religion.[1] In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven — each of which, even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John Gospel — "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" — had long before come to perfectly natural expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta Mainyu,[2] and Vohu Mano,[3] and in corresponding Jewish and Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,[4] and lie (or error) second substance — again the same dualism that opposes light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like "I am the truth and the life" and "My word is the truth," sayings to be understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so, too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." According to the Yasna the Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God — or the Godhead as Word — .enters into a man in order to assume through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. "Koran" means "reading." Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able to decipher "in the name of the Lord."[5] This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception,[6] but
- ↑ It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the Germanic West the Bible stands in a quite other relationship to the faith — namely, in that of a source in the strictly historical sense, irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual criticism or not. The relation of Chinese thought to the canonical books is similar.
- ↑ The Holy Spirit, different from Ahuramazda and yet one with him, opposed to the Evil (Angra Mainyu).
- ↑ Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht 13, 31. Ahuramazda's shining soul is the Word.
- ↑ Aletheia (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John Gospel, and drug (= lie) is used for Ahriman in Persian cosmology. Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the drug.
- ↑ Sura 96; cf. 80, 11 and 85, 21, where in connexion with another vision it is said: "This is a noble Koran on a treasured tablet." The best commentary on all this is Eduard Meyer's (Geschichte der Mormonen, pp. 70, et seq.).
- ↑ Classical man receives, in states of extreme bodily excitation, the power of unconsciously predicting future events. But these visions are completely unliterary. The Classical Sibylline books (which have no connexion with the later Christian works bearing that name) are meant to be nothing more than a collection of oracles.
