← catalogue

The Crest-Wave of Evolution

by Kenneth Morris · English · Gutenberg #14587 · 1,353,997 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Crest-Wave of Evolution
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Crest-Wave of Evolution

Author: Kenneth Morris


        
Release date: January 4, 2005 [eBook #14587]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14587

Credits: E-text prepared by M. R. Jaqua


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREST-WAVE OF EVOLUTION ***

THE CREST-WAVE OF EVOLUTION

A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the
Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-1919.*

by

KENNETH MORRIS







CONTENTS

    I.  INTRODUCTION
   II.  HOMER
  III.  GREEKS AND PERSIANS
   IV.  AESCHYLUS AND ATHENS
    V.  SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES
   VI.  SOCRATES AND PLATO
  VII.  THE MAURYAS OF INDIA
 VIII.  THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE
   IX.  THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL
    X.  "SUCH A ONE"
   XI.  CONFUCIUS THE HERO
  XII.  TALES FROM A TAOIST TEACHER
 XIII.  MANG THE PHILOSOPHER, AND BUTTERFLY CHWANG
  XIV.  THE MANVANTARA OPENS
   XV.  SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE
  XVI.  THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME
 XVII.  ROME PARVENUE
XVIII.  AUGUSTUS
  XIX.  AN IMPERIAL SACRIFICE
   XX.  CHINA AND ROME:  THE SEE-SAW
  XXI.  CHINA AND ROME:  THE SEE-SAW (Continued)
 XXII.  EASTWARD HO!
XXIII.  "THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND"
 XXIV.  FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA
  XXV.  TOWARDS THE ISLANDS OF THE SUNSET
 XXVI.  "SACRED IERNE OF THE HIBERNIANS"
XXVII.  THE IRISH ILLUMINATION

------------
*  Serialized in _Theosophical Path_ in 27 Chapters from
March, 1919 through July, 1921.
-----------



I.  INTRODUCTORY

These lectures will not be concerned with history as a record
of wars and political changes; they will have little to tell
of battles, murders, and sudden deaths.  Instead, we shall
try to discover and throw light on the cyclic movements of
the Human Spirit.  Back of all phenomena, or the outward show
of things, there is always a noumenon in the unseen.  Behind
the phenomena of human history, the noumenon is the Human
Spirit, moving in accordance with its own necessities and
cyclic laws.  We may, if we go to it intelligently, gain some
inkling of knowledge as to what those laws are; and I think
that would be, in its way, a real wisdom, and worth getting.
But for the most part historical study seeks knowledge only;
and how it attains its aim, is shown by the falseness of what
passes for history.  In most textbooks you shall find, probably,
a round dozen of lies on as many pages.  And these in themselves
are fruitful seeds of evil; they by no means end with the
telling, but go on producing harvests of wrong life; which
indeed is only the Lie incarnate on the plane of action.  The
Eternal _Right Thing_ is what is called in Sanskrit SAT, the
True; it opposite is the Lie, in one fashion or another, always;
and what we have to do, our mission and _raison d'etre_ as
students of Theosophy, is to put down the Lie at every turn,
and chase it, as far as we may, out of the field of life.

For example, there is the Superior-Race Lie:  I do not know
where it shall not be found.  Races A, B, C, and D go on
preaching it for centuries; each with an eye to its sublime
self.  In all countries, perhaps, history is taught with that
lie for mental background.  Then we wonder that there are wars.
But Theosophy is called onto provide a true mental background
for historical study; and it alone can do so.  It is the
mission of Point Loma, among many other things, to float a
true philosophy of history on to the currents of world-thought:
and for this end it is our business to be thinkers, using the
divine Manasic light within us to some purpose.  H.P. Blavatsky
supplied something much greater than a dogma:  she--like Plato
--gave the world a method and a spur to thought:  pointed for
it a direction, which following, it might solve all problems
and heal the wounds of the ages.

A false and foolish notion in the western world has been,
tacitly to accept the Greeks and Hebrews of old for the two
fountains of all culture since; the one in secular matter,
the other in religion and morality.  Of the Hebrews nothing
need be said here; but that true religion and morality have
their source in the ever-living Human Spirit, not in any sect,
creed, race, age, or bible.  I doubt there has been any new
discovery in ethics since man was man; or rather, all discoveries
have been made by individuals for themselves; and each, having
discovered anything, has found that that same principle was
discovered a thousand times before, and written a thousand times.
 There is no platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burst
upon the perceptions of all who have not yet perceived it, as a
new and burning truth; and on the other hand, there is no
startling command to purity or compassion, that has not been
given out by Teachers since the world began.--As for Greece,
there was a brilliant flaming up of the Spirit there in the
Fourth and Fifth Centuries B.C.; and its intensity, like the
lights of an approaching automobile, rather obscures what lies
beyond.  It is the first of which we have much knowledge; so we
think it was the first of all.  But in fact civilization has been
traveling its cyclic path all the time, all these millions of
years; and there have been hundreds of ancient great empires and
cultural epochs even in Europe of which we know nothing.

I had intended to begin with Greece; but these unexplored eras
of old Europe are too attractive, and this first lecture must go
to them, or some of them.  Not to the antecedents of Greece, in
Crete and elsewhere; but to the undiscovered North; and in
particular to the Celtic peoples; who may serve us as an example
by means of which light may be thrown on the question of racial
growth, and on the racial cycles generally.

The Celtic Empire of old Europe affects us like some mysterious
undiscovered planet.  We know it was there by its effects on
other peoples.  Also, like many other forgotten histories, it has
left indications of its achievement in a certain spirit, an
uplift, the breath of an old traditional grandeur that has come
down.  But to give any historical account of it--to get a
telescope that will reach and reveal it--we have not to come to
that point yet.

Still, it may be allowed us to experiment with all sorts of
glasses.  To penetrate that gloom of ancient Europe may be quite
beyond us; but guessing is permitted.  Now the true art of
guessing lies in an intuition for guiding indications.  There is
something in us that knows things directly; and it may deign at
times to give hints, to direct the researches, to flash some
little light on that part of us which works and is conscious in
this world, and which we call our brain-minds.  So although
most or all of what I am going to say would be called by the
scientific strictly empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shall
venture; aware that their Aristotelio-Baconian method quite
breaks down when it comes to such a search into the unknown; and
that this guessing, guided by what seems to be a law, would not,
perhaps, have been sneered at by Plato.

