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A not unnatural theory of the Origin of Death is illustrated by a myth from Pentecost Island and a Red Indian myth. In the legends of very many races we find the attempt to account for the Origin of Death and Evil by a simple dualistic myth. There were two brothers who made things; one made things well, the other made them ill.
We know that the life of a soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realise the infinite. It is death which is monistic, it has no life in it. But life is dualistic; it has an appearance as well as truth; and death is that appearance, that maya, which is an inseparable companion to life.
This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a sincere account of experience.
So long as man remains subject to the dualistic delusions of nature, the Janus-faced MAYA is his goddess; he cannot know the one true God. The world illusion, MAYA, is individually called AVIDYA, literally, "not-knowledge," ignorance, delusion.
It is the evolution of happiness that forms the kernel of the ethical problem, not the evolution of pain. The earlier form of the Christian apologetic took the form of a dualistic theory of the world. There were two powers, God and the devil, and between them they shared the responsibility for all good and evil. So far, good.
The connection between the witchcraft delusion and the attitude toward all women has already been implied. The dualistic teaching of the early church fathers, with its severance of matter and spirit and its insistence on the ascetic ideal of life, had focussed on sexuality as the outstanding manifestation of fleshly desires. The contact of the sexes came to be looked upon as the supreme sin.
Thus, according to one-sided Materialism, the matter is antecedent to the living force; according to the equally one-sided view of the Spiritist, it is the reverse. Both views are Dualistic, and, in my opinion, both are false. For us the antithesis disappears in the Monistic philosophy, which knows neither matter without force nor force without matter.
In the first Fargard, or chapter, of the Vendidad the historical chapter, in which are traced the only movements of the Iranic peoples, and which from the geographical point whereat it stops must belong to a time when the Arians had not yet reached Media Magna -the Dualistic belief clearly shows itself.
There is the classic monotheism of the prophets, and the more polytheistic tendencies of later times, a contrast parallel to the sanity of classic Greece as compared with the flabbiness of Hellenistic times. In the New Testament, itself, there are many evidences of the acceptance of a dualistic view of the world. Satan is the Prince of this World.
Nor does the duality of nature and thought, to which I have alluded, in any wise contradict this. In pure thought we must understand the dichotomic process to be the distinction of a positive by a privative, both logical elements of the same thought, as I have elsewhere shown. The opposites or contraries referred to as giving rise to the dualistic conceptions of divinity are thus readily harmonized with the conception of logical unity. This was recognized by the Hindoo sage who composed the Bhagavad Git
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