We said that the oldest civilizations were built on a mixture of magic and madness. As a rule, they were temple cities. The center of the city was a temple, and the center of the temple was an idol that broadcast certain messages to society (Abraham, Ibrahim-Khalil, came out of one of these city-temples). The inhabitants of the city, through a set of contemplative methods, i.e., orgies, special dances, drugs, and the like, plunged into a collective trance, into mass schizophrenia, where they really heard some kind of voices emitted by the idol.
Imam Ali (A) describes these practices in a long hadith about the history of the Rass people, quoted in Saduq’s “Uyun Akhbar ar-Reza.” He says, “They had set up celebrations in each town every month of the year. The people of the town would gather around the town’s large pine, and set up a large silk tent that was full of colorful designs around the pine tree. Then they would bring sheep and cows and offer them for sacrifice to that tree. Then they would pile up wood on the animals that they had slaughtered and set them on fire. Once the smoke from the fire filled up the air and blocked off the sky from their view, they would then fall in prostration to the tree. They would cry to please the tree. Satan would also come and shake the tree and yell from the trunk of the tree like a child and say, ‘O my servants! I am pleased with you. Be happy and blessed.’ Then they would lift their heads from their prostration. They drank wine and played music with cymbals. They would spend the whole day and night this way and then leave.”
That is, schizophrenia was the control mechanism of ancient societies, the nerve of their life. And perhaps the manifestations of schizophrenia that we see today are but the pitiful smoldering embers of the great fire of schizophrenia that engulfed ancient societies at the so-called “dawn of mankind.”
If we look at the civilizations of Mesopotamia, China, or Egypt, we will see that they were ruled by a layer of priest-kings who broadcast to the masses the “will of the gods,” that is, the signals they received through hallucinations and other schizophrenic revelations. The Aztecs told the conquering Spaniards the story of the beginning of their civilization: they possessed a statue belonging to a previous civilization, and that statue told them to cross a lake, worship itself, and carry it with them. The Incas also claimed that their gods spoke to them through statues, and the Hindus say the same. Usually, the voices of the idols are described as hissing or gnashing. Sometimes, people just left their cities for no apparent reason. Modern archaeologists found some of these cities. Enemies had not captured the city, nor had it been devastated by disease. People left on their own because their idols said so.
With the gradual complication of social life, separate gods appeared who carried out the hallucinogenic inspiration of the people for each activity and task. For example, the Romans had a special god who escorted children to school. In Hinduism, there are now about a million gods.
Often these ancient societies are described as supposedly based on a total despotism that controls everything and everyone. Hollywood exploits the pyramid-building theme with millions of slaves being whipped by merciless overseers. In reality, there was none of this, nor was there any need for it. Society didn’t need such pervasive police control because it was united by collective magic. The pyramids were built by hired laborers who were well paid, not by mythical armies of slaves. Nobody forced them to this work; on the contrary, they regarded it as an honorable job, as a chance to serve the gods and achieve prosperity in the afterlife.
It was a very hierarchical society, similar to a colony of ants, but subordination was not achieved by violence; it was voluntary.
The transition to the next stage took place in the 2nd millennium BC. More and more people were on the globe, and they were constantly moving and fighting, incited by natural disasters such as the eruption of Etna. The millennium was an uncommonly dark and bloody one. The former idyll of the city-temples, closed in on themselves and communicating with their hallucinations, was over.
Writing was invented at the same time. This broadened people’s horizons and destroyed direct communication with the gods. Information could now be obtained from written sources rather than direct hallucinogenic experience, somehow collectively sustained.
And this is where the written monuments of great style begin to develop, which try somehow to express whole layers of this contemplative experience. More or less complete written discourses called “religion” in the modern sense of the word are formed (Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Platonism). Those who developed and rationalized this were not necessarily great contemplators. Rather a kind of “chroniclers.” The same Plato, for example, did not invent the wheel; he simply combined what the Egyptians or the Greeks themselves had… He put it together in a rational narrative. Zarathustra did the same with the Persians.