Guided by what seems to be a law;--guided, at any rate, by the
knowledge that there are laws; that "God geometrizes," as Plato
says:  that which is within flows outward upon a design; that
life precipitates itself through human affairs as it does through
the forms of the crystals; that there is nothing more haphazard
about the sequence of empires and civilizations, than there is
about the unfolding of petals of a flower.  In both cases it is
the eternal rhythm, the Poetry of the Infinite, that manifests;
our business is to listen so carefully as to hear, and apprehend
the fact that what we hear is a poetry, a vast music, not a
chaotic cacophony:  catch the rhythms--perceive that there is a
design--even if it takes us long to discover what the design
may be.

You know Plato's idea that the world is a dodecahedron or
twelve-sided figure.  Now in Plato's day, much that every
schoolboy knows now, was esoteric--known only to the initiated.
So I think Plato would have known well enough that this physical
earth is round; and that what he meant when he spoke of the
dodecahedron, was something else.  This, for example: that on
the plane of causes--this outer plane being that of effects
--there are twelve (geographical) centers, aspects, foci,
facets, or what you like to call them:  twelve _laya centers,_
as I think the Secret Doctrine would say:  through which
the forces from within play on the world without.  You have
read, too, in _The Secret Doctrine,_ Professor Crooke's theory,
endorsed by H.P. Blavatsky, as to how the chemical elements
were deposited by a spiral evolutive force, a creative impulse
working outward in the form of a caduceus or lemniscate, or
figure '8.'  Now suppose we should discover that just as
that force deposited in space, in its spiral down-working,
what Crookes calls the seeds of potassium, beryllium, boron,
and the rest--so such another creative force, at work on the
planes of geographical space and time, rouses up or deposits
in these, according to a definite pattern, this nation and that
in its turn, this great age of culture after that one; and that
there is nothing hap-hazard about the configuration of continents
and islands, national boundaries, or racial migrations?

H.P. Blavatsky tells us that the whole past history of the race
is known to the Guardians of the Secret Wisdom; that it is all
recorded, nothing lost; down to the story of every tribe since
the Lords of Mind incarnated.  And that these records are in the
form of a few symbols; but symbols which, to those who can
interpret or disintegrate them, can yield the whole story.  What
if the amount of the burden of history, which seems so vast to us
who know so very little of it, were in reality, if we could know
it all, a thing that would put but slight tax on the memory; a
thing we might carry with us in a few slight formulae, a few
simple symbols?  I believe that it is so; and that we may make a
beginning, and go some little way towards guessing what these
formulae are.

As thus:  A given race flowered and passed; it had so many
centuries of history before its flowering; it died, and left
something behind.  Greece, for example.  We may know very little
--you and I may know very little--of the details of Greek history.
We cannot, perhaps, remember the date of Aegospotami, or what
happened at Plataea:  we may have the vaguest notion of the
import of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Plato.  But still there is
a certain color in our conscious perceptions which comes from
Greece:  the 'glory that was Greece' means something, is a
certain light within the consciousness, to everyone of us.  The
Greeks added something to the wealth of the human spirit, which
we all may share in, and do. An atmosphere is left, which
surrounds and adheres to the many tangible memorials; just as an
atmosphere is left by the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy,
with its many tangible memorials.

But indeed, we may go further, and say that an atmosphere is
left, and that we can feel it, by many ages and cultures
which have left no tangible memorials at all; or but few and
uninterpretable ones, like the Celtic.  And that each has
developed some mood, some indefinable inward color--which we
perceive and inherit.  Each different: you cannot mistake the
Chinese or the Celtic color for the Greek; thought it might be
hard to define your perception of either, or of their difference.
It would be hard to say, for instance, that this one was crimson,
the other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects
us as crimson does, that other as blue does.   And  yet we can
see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source,
there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form.
There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks,
or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down
even in  a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such
as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the
indefinable feeling either of these people give us.

In the Chinese writing, with all its difficulty, there is
something superior to our alphabets:  an element that appeals to
the soul directly, or to the imagination directly, I think.
Suppose you found a Chinese ideogram--of course there is no such
a one--to express the forgotten Celtic culture; and it proved in
analysis, to be composed of the signs for twilight, wind, and
pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with certain other
elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul, would
have to supply.  In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the
imagination--that great Wizard within us--to rise up and supply
us with quantities of knowledge left unsaid.  Indeed, I am but
trying to illustrate an idea, possibilities.... I think there is
a power within the human soul to trace back all growths, the most
profuse and complex, to the simple seed from which they sprung;
or, just as a single rose or pansy bloom is the resultant, the
expression, of the interaction and interplay of innumerable
forces--so the innumerable forces whose interaction makes the
history of one race, one culture, could find their ultimate
expression in a symbol as simple as a pansy or rose bloom--color,
form and fragrance.  So each national great age would be a flower
evolved in the garden of the eternal; and once evolved, once
bloomed, it should never pass away; the actual blossom withers
and falls; but the color, the form, the fragrance,--these remain
in the world of causes.  And just as you might press a flower in
an album, or make a painting of it, and preserve its scent by
chemical distillation or what not--and thereby preserve the
whole story of all the forces that went to the production of
that bloom--and they are, I suppose, in number beyond human
computation--so you might express the history of a race in a
symbol as simple as a bloom... And that there is a power, an
unfolding faculty, in the soul, which, seeing such a symbol,
could unravel from it, by meditation, the whole achievement of
the race; its whole history, down to details; yes, even down to
the lives of every soul that incarnated in it:  their personal
lives, with all successes, failures, attempts, everything.
Because, for example, the light which comes down to us as that of
ancient Greece is the resultant, the remainder of all the forces
in all the lives of all individual Greeks, as these were played
on by the conditions of place and time.  Time:--at such and such
a period, the Mood of the Oversoul is such and such. Place:--the
temporal mood of the Oversoul, playing through that particular
facet of the dodecahedron, which is Greece.  The combinations and
interplay of these two, plus the energies for good or evil of the
souls there incarnate, give as their resultant the whole life of
the race.  There is perhaps a high Algebra of the Soul by which,
if we understood its laws, we could revive the history of
any past epoch, discover its thought and modes of living, as
we discover the value of the unknown factor in an equation.
Pythagoras must have his pupils understand music and geometry;
and by music he intended, all the arts, every department of life
that came under the sway of the Nine Muses.  Why?--Because, as he
taught, God is Poet and Geometer.  Chaos is only on the outer rim
of existence; as you get nearer the heart of thing, order and
rhythm, geometry and poetry, are more and more found.  Chaos is
only in our own chaotic minds and perceptions:  train these
aright, and you shall hear the music of the spheres, perceive the
reign of everlasting Law.  These impulses from the Oversoul, that
create the great epochs, raising one race after another, have
perfect rhythm and rhyme.  God sits harping in the Cycle of
Infinity, and human history is the far faint echo of the tune he
plays.  Why can we not listen, till we hear and apprehend the
tune?  Or History is the sound heard from far, of the marching
hosts of angels and archangels; the cyclic tread of their
battalions; the thrill and rumble and splendor of their drums and
fifes:--why should we not listen till the whole order of their
cohorts and squadrons is revealed?--I mean to suggest that there
are laws, undiscovered, but discoverable--discoverable from the
fragments of history we possess--by knowing which we might gain
knowledge, even without further material discoveries, of the lost
history of man.  Without moving from Point Loma, or digging up
anything more important that hard-pan, we may yet make the most
important finds, and throw floods of light on the whole dark
problem of the past.  H.P. Blavatsky gave us the clews; we owe it
to her to use them.

