains integral, but _as_ a unit, a whole, _a fact_, it has a history. Absolute and relative are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of a succession of generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former Time. The systematic thinker stays in the causal order of a moment; only the physiognomist who reviews the sequence of positions realizes the constant alteration of that which “is” true.

_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ holds good for the eternal truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of history, and watch them move on as elements in the world-picture of the generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of his existence, the _one_ religion is eternal and true which Destiny, through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths; in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness.

_A morphology of religious history_, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his world-understanding--illusory even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods--but actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first age,[474] the colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal, who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the dæmonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence--for from this elementary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can be dæmonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only so long as he is frightened or so long _as he uses them_--there are quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one believes in its _continued_ existence. Love presupposes the thought of a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal, exists. Primitive man’s chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such a world-picture does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a _world of organic religions_, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding, and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own.

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the “pre-” periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries’ duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[475] They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse. Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he was wolf (Lycæus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and of the Furies even in Æschylus;[476] and the sacred snake kept on the Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she-bear, but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called “_arktoi_” (bears).[477] Dionysus--now a bull, now a stag--and Pan retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian corporal-soul, _bai_) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that completely fill up the Early Classical nature-picture.[478]

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are _ostensibly_ the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion--namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these “converted” minds? Leaving out of account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed from a saint’s tombstone in these words: “O divine purgative, superior to all doctors’ recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and washes away all stains from our conscience!” For him the death of Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he felt deep down as an athletic _tour de force_ that stamped the Messiah as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.[479]

In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of 1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins--they were affronts to the dæmons. The “Synod of Antichrist,” of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus” instead of “Issus”--whereby, for the strict believer, the power of this magic over the dæmons would be lost.[480] But this effect of fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr-sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves _en masse_ into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their “Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their ghastly mutilation-precepts--manifestations, one and all, of something without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are incomprehensible[481]--how is it that in comparison the Frankish period seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians possess religious genius--and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?