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