Now I want to suggest a few ideas along these lines that may
throw light on ancient Europe; of which orthodox history tells us
of nothing but the few centuries of Greece and Rome.  As if the
people of three thousand years hence should know, of the history
of Christendom, only that of Italy from Garibaldi onward, and
that of Greece beginning, say, at the Second Balkan War.  That is
the position we are in with regard to old Europe.  Very like
Spain, France, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia played as great
parts in the millennia B.C., as they have done in the times we
know about. All analogy from the other seats of civilization is
for it; all racial memories and traditions--tradition is racial
memory--are for it; and I venture to say, all reason and common
sense are for it too.

Now I have to remind you of certain conclusions worked out in an
article 'Cyclic Law in History,' which appeared some time back in
_The Theosophical Path:_--that there are, for example, three
great centers of historical activity in the Old World:  China and
her surroundings; West Asia and Egypt; Europe.  Perhaps these are
major facets of the dodecahedron.  Perhaps again, were the facts
in our knowledge not so desperately incomplete, we should find,
as in the notes and colors, a set of octaves: that each of these
centers was a complete octave, and each phase or nation a note.
Do you see where these leads?  Supposing the note _China_ is
struck in the Far Eastern Octave; would there not be a vibration
of some corresponding note in the octave Europe?  Supposing the
Octave _West Asia_ were under the fingers of the Great Player,
would not the corresponding note in Europe vibrate?

Now let us look at history.  Right on the eastern rim of the Old
World is the Chino-Japanese field of civilization.  It has been,
until lately, under pralaya, in a night or inactive period of its
existence, for something over six centuries:  a beautiful pralaya
in the case of Japan; a rather ugly one, recently, in the case
of China.  Right on the western rim of the Old World are the
remnants of the once great Celtic people.  Europe at large has
been very much in manvantara, a day or waking period, for a
little over six hundred years.  Yet of the four racial roots or
stocks of Europe, the Greco-Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, and Celtic,
the last-named alone has been under pralaya, sound asleep, during
the whole of this time.  Let me interject here the warning that
it is no complete scheme that is to be offered; only a few facts
that suggest that such a scheme may exist, could we find it.
Before Europe awoke to her present cycle of civilization and
progress, before the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the
Chinese had been in manvantara, very much awake, for about
fifteen hundred years.  When they went to sleep, the Celts
did also.

I pass by with a mere note of recognition the two dragons, the
one on the Chinese, the other on the Welsh flag; just saying
that national symbols are not chose haphazard, but are an
expression of inner things; and proceed to give you the dates of
all the important events in Chinese and Celtic, chiefly Welsh,
history during the last two thousand years.  In 1911 the Chinese
threw off the Manchu yoke and established a native republic.  In
1910 the British Government first recognized Wales as a separate
nationality, when the heir to the throne was invested as Prince
of Wales at Carnarvon.  Within a few years a bill was passed
giving Home Rule to Ireland; and national parliaments at Dublin
and at Cardiff are said to be among the likelihoods of the near
future.  The eighteenth century, for manvantara, was a singularly
dead time in Europe; but in China, for pralaya, it was a
singularly living time, being filled with the glorious reigns of
the Manchu emperors Kanghu and Kien Lung.  In Wales it saw the
religious revival which put a stop to the utter Anglicization of
the country, saved the language from rapid extinction, and
awakened for the first time for centuries a sort of national
consciousness.   Going back, the first great emperor we come to
in China before the Manchu conquest, was Ming Yunglo, conqueror
of half Asia.  His contemporary in Wales was Owen Glyndwr, who
succeeded in holding the country against the English for a number
of years; there had been no Welsh history between Glyndwr and
the religious revival.  In 1260 or thereabouts the Mongols
completed the conquest of China, and dealt her then flourishing
civilization a blow from which it never really recovered.  About
twenty years later the English completed the conquest of Wales,
and dealt her highly promising literary culture a blow from which
it is only now perhaps beginning to recover.  In the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the great Sung artists of China
were painting infinity or their square feet of silk:  painting
Natural Magic as it has never been painted or revealed since.  In
those same centuries the Welsh bards were writing the Natural
Magic of the Mabinogion, one of the chief European repositories
of Natural Magic; and filling a remarkable poetical literature
with the same quality:--and that before the rest of Europe
had, for the most part, awakened to the spiritual impulses
that lead to civilization.  In the seventh and eighth centuries,
when continental Europe was in the dead vast and middle of
pralaya, Chinese poetry, under Tang Hsuan-tsong and his great
predecessors, was in its Golden Age--a Golden Age comparable to
that of Pericles in Athens.  In the seventh and eighth centuries,
Ireland was sending out scholars and thinkers as missionaries to
all parts of benighted Europe:  Ireland in her golden age, the
one highly cultured country in Christendom, was producing a
glorious prose and poetry in the many universities that starred
that then by no means distressful island.  In 420, China, after a
couple of centuries of anarchy, began to re-establish her
civilization on the banks of the Yangtse.  In 410, the Britons
finally threw off the Roman yoke, and the first age of Welsh
poetry, the epoch of Arthur and Taliesin, which has been the
light of romantic Europe ever since, began.

