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[1] 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 Maccabean 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 Cxsar 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
- ↑ Vendidad 19, 1; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted.
