Magian Truth
Magian cultures derive “truth” from two contexts: that is, the “consensus” and the word of God.
Consensus relies on the understanding that the ego is non-existent, and what resides within them is a collective pneuma shared among the elect, pneuma being the truth. This makes understanding the truth a collective endeavour that is shared among the entirety of the faithful. The mystic community of Islam extends themselves from the here into the beyond, and contributes to a singular unity of Muslims both alive and since passed. Reciprocally, the collective helps the individual, and the individual, by his merit, contributes to the collective.
This was what was touched upon by the Christians and Pagans of the pseudomorphosis when using terms like Polis and Civitas, with old language, Augustine’s idea of the Civitas Dei conjured a notion that was neither a Classical city nor a Faustian church. The idea of a pope in a Magian setting, whose individual Will could resolve dogmatic disputes, would have been bizarre in such a setting. One might see consensus like a spirit of a people, united by common beliefs, that can, like God, for God is the implication of the divine pneuma in the elect, inspire and silently guide individuals that require help. And so when one contemplates, he calls upon all his peers and ancestors and also God in that pursuit.
This is important because it extends to the political as well, and localities and fiefs and empires were simply limited units of a singular whole united within God. A separation of church and state, like in the West, that constantly vies against each other in tension forever, is dismissed altogether in Magian societies.
“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”
“The state, church and nation formed a spiritual unity”
This lends context to why there is a unity of church and state, because the attitude to politics and religion was that it was derived from the same source anyway, that being a consensus of the followers of the true God, politics thus occurred within religion on behalf of the interests of religion on Earth, and without the will of the Ego, such a manifestation was the Will of God and not power-interested individuals.
The clearer path to Truth would be the Word of God itself as made accessible through the holy book. Every Magian faith constituted a God that made his intentions clear through some form of scripture, either divinely inspired or divinely published.
From Cyrus the idea of a holy book being directly sourced from God became increasingly prevalent, whether it was Moses receiving the Torah volume by volume from God, the Deuteronomic codes being “found in the temple” meaning it was dispensed as wisdom of the Father. After 90BC it was set in stone that for the old testament books to be canon they had to be divinely inspired at minimum and were considered as such, and thus motif extended into Neopythagorean literature and then the Koran as its most maximally pure example.
Within the idea of the divinely inspired, or authored, holy book, there comes the problem once again of the sameness and separateness of God, his spirit and his word. But Spengler pierces this problem with the reminder that “truth”, “goodness”, “light”, “pneuma”, “life”, and “God” all mean the same thing by the cavern dualism motif.
“…For Magian thought, Truth is itself a substance, and lie (error) second substance… 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.””
Holy books are how the indefinite makes itself definite for us to behold, how truth in an ill-defined world may become graspable for the individual. But because the book itself, whether we are to assume any of these holy books are derived from God or not, are from God, sent down from the light, enlighten the elect, IS INFALLIBLY TRUE, they are unalterable and incapable of improvement.
What followed from this is a tradition and a science. Firstly in parallel to the written word comes a secret oral word, that only the elect are made aware of. We regard the Talmud as a series of interpretations and speculations on the Jewish faith, but even beyond this extensive collection lie even lesser-known secrets. And it is stated in the Talmud that “God foresaw that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘we too are sons of God.’ Then will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.” This was equally practised by the early Christians, hence the varying quantities of information on subjects like the resurrection between the Gospels. The initiate knew because he was brought into an oral tradition, but the outsider, the nonbeliever, the non-elect, was guarded against.
What these allowed followers of the religion to do was override the potential problems of the text with an interpretation that resolved any discrepancy between the eternal book and the momentary zeitgeist. Unsurprisingly, Gothic Christianity, having no secrets, immediately distrusted the Talmud and the Jews, knowing that as extensive as their literature was, it was but a foreground.
Secondly, an alternative interpretation of the infallible literature would be the commentary, which allowed for the same premise of adapting the book to a new age and more importantly opening up the word of God to progressive contribution. The fathers compiled commentaries on the bible and the Midrash on the Jewish Canon, the Mishnah is a commentary upon the Torah, the Talmud and Hadiths compile their own interpretations as well in extensive collections, and the longer lasting the commentary was, the more likely it became as concrete as the word of God itself, to be studied and reinterpreted and commented upon. This formed a science of interpretation and chains of work that cited previous works and individuals.
When the word of God becomes flesh, either as the Son or the prophets or in the holy literature that assumes the bulk of mankind’s witnessing of it, Truth, regarded as substance, the same as light and God, permeates man’s intellect and becomes the object of inquiry. If God is absolute and perfect, then so are the words divinely inspired by him in the canon. Unable to be objected to, the science of the book revolves around interpretation, commentary and parsing by secret traditions. For the elect of a given faith, one does not rely on a singular ego for interpretation and the resolving of disputes, for it is the pneuma within all of the elect that so happened to bestow knowledge as it pleased to this or that person. In other words, the accomplishments of one Muslim or Christian or Jew, reflects the merit of the entire community of Muslims or Christians or Jews as they all carry the source of truth within them. That is what it means to acquire knowledge within the Magian world