Does it not seem as if that great Far Eastern note could not
be struck without this little far western note vibrating in
sympathy?  Very faintly; not in a manner to be heard clearly by
the world; because in historical times the Celtic note has been
as it were far up on the keyboard, and never directly under the
Master-Musician's fingers.  And when you add to it all that this
Celtic note has come in the minds of literary critics rather to
stand as the synonym for Natural Magic--you all know what is
meant by that term;--and that now, as we are discovering the old
Chinese poetry and painting, we are finding that Natural Magic is
really far more Chinese than Celtic--that where we Celts have
vibrated to it minorly, the great Chinese gave it out fully and
grandly--does it not add to the piquancy of the 'coincidence?'

Now there is no particular reason for doubting the figures of
Chinese chronology as far back as 2350 B.C.  Our Western
authorities do doubt all before about 750; but it is hard to see
why, except that 'it is their nature to.'  The Chinese give the
year 2356 as the date of the accession of the Emperor Yao, first
of the three canonized rulers who have been the patriarchs,
saints, sages, and examples for all ages since.  In that decade a
manvantara of the race would seem to have begun, which lasted
through the dynasties of Hia and Shang, and halfway through the
Chow, ending about 850.  During this period, then, I think
presently we shall come to place the chief activities and
civilization of the Celts.  From 850 to 240--all these figures
are of course approximations:  there was pralaya in China;
on the other side of the world, it was the period of Celtic
eruptions--and probably, disruption.  While Tsin Shi Hwangti,
from 246 to 213, was establishing the modern Chinese Empire, the
Gauls made their last incursion into Italy.  The culmination of
the age Shi Hwangti inaugurated came in the reign of Han Wuti,
traditionally the most glorious in the Chines annals.  It
lasted from 140 to 86 B.C.; nor was there any decline under his
successor, who reigned until 63.  In the middle of that time--the
last decade of the second century--the Cimbri, allied with the
Teutones, made their incursion down into Spain.  Opinion is
divided as to whether this people was Celtic or Teutonic; but
probably the old view is the true one, that the word is akin to
Cimerii, Crimea, and Cymry, and that they were Welshmen in their
day.  When Caesar was in Gaul, the people he conquered had much
to say about their last great king.  Diviciacos, whose dominions
included Gaul and Britain; they looked back to his reign as a
period of great splendor and national strength.  He lived, they
said, about a hundred years before Caesar's coming--or was
contemporary with Han Wuti.

But the empire of the Celtic Kings was already far fallen, before
it was confined to Gaul, Britain, and perhaps Ireland.  When
first we see this people they were winning a name for fickleness
of purpose:  making conquests and throwing them away; which
things are the marks of a race declining from a high eminence it
had won of old through hard work and sound policy.  We shall come
to see that personal or outward characteristics can never be
posited as inherent in any race.  Such things belong to ages and
stages in the race's growth.  Whatever you can say of Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Germans, now, has been totally untrue of them at some
other period.  We think of the Italians as passionate, subtle of
intellect, above all things artistic and beauty-loving.  Now
look at them as they were three centuries B.C.:  plodding, self-
contained and self-mastered, square-dealing and unsubtle, above
all things contemning beauty, wholly inartistic.  But a race may
retain the same traits for a very long time, if it remains in a
back-water, and is unaffected by the currents of evolution.

So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which
they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal
or epochal defect.  They were not fickle when they held out (in
Wales) for eight centuries against the barbarian onslaughts which
brought the rest of the Roman empire down in two or three; or
when they resisted for two hundred years those Normans who had
conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a decade.  This very quality, in
old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic
of extreme age; "I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash." says
Llywarch Hen.  I think that gives the clew to the whole position.
The race was at the end of its manvantaric period; the Race Soul
had lost control of the forces that bound its organism together;
centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse
that marks the cycles of youth and growth.  It had eaten into
individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at
tangents.  We see the same thing in any decadent people; by
which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras,
and on the verge of a pralaya.  And remember that a pralaya, like
a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is
simply a means for restoring strength and youth.

How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what
settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather
from two not much noticed facts.  First: Caesar, conqueror of the
Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day,
landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without
accomplishing anything in particular.  But it was the central
seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph
was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than
anything else he ever did.  He set it above his victories over
Pompey. Second:  the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able
to put in the field against him three million men:  not so far
short of the number France has been able to put in the field
in the recent war.  Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have
raised such an army--in France.  Caesar is said to have killed
some five million Gauls before he conquered them.  By ordinary
computations, that would argue a population of some thirty
millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of Diviciacos a
century after the latter's death; and even if that computation
is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there was a very
large population; and a large population means always a long and
settled civilization.

Diviciacos ruled only Gaul and Britain; possible Ireland as
well; he may have been a Gaul, a Briton, or an Irishman; very
likely there was not much difference in those days.  It will be
said I am leaving out of account much that recent scholarship has
divulged; I certainly am leaving out of account a great many of
the theories of recent scholarship, which for the most part make
confusion worse confounded.  But we know that the lands held by
the Celts--let us boldly say, with many of the most learned, the
Celtic empire--was vastly larger in its prime than the British
Isles and France.  Its eastern outpost was Galatia in Asia Minor.
You may have read in _The Outlook_ some months ago an article by
a learned Serbian, in which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of the
Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of
the fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an
original Celtic population.  Bohemia was once the land of the
Celtic Boii; and we may take it as an axiom, that no conquest,
no racial incursion, ever succeeds in wiping out the conquered
people; unless there is such wide disparity, racial and
cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers in
America and the Indians.  There are forces in human nature itself
which make this absolute.  The conquerors may quite silence the
conquered; may treat them with infinite cruelty; may blot out
all their records and destroy the memory of their race; but the
blood of the conquered will go on flowing through all the
generation of the children of the conquerors, and even, it seems
probable, tend ever more and more to be the prevalent element.

The Celts, then, at one time or another, have held the following
lands:  Britain and Ireland, of course; Gaul and Spain;
Switzerland and Italy north of the Po; Germany, except perhaps
some parts of Prussia; Denmark probably, which as you know was
called the Cimbric Chersonese; the Austrian empire, with the
Balkan Peninsula north of Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace, and much
of southern Russia and the lands bordering the Black Sea.
Further back, it seems probable that they and the Italic people
were one race; whose name survives in that of the province of
Liguria, and in the Welsh name for England, which is Lloegr.  So
that in the reign of Diviciacos their empire had already shrunk
to the meerest fragment of its former self.   It had broken and
shrunk before we get the first historical glimpses of them;
before they sacked Delphi in 279 B.C.:  before their ambassadors
made a treaty with Alexander; and replied to his question as to
what they feared: "Nothing except that the skies should fall."
Before they sacked Rome in 390.  All these historic eruptions
were the mere sporadic outburst of a race long past its prime and
querulous with old age, I think  Two thousand years of severe
pralaya, almost complete extinction, utter insignificance and
terrible karma awaited them; and we only see them, pardon the
expression, kicking up their heels in a final plunge as a
preparation for that long silence.