And so, here we have two main forms of explanation of the universe, existing outside the tradition of the Prophets: Monism and Dualism. They take into account some true facts but, by absolutizing them, turn them into falsehoods. Monism proceeds from the fact that each part corresponds to another part in the universe. Hence the conclusion is drawn that “all is one.” Dualism, on the contrary, absolutizes the fact that the universe consists of opposites. Such forms of religiosity as Indian, Greek, Far Eastern, and also Sufism are based on Monism. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism are dualistic. Christianity is also a special form of Dualism (we will speak about it in detail in the continuation of this series).
Monism and Dualism are the results of a break from the all-encompassing truth of the Prophets. They grab onto a particular limited aspect of the universe and make it absolute.
If we take a dualistic discourse, we will see that the world is really arranged in such a way that it is divided into opposites. In the Quran, we read, “We have created everything in pairs so that perhaps you may take heed” (51: 49). Imam Reza (A) says, “He (the Creator) contrasted light with darkness, obviousness with obscurity, solidity with fluidity, coldness with heat. He united their enmity and separated their sympathy so that He might point through their separation to the Disconnector and through their connection to the Connector. That is (the meaning of) the Sublime (God’s) words, ‘We have created everything in pairs so that perhaps you may take heed.’”
Therefore, every thing in creation has an opposite. Light corresponds to darkness, truth to falsehood, good to evil, day to night, paradise to hell, intellect to jahl, angels to shaytans, etc. And the wisdom of this is that, as Imam Reza (A) says, the Almighty has put in front of each thing its opposite, in order to thereby point to the Creator of all these things.
But if thinking is fixed on this aspect and notices only the opposites in everything and sees neither their Creator nor their connection, then Gualism and black discourse are born. A certain psychological type of people thinks within the dualistic paradigm, perceiving the world this way. They see the world as a set of some dual discontinuities, not as harmony. This is their psychotype. And so, if they do not have the mirror of truth in front of them, then at some point, all this is framed in a dualistic discourse, like Zarathustra’s one.
So, the truth becomes a lie in pagan thinking divorced from the Prophets. If I say that every thing in creation has its opposite, that will be true. But if I say that the division into opposites is the last degree of comprehension of reality, the same truth will immediately turn into a lie.
And the same is the case with the holistic paradigm, with what is called “Monism.” Monism is a picture of the world that reduces everything to a single beginning, where all things, all opposites, drown. If I see this object, for example, a table, then it is only the result of my ignorance, an illusion, a “veil of Maya.” In reality, the table and all other things are external manifestations of the same divine principle, “like waves on the surface of the ocean.” In the Islamic world, Monism is known under the name of the Sufi heresy “wahdatu l-wujud,” “the Unity of Being.”
In reality, Monism, like Dualism, is based on the false absolutization of only one aspect of being. If I say that the “bottom” corresponds to the “top,” the “microcosm” to “macrocosm,” that creation is one within itself (I emphasize, only creation, not creation and the Creator), that the levels of creation are symbolically reflected in each other, this would be true. But if I say that there is nothing but this unity, this truth immediately becomes a lie, kufr, and shirk.
Suppose one refuses the guidance of the Prophets and Imams and begins to invent his own picture of the world, in which certain reasonable conclusions and observations are combined with hallucinogenic suggestions and schizophrenic visions. In that case, he generates paradigms and models of explaining the world on which the great myths are based. They fix some aspects of reality and supplement it with hallucinations and psycho-delusions.
After all, a lie is always similar to the truth from the outside. The Almighty says, “Have you not considered how Allah presents an example, [making] a good word like a good tree” (14: 24). And He says, “And the example of a bad word is like a bad tree” (14: 26). Here He likened truth and lie to a tree, although these are different trees: one is the tree of light, and the other is an inverted tree of darkness. And He says, “But those who disbelieved – their deeds are like a mirage in a lowland which a thirsty one thinks is water” (24: 39). Truth is water, and a lie is a mirage, that is, the likeness of water, which the thirsty person thinks is water.
