eyes saw the end of the world at hand — it is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any one particular religion.[1] Their colouring is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they have absorbed all that was circulating in men's minds. Whereas the canonical books are national, the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal sense of the word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its content is fluid — to-day it reads thus and to-morrow otherwise. But this does not mean that it is a "poetry" — it is not.[2] These creations resemble the terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral-porches in France, which also are not "art," but fear turned into stone. Everyone knows those angels and devils, the ascent to heaven and descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam, the Envoy of God, the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal city, and the last judgment.[3] In the alien cities and the high positions of strict Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines might be tangibly defined and argued about, but below in the mass of the people there was practically no specific religion, but a general Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day "He" of whom all these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing tension, and in the very years around Jesus's birth-year, there arose, besides endless communities and sects, another redemption-religion, the Mandæan, as to which we know
- ↑ For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, pp. 177, et seq.); the "Mithras Liturgy" (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Pœmander (ed. Reitzenstein), the Psalms of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will be found in the articles "Ophites," "Mithras," "Hermes Trismegistus," "Apocalyptic Literature," "Apocryphal Literature," "Gnosticism," in the Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ Any more than Dostoyevski's "Dream of a Ridiculous Person" is so.
- ↑ Our definitive ideas of this early Magian vision-world we owe to the manuscripts of Turfan, which have reached Berlin since 1903. It was these which at last freed our knowledge and, above all, our criteria from the deformations due to the preponderance of Western-Hellenistic material — a preponderance that had been augmented by Egyptian papyrus finds — and radically transformed all our existing views. Now at last the pure, almost unknown, East is seen operative in all the apocalypses, hymns, liturgies, and books of edification of the Persians, Mandæans, Manichæans, and countless other sects; and primitive Christianity for the first time really takes its place in the movement to which it owes its spiritual origins (see H. Lüders, Sitzungen der Berliner Akademie, 1914, and R. Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium (1921).