Some time back I discussed these historical questions, particularly
the correspondence between Celtic and Chinese dates, with
Dr. Siren and Professor Fernholm; and they pointed out to
me a similar correspondence between the dates of Scandinavian
and West Asian history.  I can remember but one example now:
Gustavus Vasa, father of modern Sweden, founder of the present
monarchy, came to the throne in 1523 and died in 1560.  The last
great epoch of the West Asian Cycle coincides, in the west, and
reign of Suleyman the Magnificent in Turkey, from 1520 to 1566.
At its eastern extremity, Babar founded the Mogul Empire in India
in 1526; he reigned until 1556.  On the death of Aurangzeb in
1707, the Moguls ceased to be a great power; the Battle of
Pultowa, in 1709, put an end to Sweden's military greatness.

It is interesting to compare the earliest Celtic literature we
have, with the earliest literature of the race which was to be
the main instrument of Celtic bad karma in historical times--the
Teutons.  Here, as usual, common impressions are false.  It is
the latter, the Teutonic, that is in the minor key, and full
of wistful sadness.  There is an earnestness about it:  a
recognition of, and rather mournful acquiescence in, the
mightiness of Fate, which is imagined almost always adverse.  I
quote these lines from William Morris, who, a Celt himself by
mere blood and race, lived in and interpreted the old Teutonic
spirit as no other English writer has attempted to do, mush less
succeeded in doing:  he is the one Teuton of English literature.
He speaks of the "haunting melancholy" of the northern races--the
"Thought of the Otherwhere" that

     "Waileth weirdly along through all music and song
     From a Teuton's voice or string: ..."

Withal it was a brave melancholy that possessed them; they were
equal to great deeds, and not easily to be discouraged; they
could make merry, too; but in the midst of their merriment, they
could not forget grim and hostile Fate:--

     "There dwelt men merry-hearted and in hope exceeding great,
     Met the good days and the evil as they went the ways of fate."

It is literature that reveals the heart of a people who had
suffered long, and learnt from their suffering the lessons of
patience, humility, continuity of effort:  those qualities which
enable them, in their coming manvantaric period, to dominate
large portions of the world.

But when we turn to the Celtic remains, the picture we find is
altogether different.  Their literature tells of a people, in the
Biblical phrase, "with a proud look and a high stomach."  It is
full of flashing colors, gaiety, titanic pride.  There was no
grayness, no mournful twilight hue on the horizon of their mind;
their 'Other-World' was only more dawn-lit, more noon-illumined,
than this one; Ireland of the living was sun-bright and
sparkling and glorious; but the 'Great Plain' of the dead was
far more sun-bright and sparkling than Ireland.  It is the
literature of a people accustomed to victory and predominance.
When they began to meet defeat they by no means acquiesced in
it.  They regarded adverse fate, not with reverence, but with
contempt.  They saw in sorrow no friend and instructress of the
human soul; were at pains to learn no lesson from her; instead,
they pitted what was their pride, but what they would have called
the glory of their own souls, against her; they made no terms,
asked no truce; but went on believing the human--or perhaps I
should say the Celtic--soul more glorious than fate, stronger to
endure and defy than she to humiliate and torment.  In many sense
it was a fatal attitude, and they reaped the misery of it; but
they gained some wealth for the human spirit from it too.  The
aged Oisin has returned from Fairyland to find the old glorious
order in Ireland fallen and passed during the three centuries of
his absence.  High Paganism has gone, and a religion meek,
inglorious, and Unceltic has taken its mission thereto:  tells
him the gods are conquered and dead, and that the omnipotent God
of the Christians reigns alone now.--"I would thy God were set on
yonder hill to fight with my son Oscar!" replies Oisin.  Patrick
paints for him the hell to which he is destined unless he accepts
Christianity; and Oisin answers:

     "Put the staff in my hands! for I go to the Fenians, thou
         cleric, to chant
     The warsongs that roused them of old; they will rise,
         making clouds with their breath.
     Innumerable, singing, exultant; and hell underneath them
         shall pant,
     And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them
         in death."

"No," says Patrick; "none war on the masters of hell, who could
break up the world in their rage"; and bids him weep and kneel in
prayer for his lost soul.  But that will not do for the old
Celtic warrior bard; no tame heaven for him.  He will go to
hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to
the mere meanness of fate.  He will

     "Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair
     And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or
at feast."

So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and
desolation.  His kingdom has been conquered; he is in exile in
Wales; his four and twenty sons, "wearers of golden torques,
proud rulers of princes,"  have been slain; he is considerably
over a hundred years old, and homeless, and sick; but no whit of
his pride is gone.  He has learnt no lesson from life excepts
this One:  that fate and Karma and sorrow are not so proud, not
so skillful to persecute, as the human soul is capable of bitter
resentful endurance. He is titanically angry with destiny; but
never meek or acquiescent.

Then if you look at their laws of war, you come to know very well
how this people came to be almost blotted out. If they had a true
spiritual purpose, instead of mere personal pride, I should say
the world would be Celtic-speaking and Celtic-governed now. Yet
still their reliance was all on what we must call spiritual
qualities. The first notice we get in classical literature of
Celts and Teutons--I think from Strabo--is this: "The Celts
fight for glory, the Teutons for plunder." Instead of plunder,
let us say material advantage; they knew why they were fighting,
and went to get it. But the Celtic military laws--Don Quixote in
a fit of extravagance framed them! There must be no defensive
armor; the warrior must go bare-breasted into battle. There are a
thousand things he must fear more than defeat or death--all that
would make the glory of his soul seem less to him. He must make
fighting his business, because in his folly it seemed to him that
in it he could best nourish that glory; not for what material
ends he could gain. Pitted against a people--with a definite
policy, he was bound to lose in the long run. But still he
endowed the human spirit with a certain wealth; still his folly
had been a true spiritual wisdom at one time. The French at
Fontenoy, who cried to their English enemies, when both were
about to open fire: _"Apres vous, messieurs! "_ were simply
practicing the principles of their Gaulish forefathers; the
thrill of honor, of _'Pundonor'_ as the Spaniard says, was much
more in their eyes than the chance of victory.

