PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (B) THE MAGIAN SOUL

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 233-261

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.233-234

The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like, though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian "space." For "space" has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The worldas-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the worldfeeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean cavern-astronomy, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space. The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man's sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universa lly dominates the waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that "Semitic" primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man. But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandaean monuhmed and gyan, Greek pneuma and psyche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandaeans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally "wind" and nephesh "breath." The nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the "upward." The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment, ) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out. 3 From Isaiah xi, x, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the "elect," a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet).

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.234-235

But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.235

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.236

The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian lightsensation 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.237

Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the lightsensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling. Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon's Seal, the Philosophers ' Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus's teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. [...] If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus's worldimage. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.238

The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning and an End of "This Day," which is irrevocably ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that everything has "a" time, from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to the smal lest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things. The Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man the form, the " How?" of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is "When?" The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.239

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as "the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time." The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man acts of God of mighty magic and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. [...] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day the view over a given time. "The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts worldbeginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.240

But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling of this sort of Time and the view of this sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally Jesus 's normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something perfectly different, while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego that Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine Infinite there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes "Islam." [...] From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies
all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.243

The Islamic community, like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the whole of the worldcavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions logical, necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.244

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." This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.248

With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future to write a history of the Magian group of religions. It forms an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.249-250

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. [...] 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 third upheaval came in the time of Caesar 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. [...] With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.259

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existenc e in this World's Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.260

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World's Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example.