The Magian Cavern

For the Magian world, the idea of space was naturally considered different from the Faustian or Apollinian. One thrusts outwards, space for the Faustian is infinite and God makes himself apparent all around us, the other is a sum of Euclidian bodies, and man stood before a plurality of gods as one body to another. The Magian idea of space, though we may not have a word that best defines it in any of the Western tongues, can be allegorized as a great world-cavern.

Form and Matter for the Greeks and Force and Mass in the West show a microcosmic-macrocosmic tension between the small and the great. Equally, such a dualism within the Magian worldview is that of light and dark, the cavern idea showing us how light pours in from above and struggles against the dark below. These ideas associate themselves with the concepts of Good and Evil, Heaven and Earth and God and the Devil interchangeably.

With many different religions exemplifying this in ways unique to their own metaphysic, we have innumerable different binaries of this order reflecting the concepts of spirit and soul. The Hebrew Ruach and Nephesh, the Persian Abu and Urvan, the Mandaean Monuhmed and Gyan and the Pneuma and Psyche of the Greek Bible reflect a divine element that descends from up high and is channelled within the lower souls of man.

“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.”

Souls are plural, but in participating in the up high they channel a singular spirit as a Pneumatic “We”, hence the idea of consensus as the staple of religious national identity, and is counter to our more Western conception of an “I” drawing its own conclusions about the infinite. Magian man would look at enlightenment debates like empiricism versus rationalism with contempt for the ego attempting to assert himself and his knowledge instead of deferring to a perfect, ego-quelling God.

This fact draws us to Spengler’s conclusion on the nature of Godhood to the Magian world: if God is a plurality of bodies one finds themselves among in the Classical, and God is infinite and all around us from the Faustian perspective, this Cavern God is indefinite in nature. Fundamentally it is unknowable and no man can say why the higher realm, spreading and tangling and engaging with the dark, may pour out wrath or grace, send earthquakes or good harvests upon the earth, or bless or curse nations with prophets or barbarians. In the sack of Baghdad, Hulegu Khan held a banquet in mockery of the ruined Caliph. In refusing to eat the food set before him, Hulegu asked the Caliph why he keeps the food before him instead of giving it to his soldiers. The Caliph states that it is the will of God, and Hulegu retorts that what will befall him (being trampled by horses) is also the will of God. This small story displays the limits of such a worldview, notably nearing the end of its lifespan, but also reveals the conviction in such a truth by its most archetypical participants.

More on point, if God is unknowable, where do all the religious dictates come from? The need for a divine mediator becomes apparent to rectify how an unmoving, unperceived perfection can reach down and dirty itself in the dark and so each and every Magian faith is founded upon the revelations brought forth by such a messenger. The Trinity is the clearest example for us in the West:

“The Logos-Idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light-sensation 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 relationship 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.”

Mazdaism, Judaism, Chaldeanism and Islam, though they may have disputed the Christian Trinity, all recognise in some form this separation of the perfect God, his word, be it spoken by another person within God or by a mere messenger, and Spengler notes that even in Islam, which makes no rumour of its defence as true monotheism, there still penetrated an idea of “Allah as the Word of God (kalimah), the Holy Spirit (Ruh), and the “light of Mohammad.””

In conclusion, the Magian worldview can be unified in the prime symbol of the Cavern, which symbolises the divine tension between the light from outside the cave penetrating into the dark within. For us souls within, the realm of the up high presents itself as a unifying consensus within the Will of an indefinite God, whose word is brought to us by a messenger, Moses, Zarathustra, Christ, Paul, Mohammad, be they a servant of God, or God in flesh.