Magian Time

For Magian mankind, understanding of time is also cave-like. The battle between light and dark effects every concept and state of existence, for example, death is but a victory over life, and as such time for the Magian waking consciousness is perceived also as the midway between two polar ends fighting for control. Creation is but a mid-point between Genesis 1 and Revelation 22, dawn and dusk, beginning and end. More so, as the Persian-Zoroastrian and Chaldean-Jewish apocalyptic attests, between these two points may lie sub-epochs. These may span millennia, but the standard set here is that there comes an allotted time for everything within the span of creation.

“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 smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable.”

Since the Chaldeans there has been an emphasis on the study of the movement of the stars for the purpose of tracing these epochs and eras. The pseudomorphosis would see this idea bleed into the stoicism practised by the ever-conflicted Tacitus who, first enshrining the city cults, then in his city intellect denouncing his own gods’ influence as superstition, would turn to the planets as the sources of the fates of men.

This knowledge paints a context for the peculiar piety of Magian, and especially Islamic, societies. Before the sunlight afforded to this or that person, the development of the world from beginning to end demands an affirming ethic, and in relation to God an attitude to piety. This piety takes the form of resignation in the individual to the divine will that permeates him as part of the Pneumatic “we” whom God’s will permeates. Islam directly calls upon this ethic in its very name as the Arab word for submission, but the idea of submission is not exclusive to Islam alone but was merely pointed towards for its inner significance when all those who came before it never picked up on the idea itself.

“…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… ...if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascall 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”.”

To speak of the will, the idea of the waking-consciousness being a force with agency in the Magian period is misguided, the battle of light and dark was entirely a theatre projected upon the consciousness by the godhead, which was considered the sole cause of everything. Cause and effect as we know it did not exist and “natural law” was simply the workings of an “Autocratic” prime mover.

The last point to note is the tension between Augustine’s idea of Grace versus the more Western concept of contrition. The former finds itself amidst the assertion of inherent sin, and Augustine declares that without God’s grace then there is no path to heaven. From grace comes empowerment and from the higher, heavenly realm of light it radiates from God and enters into man, repeating the motif of the cavern idea. Such an idea risked unravelling the Faustian worldview, which before its preculture argued from before birth in the form of Pelagianism for an emphasis on free will, but the arrival of Duns Scotus and William of Occam brought a different perspective to iron out this threat to the Faustian spirit.

“Magian waking-being is the theatre of a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic waking consciousness itself, a context of the two forces of the Ego – namely, will and reason, and so imperceptibly the question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have been incapable of understanding – are willing and thinking free forces, or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that the individual ego has to wage this war and not to suffer it.”

To surmise this post, the magian understanding of time is as epochs within epochs, this is because the cavern idea of the battle between light and dark puts mankind in the middle of that struggle on every front, from the lives of individuals such as the messiah to the spans of the great multi-millennia epochs of Zoroastrianism. This idea is most commonly identified with astrology thanks to the chaldeans. Magian mankind also possess a culturally unique piety ofwhich the world “islam” (lower-case) encapsulates as man submits to the will of God and his plan for the world between its creation and destruction. God’s influence over reality is not one of causes and effects, rather God’s light, in tension with the dark, is reality itself as perceived by us, and this leaves a fundamental lack of agency in the Magian path to God. For the Faustian, God, goodness, enlightenment, are ideals to be attained by the will, but for the Magian religions, and to be clear there are always disagreements between this or that individual on particulars, yet the motif remains the same, God’s grace plays a far heavier part in deciding the elect, the chosen and the saved.