The most typical form of Monism is Indian religion. To be more precise, “religions” because India has a huge number of cults and religious-philosophical systems, but all of them are built on a certain common platform, which can be characterized as pronounced Monism. We have already described this paradigm when discussing “manifestationalism” in Part 13 of this book. It focuses on the impersonal Absolute, which manifests from itself all things that are nothing more than a shroud of illusion, waves on the ocean’s surface.
Transferred to man, this means that his individual existence is an unfortunate mistake, and the supreme task is to achieve the annihilation of the self and merge with the original, i.e., the cosmic Absolute. “I = It,” Atman is Brahman. Here, the cosmos itself is the supreme deity – a self-sufficient, unified, and eternal sea, on whose surface the waves, the glare, the entanglements of metamorphoses walk. It knows no beginning, no end, no birth, no death. Hence the doctrine of reincarnation: freeing oneself from the corporeal shell, the various levels of the mental structure pass into other planes of manifestation. Everything flows into everything. There is no creation, no death, no good and evil, no hell and paradise -there is nothing that meets us in the optics of Revelation. There is only a faceless deity generating all of us through the play of its imagination.
The monistic paradigm also included the ancient, Greco-Roman tradition, which dominated the civilized world for some five centuries, beginning with the campaigns of Alexander the Great and ending with the birth and spread of Christianity.
The main and essentially only object of ancient thought is, as already mentioned, the Cosmos – the eternal, unchanging, periodically burning and reviving “nature” of the contemplative tradition. Here also emerged what is called “philosophy,” that is, the technique of the rational elaboration of a monistic worldview. All schools of ancient thought essentially say the same thing and are easily “translated” into each other’s language. One gets the impression that nothing new has been said in 1200 years of its history, and Proclus is engaged in precisely the same thing as Parmenides.
Guenon very well described the paradigm of Monism. Almost all the works of him and his school are devoted to this topic, and it is Monism that he considers “the great primordial tradition.” This is completely wrong, as we have already said, since the primordial and all-embracing tradition of humankind is Monotheism, that is, the school of Prophets and Revelation, while other religious models are deviations from this great axis, which absolutize some particular aspect of the universe. Monism is one such deviation; Dualism is another.
I want to elaborate a bit more on Dualism since it has received far less attention in the literature. And yet it is Dualism that has had a tremendous, defining influence on the formation of the modern world and Western civilization, as we shall see.
What is Dualism? Outwardly, it is the opposite of Monism. If Monism drowns all things in indistinguishable unity, Dualism, on the contrary, interprets the whole world as a field of confrontation between hostile principles – light and darkness, good and evil, white and black gods.
All versions of Monism are very similar to one another due to the very specific nature of this discourse. After all, there is only one supreme beginning, and things are only its manifestation and outward expression. However, Dualism generates a much larger number of variants and plots, depending on how one sees the relationship between the two warring origins, light and darkness:
1 Darkness has penetrated this world, but it has not completely taken over it. Among the ocean of darkness, the “sparks of light” are sprinkled in this world. They are the guarantee of the possibility of our ascension to a higher beginning. Manichaeism was close to this type.
2. Darkness and light confront each other frontally – face to face, as two irreconcilable enemies. In this case, the light beginning can be embodied in a certain nation, ethnic group, type of people, civilization (Zoroastrian Iran). Often this kind of Dualism gives rise to the feeling of a “besieged fortress” – a bastion of Light, around which the sea of Darkness rages, and, accordingly, a militant consciousness (“warriors of Light” against “warriors of Darkness”). Echoes of this worldview can be seen in the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century.
3. This world is evil, but it shines a good light somewhere above it. This kind of Dualism is less dynamic because there is no projection of light on the historical plane. The earthly world is dominated by darkness, created by the “evil demiurge,” and all light is gathered “above” it, in other worlds. The goal is to connect with the good beginning through “knowing,” meditative practices, escape from this evil world.