Now, in what condition does a race gain such qualities? Not in
sorrow; not in defeat, political dependence or humiliation. The
virtues which these teach are of an opposite kind; they are what
we may call the plebeian virtues which lead to success. But the
others, the old Celtic qualities, are essentially patrician. You
find them in the Turks; accustomed to sway subject races, and
utterly ruthless in their dealings with them; but famed as clean
and chivalrous fighters in a war with foreign peoples. See
how the Samurai, the patricians of never yet defeated Japan,
developed them. They are the qualities the Law teaches us through
centuries of domination and aristocratic life. They are developed
in a race accustomed to rule other races; a race that does
not engage in commerce; in an aristocratic race, or in an
aristocratic caste within a race. Here is the point: the Law
designs periods of ascendency for each people in its turn, that
it may acquire these qualities; and it appoints for each people
in its turn Periods of subordination, poverty and sorrow, that it
may develop the opposite qualities of patience, humility, and
orderly effort.

Would it not appear then, that in those first centuries B. C.
when Celts and Teutons were emerging into historical notice, the
Teutons were coming out of a long period of subordination, in
which they had learnt strength--the Celts out of a long period of
ascendency, in which they had learnt other things? The Teuton,
fresh from his pralayic sleep, was unconquerable by Rome.
The Celt, old, and intoxicated with the triumphs of a long
manvantara, could not repel Roman persistence and order. Rome.
too, was rising, or in her prime; had patience, and followed her
material plans every inch of the way to success. Where she
conquered, she imposed her rule. But whatever material plan were
set before the Celt, some spiritual red-herring, some notion in
his mind, was sure to sidetrack him before he had come half way
to its accomplishment. He had enough of empire-building; and
thirsted only after dreams. Brennus turned from a burnt Rome, his
pride satisfied. Vercingetorix, decked in all his gold, rode
seven times--was it seven times?--round the camp of Caesar:
defeat had come to him; death was coming; but he would bathe his
soul in a little pomp and glory first. Whether you threw your
sword in the scales, or surrendered to infamous Caesar, the main
thing was that you should kindle the pride in your eye, and puff
up the highness of your stomach. . . . So the practical Roman
despised him, and presently conquered him.

Here is another curious fact: the greater number, if not all, of
the words in the Teutonic languages denoting social order and the
machinery of government, are of Celtic derivation. Words such as
_Reich_ and _Amt,_ to give two examples I happen to remember out
of a list quoted by Mr. T. W. Rollestone in one of his books.

And now I think we have material before us wherewith to reconstruct
a sketch or plan of ancient European history. Let me remind you
again that our object is simply the discovery of Laws.  That, in
the eyes of the Law, there are no most favored nations.  That
there are no such things as permanent racial characteristics;
but that each race adopts the characteristics appropriate to
its stage of growth.

It is a case of the pendulum swing, of ebb and flow. For two
thousand years the Teutons have been pressing on and, dominating
the Celts. They started at the beginning of that time with the
plebeian qualities--and have evolved, generally speaking, a large
measure of the patrician qualities. The Celts, meanwhile, have
been pushed to the extremities of the world; their history has
been a long record of disasters. But in the preceding period the
case was just the reverse. Then the Celts held the empire. They
ruled over large Teutonic populations. Holding all the machinery
of government in their hands, they imposed on the languages of
their Teuton subjects the words concerned with that machinery;
just as in Welsh now our words of that kind are mostly straight
from the English.  It does not follow that there was any sudden
rising of Teutons against dominant Celts; more probably the
former grew gradually stronger as the latter grew gradually
weaker, until the forces were equalized.  We find the Cimbri and
Teutones allied on equal terms against Rome.  According to an old
Welsh history, the _Brut Tyssilio,_  there were Anglo-Saxons in
Britain before Caesar's invasion; invited there by the Celts, and
living in peace under the Celtic kings.  To quote the _Brut
Tyssilio_ a short time ago would have been to ensure being
scoffed at on all sides; but recently professor Flinders Petrie
has vindicated it as against both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
Caesar himself.  English Teutonic was first spoken in Britain
probably, some two or three centuries B.C.; and it survived
there, probably, in remote places, through the whole of the Roman
occupation; then, under the influence of the rising star of the
Teutons, and reinforced by new incursions from the Continent,
finally extinguished the Latin of the roman province, and drove
Celtic into the west.

But go back from those first centuries B.C. and you come at last
to a time when the Celtic star was right at the zenith, the
Teutonic very low.  Free Teutons you should hardly have found
except in Scandinavia; probably only in southern Sweden:  for
further north, and in most of Norway, you soon came to ice and
the Lapps and _terra incognita._  And even Sweden may have been
under Celtic influence--for the Celtic words survive there
--but hardly so as to affect racial individuality; just as
Wales and Ireland are under English rule now, yet retain their
Celtic individuality.

And then go back a few more thousand years again, and you would
probably find the case again reversed; and Teutons lording it
over Celts, and our present conditions restored.  It is by
suffering these poles of experience, now pride and domination,
now humiliation and adversity, that the races of mankind learn.
Europe is not a new sort of continent.  Man, says one of the
Teachers, has been much what he is any time these million years.
History has been much what it is now, ebbing and flowing.
Knowledge, geographical and other, has receded, and again
expanded.  Europe has been the seat of empires and civilizations,
all Europe, probably, for not so far short of a million years;
there has been plenty of time for it to multiply terrible karma--
which takes the occasion to expend itself sometimes--as now.  I
mistrust the theory of recent Aryan in-pourings from Asia.  The
Huns came in when the Chinese drove them; and the Turks and
Mongols have come in since; but there is nothing to show that
the Slavs, for example, when they first appear in history, had
come in from beyond the Urals and the Caspian.  Slavs and Greco-
Latins, Teutons and Celts, I think they were probably in Europe
any time these many hundreds of thousands of years.

