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.[1] 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[2] "formed of white pearls" and walled about by veilings. But the peacock is the Envoy of God and the prime soul[3] 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.[4] The Jezidi[5]
- ↑ M. Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt der Volkes im heutigen Islam (1917), pp. 381, et seq. By the Shiites the Logos-idea was transferred to Ali.
- ↑ Wolff, Muhammedanische Eschatologie, 3, 2, et seq.
- ↑ Mandæan Book of John, Ch. LXXV.
- ↑ Usener, Vortr. u. Aufs., p. 217.
- ↑ The "devil-worshippers" in Armenia; M. Horten in Der neue Orient (March 1918). The name arose from the fact that they did not recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil,