Ancient Gnosticism was close to this type. Changing this world or acting in it is useless because it is hopelessly evil anyway. The world cannot be transformed: one must escape from it, as from a prison. Any horizontal path is a waste of time: you have to go vertically, upward.
In this version, the dualistic discourse is in touch with Monism, to the point of indistinction. In fact, ancient Gnosticism emerged from a monistic paradigm.
4. All manifested being is evil, there is no light at all: an extreme form of Dualism. Perhaps the only widespread representative of this type is Buddhism. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it declares evil not only this “lower” material world but all of creation in general, including the higher worlds of “light” – everything that exists at all. The peculiarity of Buddhism is that the good beginning has been removed from it – or it flickers dimly somewhere on the horizon, like “nirvana” (but it is hard to call it even a “beginning” – it is rather a freedom from all beginnings). Buddhism is what you get when you subtract the good beginning from Dualism and extend the evil beginning to the entire universe.
The only logical conclusion from this doctrine of radical evil of being is to try to escape from being into non-being, i.e., self-destruction. And since not only matter is evil, but all the other worlds, including the higher ones, then self-destruction is necessary not only on the material level (in that case, salvation would be suicide) but also on all levels in general – the mental, spiritual, etc. The knots of being must be untied on all cosmic echelons. The conclusion of total self-destruction is the only possible consequence of this metaphysics.
So, the dualist ideology divides into many forms within itself. But nevertheless, there is something in common, what I call the “Black Myth.” The Black Myth is treating our earthly reality as something evil and pervasive with darkness. According to the Black Myth, the world is inescapably bad. It deserves nothing but hatred and contempt. Even its creator is not a good God but a black demiurge. This world is a corpse, an ugly monster, separated from the absolute Good. In the future parts, we will see where this understanding leads.
Generally speaking, dualistic religious systems are usually based on a plot of some primordial cosmic catastrophe. We immediately recall here the Christian doctrine of the “Fall,” which speaks of the hopeless sinfulness of human nature (and Christianity itself is also a dualistic cult, but complicated by some specifics, which we will talk about in detail later).
In the Gnostic version, it was “the fall of Sophia.” The good deity here creates worlds as an order of eons, which the Gnostics have a very detailed and, it must be said, a rather tedious enumeration. So the deity creates until it comes to the female eon called “Sophia.” And suddenly, this Sophia begins to burn with passion for her deity, who created her, and by this bad deed falls away from the harmonious cosmic order. As a result of her adventures, Sophia generates another god – a blind demiurge who creates our world.
The Gnostics give him the rather obnoxious name “Jaldabaoth.” And it is interesting that in Gnosticism, the role of this demiurge is assigned to the God of Monotheism, that is, in those days, the God of the Bible and Old Testament. According to the Gnostics, the fact that God created this world doesn’t make Him look good. Accordingly, in some versions of this ideology, a radical reversion of the Bible is carried out: all its positive characters become negative, and all negative ones (such as Satan, Cain, Judas) become positive.
So, our material world was created as an ugly offspring of this “evil demiurge,” Jaldabaoth, including the people who inhabit it. Although to some of them, his mother Sophia, who watched the whole process, gave a certain higher particle of her soul, thanks to which they are still able to escape from the material cage of our world. Paradoxically, it turns out that humans are above the god who created them.
But how does one attain liberation from this world? First of all, through knowledge, “gnosis” (hence the name of the sect). And this implies the rejection of the evil and dark world, up to the conscious violation of all the social and moral norms established by the same Jaldabaoth. Childbirth and the family institution are also seen here as something negative because prolonging the human race means producing new generations for the prison of suffering, into which the evil demiurge has chained people.