Or rather, I think there were Europeans--Indo-Europeans, Aryans,
call them what you will--where they are now at any time during
such a period.  Because race is a thing that will not bear
close investigation.  It is a phase; an illusion; a temporary
appearance taken on by sections of humanity.  There is nothing in
it to fight about or get the least hot over.  It is a camouflage;
there you have the very word for it.  What we call Celts
and Teutons are simply portions of the one race, humanity,
camouflaged up upon their different patterns.  So far as flood
and ultimate physical heredity are concerned, I doubt there is
sixpenny-worth of difference between any two of the lot.  "Oi
mesilf," said Mr. Dooley, speaking as a good American citizen,
"am the thruest and purest Anglo-Saxon that iver came out of
Anglo-Saxony."  We call ourselves Anglo-Saxons because we speak
English (a language more than half Latin); when in reality we
are probably Jews, Turks, infidels or heretics, if all were
known.  What is a Spaniard?  A Latin, you answer pat.  Yes; he
speaks a Latin-derived language; and has certain qualities of
temperament which seem to mark him as more akin to the French and
Italians, than to those whom we, just as wisely, dub 'Teutonic'
or 'Slavic.'  But in fact he may have in his veins not a drop of
blood that is not Celtic, or not a drop that is not Teutonic, or
Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician, or Iberian, or God knows what.

Suppose you have four laya centers in Europe:  four Foci through
which psychic impulses from the Oversoul pour through into this
world.  A Mediterranean point, perhaps in Italy; a Teutonic
point in Sweden; a Celtic point in Wales-Ireland (formerly a
single island, before England rose out of the sea); and a Slavic
point, probably in Russia.  The moment comes for such and
such a 'race' to expand; the Mediterranean, for example.  The
Italian laya center, Rome, quickens into life.  Rome conquers
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the East; becomes _Caput Mundi._
Countries that shortly before were Celtic in blood, become,
through no material change in that blood, Latin; by language,
and, as we say, by race.  The moment comes for a Teutonic
expansion.  The laya center in Sweden quickens; there is a
Swedish or Gothic invasion of Celtic lands south of the Baltic;
the continental Teutons presently are freed.  It is the expansion
of a spirit, of a psychic something.  People that were before
Celts (just as Mr. Dooley is an Anglo-Saxon)  become somehow
Teutons.  The language expands, and carries a tradition with it.
Head measurements show that neither Southern Germany nor England
differs very much towards Teutonicism from the Mediterranean
type; yet the one is thoroughly Teutonic, the other Anglo-Saxon.
Sometimes the blood may be changed materially; often, I suppose,
it is changed to some extent; but the main change takes place in
the language and tradition; sometimes in tradition alone.  There
was a minor Celtic quickening in the twelfth century A. D.;
then Wales was in a fervor of national life.  She had not the
resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest.  But her
Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out
of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of
the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain:  absolutely
installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people
his people were fighting; and infused chivalry with a certain
uplift and mysticism through-out western Europe.  Or again, in
the Cinquecento and earlier, the Italian center quickened; and
learning and culture flowed up from Italy through France and
England; and these countries, with Spain, become the leaders in
power and civilization.

England since that Teutonic expansion which made her English was
spent, has grown less and less Teutonic, more and more Latin;
the Italian impulse of the Renaissance drove her far along that
path.  In the middle of the eleventh century, her language was
purely Teutonic; you could count on the fingers of your hand the
words derived from Latin or Celtic.  And now?  Sixty percent of
all English words are Latin.  At the beginning of the fifth
century, after nearly three hundred years of Roman occupation,
one can hardly doubt that Latin was the language of what is now
England.  Celtic, even then I imagine, was mainly to be heard
among the mountains.  See how that situation is slowly coming
back.  And the tendency is all in the same direction.  You have
taken, indeed, a good few words from Dutch; and some two dozen
from German, in all these centuries; but a Latin word has
only to knock, to be admitted and made welcome.  Teachers of
composition must sweat blood and tears for it, alas, to get their
pupils to write English and shun Latin.  In a thousand years'
time, will English be as much a Latin language as French is?
Quite likely.  The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come
pouring in.  And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than
Englishmen are:  they 'locate' at such and such a place, where an
English man would just go and live there.

Before Latin, Celtic was the language of Britain.  Finally, says
W.Q. Judge, Sanskrit will become the universal language.  That
would mean simply that the Fifth Root Race will swing back slowly
through all the linguistic changes that it has known in the past,
till it reaches its primitive language condition.  Then the
descendants of Latins, Slavs, Celts, and Teutons will proudly
boast their unadulterated Aryan-Sanscrit heredity, and exult
over their racial superiority to those barbarous Teutons,
Celts, Slavs, and Latins of old, of whom their histories will
lie profusely.




II.  Homer


When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of
men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road
for an inrush of important and awakened souls. Having in mind to
get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one
Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with
high poetic genius. Or he had in many past lives so endowed
himself; and therefore the Law called him in. This evening I
shall work up to him, and try to tell you a few things about him,
some of which you may know already, but some of which may be new
to you.

What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of
activity--the one that preceded this present one--should have
begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, _of which we
know anything,_ began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we
may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony,
as the date of its inception. Our present European manvantara
began while Frederick II was forcing a road for civilization up
from the Moslem countries through Italy; we may take 1240 as a
central and convenient date. The first 390 years of it--from 1240
to 1632--saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in
Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal;
Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in
England. That will suggest to us that the Periclean was not the
first age of splendor in Europe in that former manvantara; it
will suggest how much we may have lost through the loss of all
records of cultural effort in northern and western Europe during
the four centuries that preceded Pericles. Of course we cannot
certainly say that there were such ages of splendor. But we shall
see presently that during every century since Pericles--during
the whole historical period--there has been an age of splendor
somewhere; and that these have followed each other with such
regularity, upon such a definite geographical and chronological
plan, that unless we accept the outworn conclusion that at a
certain time--about 500 B. C.--the nature of man and the laws of
nature and history underwent radical change, we shall have to
believe that the same thing had been going on--the recurrence of
ages of splendor--back into the unknown night of time.  And that
geographical and chronological plan will show us that such ages
were going on in unknown Europe during the period we are speaking
of.  In the manvantara 2980 to 1480 B.C., did the Western Laya
Center play the part in Europe, that the Southern one did in the
manvantara 870 B.C. to 630 A.D.?  Was the Celtic Empire then,
what the roman Empire became in the later time?  If so, their
history after the pralaya 1480 to 870 may have been akin to that
of the Latin, in this present cycle; no longer a united empire,
they may have achieved something comparable to the achievements
of France, Spain, and Italy in the later Middle Ages. At least we
hear the rumblings of their marches and the far shoutings of
their aimless victories until within a century or two of the
Christian era. Then, what was Italy like in the heyday of the
Etruscans, or under the Roman kings? The fall of Tarquin--an
Etruscan--was much more epochal, much more disastrous, than Livy
guessed. There were more than seven kings of Rome; and their era
was longer than from 753 to 716; and Rome--or perhaps the
Etruscan state of which it formed a part--was a much greater
power then, than for several centuries after their fall. The
great works they left are an indication.  But only the vaguest
traditions of that time came down to Livy.  The Celts sacked
Rome in 390 B.C., and all the records of the past were lost;
years of confusion followed; and a century and a half and
more before Roman history began to be written by Ennius in his
epic _Annales._  It was a break in history and blotting out of
the past; such as happened in China in 214 B.C., when the ancient
literature was burnt.  Such things take place under the Law.
Race-memory may not go back beyond a certain time; there is a
law in Nature that keeps ancient history esoteric.  As we
go forward, the horizon behind follows us.  In the ages of
materialism and the low places of racial consciousness, that
horizon probably lies near to us; as you see least far on a
level plain.  But as we draw nearer to esotericism, and attain
elevations nearer the spirit, it may recede; as the higher you
stand, the farther you see.  Not so long ago, the world was but
six thousand years old in European estimation.  But ever since
Theosophy has been making its fight to spiritualize human
consciousness, _pari passu_ the horizon of the past has been
pushed back by new and new discoveries.

