feeling of his dignity. But, on the contrary, man has here complete worthlessness; for man does not possess dignity through what he is as immediate will, but only in virtue of having knowledge of something which exists in-and-for-itself, and of something substantial, and only because he subjects his natural will to this, and brings it into accordance with it. Only by the annulling of natural unruliness, and through the knowledge that a Universal that exists in-and-for-itself is the True, does he acquire a dignity, and then only does life itself too become worth something.
(c.) Worship or Cultus in the Religion of Magic.
In the sphere of magic, where the spiritual element is known as existing in the particular self-consciousness only, there can be no question of worship as free reverence for a spiritual being, for what has an absolute objective existence of its own. Here this relation is rather the exercise of lordship over nature, the rule of some few self-conscious beings over the rest—the sway of the magician over those who do not know. The condition of this lordship is sensuous stupor, in which the particular will is forgotten, extinguished, and the abstract sensuous consciousness is intensified to the utmost degree. The means used for producing this stupor are dancing, music, shouting, gorging, even sexual intercourse; and it is these which at a higher level become cultus.
The way out of this first form of religion is that Spirit gets to be purified from externality, from sensuous immediacy, and attains to the idea of Spirit as Spirit in ordinary conception and in thought.
The important element in the advance is just the objectifying of Spirit—that is to say, the fact that Spirit becomes purely objective, and comes to have the signification of Universal Spirit.
