Note 353 — Chapter VII · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

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).