This was the general plot of the Gnostic myth. In another dualistic doctrine, Manichaeism, created in the 3rd century by a Persian preacher named Mani, there are initially two equally eternal beginnings – light and darkness. As a result of the cunning schemes of the King of Darkness, he invades the opposite realm and steals the particles of light, which are immediately mixed with the elements of darkness. In fact, this mixing is what our world is all about. This world has no value, it is to be destroyed, and the particles of light contained therein are to be saved and purified.
A war begins between light and darkness, which previously existed as two different and absolutely equal, but at the same time divided beginnings. In order to free the captive particles of light, the good deity sends a number of messengers, who, by various tricks, fight the King of Darkness and his associates. Their main task is to draw the particles of light out of the prison of this world. When this happens, the line between light and darkness will be drawn, and the status quo will be restored.
In Zoroastrianism, which was the oldest developed version of Dualism, we see a similar plot. According to the teachings of Zarathustra, the world was initially divided into two absolutely opposite beginnings – light and darkness, Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd) and Angro-Manyu (Ahriman). When Ormuzd created the good world of light, Ahriman invaded and began to spoil it. He gradually mixed his darkness into this world, especially in its corporeal part, so that the darkness permeates all its elements. And so we are now living in a period of confusion, “Humizishn,” where darkness and light frontally oppose each other. Zoroastrianism casts a dualistic net over all the phenomena of the world around us. To the light and good beginning belong day, fire, Iranians, the upper half of the body, ahurs (good gods), livestock, dogs, grain. The dark and evil beginning includes night, illness, non-Iranians, the lower half of the body, devas (evil gods), corpses, snakes, wolves.
Thus, the entire universe is divided here into dual pairs, mutually exclusive of each other. No reconciliation between them is possible: opposition and separation are the final foundation of reality. Sometime in the future, there will be a final victory of Ahura-Mazda, and the light beginning will be separated from the dark one. This stage is called “Vicharishn,” separation. The evil beginning will not be saved or somehow transformed, but separated from the light one, confined, sealed, and forgotten. Thereby the normal order of things will be restored.
The Jewish Kabbalah is also a dualistic system. The specific feature that distinguishes it from all the above-mentioned teachings is that it grew up on the basis of the original prophetic tradition, reinterpreting it beyond recognition. However, this is a very specific quality of the dualistic discourse – it is able, like a virus, to penetrate into other traditions and corrupt them from within, changing all signs and accents. In general, the interesting point is that, apparently, each great tradition had its own dualistic twin. Hinduism had Buddhism, the Greeks had Orphism and the cult of Dionysus, and Christianity (also a largely dualistic religion) had Gnosticism and the same Manichaeism. In Judaism, it is the Kabbalah.
According to the Kabbalah, first, there was an eternal God, here called “Ein Sof.” When God wanted to create creatures, He sort of cleared a space for them within Himself, removing within Himself, which is called “tzimtzum” (“reduction,” “contraction”). And into this empty space, God sends the rays of His light, which accumulates in some vessels, which should restrain and limit it. But then the Catastrophe occurs – the vessels can not withstand it and burst. This is a full analogy of the dualistic plot of the initial cosmic Catastrophe (invasion of the forces of darkness or the rebellion of the fallen Sophia). The vessels collapse, and their contents spill out into the lower worlds of darkness. Divine sparks are scattered in the darkness. Everything is shifted; everything is out of place.
And since this process is carried out as if “inside God” (for God has given place to creation within Himself), it turns out that God Himself is scattered, incomplete. He must restore Himself. And some stages of this restoration are entrusted to man. And not to just any man, but only to “chosen people.” So it turns out that God literally depends on man. He is incomplete without the “chosen people” and therefore needs them.
So we see here the same plot, where, according to all the laws of the dualistic genre, the catastrophe is followed by a stage of mixing and then restoration. The historical process is a collection of scattered particles of light by the Jews, for which they were providentially dispersed among other nations. When this process is completed, the great Tikkun (restoration) will take place, the parts of God will be reunited within themselves, and perfect harmony will ensue.
The first volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam” can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
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