What comes down to us from old Europe between its waking and the
age of Pericles?  Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history
from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of
the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi
and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red
Branch and Fenian cycles.  The actual tales as we get them were
no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late
recensions that we have. What will remain of England in the
memory of three or four thousand years hence? Unless this
Theosophical Movement shall have lifted human standards to the
point where that which has hitherto been esoteric may safely be
kept public, this much:--an echo only of what  England has
produced of eternal truth;--something from Shakespeare; something
from Milton; and as much else in prose and poetry from the rest.
But all the literature of this and all past ages is and will then
still be in being; in the hidden libraries of the Guardians of
Esoteric Science, from which they loose fragments and hints on
the outer world as the occasion cyclically recurs, and as their
wisdom directs.

How do they loose such fragments of old inspiration? It may be by
putting some manuscript in the way of discovery; it may be by
raising up some man of genius who can read the old records on
inner planes, and reproduce in epic or drama something of a long
past splendor to kindle the minds of men anew. In that way Greece
was kindled. Troy fell, says H. P. Blavatsky, nearly five
thousand years ago. Now you will note that a European manvantara
began in 2980 B. C.; which is very nearly five thousand years
ago. And that this present European manvantara or major cycle was
lit up from a West Asian Cycle; from the Moors in Spain; from
Egypt through Sicily and Italy; and, in its greatest splendor;
when Constantinople fell, and refugees therefrom came to light
the Cinquecento in Italy. Now Constantinople is no great way from
Troy; and, by tradition, refugees came to Italy from Troy, once.
Was it they in part, who lit up that ancient European cycle of
from 2980 to 1480 B. C.?

In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come
down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that
ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean
age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were
probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of
the Celtic Age are to us. But Homer caught an echo and preserved
the atmosphere of it. As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the
Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style--which thing is the
impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its
expression;--so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a
sense of style to the later Greeks. It rings majestically through
his lines. His history is perhaps not actual history in any
recognizable shape.

Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest
genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message
through them; perhaps reinvented half of them. Even so Geoffrey
of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that
came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and
Spenser followed him in the _Faery Queen,_ Malory in his book,
and Tennyson in the _Idylls of the King._  Even in that last,
from the one poem _Morte D'Arthur_ we should get a sense of the
old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a
score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the
Idylls.  But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser
and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic.  How much more
of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek
of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled
with racial uplift.

Where did he live?  Oh, Goodness knows!  When?  Goodness knows
again.  (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.)  We have
Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years
before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850;
and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as
possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not
Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one?  At
such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a
little after; because they have a work of preparation to do;
and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and
aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other
sought to do for Greece.  But this is to treat Homer as if he had
been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved'
(a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of
him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a
fiction.  Admitted.  A school of critics has cleaned poor old
blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on
God's earth--just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up
the Human Soul.  But there is another school, who have preserved
for him some shreds at least of identity.  Briefly put, you can
'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence--grammar,
microscopic examination of text and forms and so on--that Homer
is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious
of the spiritual facts of style and poetry.  Take these into
account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave
and nothingness into which you have relegated him.  The Illiad
does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities
between its parts.  On the other hand, there is, generally
speaking, the impress of a single creative genius.  One master
made the Homeric style.  The Iliad, as we know it, may contain
passages not his; but--_he wrote the Iliad._

What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said:  "Now
let us write an epic."  Conditions would be against it.  A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies:  that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting.  The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.

Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an
interval, another?  Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another.  The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_  but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend.  At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents.  The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet.  It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.

Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had
been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering
minstrels--Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they
were called--who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic
mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and
unculture.  The first three orders were doubtless in existence
long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and
minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of
culture in any race during its pralayas.  So you find the
professional story-tellers in the East today.  But the Homeridae
may well have been--as De Quincey suggests--an order specially
trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single
school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer.
We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer--the works,
not the man--into continental Greece; importing them from Crete.
That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle
in Sparta.  European continental Greece would in any case
have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture;
because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian
civilization.  Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia
Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and
Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them
into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so
awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica,
Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.

Where did Homer live?  Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over
the place.  We know of the seven cities that claimed to be
his birthplace:

     _Smyrna, Chias, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenae
          Orbis de patria certat, Homere, Tua._

Of these Smyrna probably has the best chance of it; for he was
Maeonides, the son of Maeon, and Maeon was the son of Meles; and
the Maeon and the Meles are rivers by Smyrna.  But De Quincey
makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better
than any other part of the world.  Many of the legends he
records; many of the superstitions--to call them that;--many of
the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to
Crete.  Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were
very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does
not figure greatly in their legends.  But in Crete the friendship
of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses
still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they
do in Homer.

There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he
give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns;
exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times.  He mentions the
_Kubizeteres,_ Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown
elsewhere.  They perform in couples; and when he mentions them,
it is in the dual number.  Preternatural voices are an Homeric
tradition:  Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when
Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened.
In Crete such voices are said to be still common:  shepherds
carry on conversations at incredible distances--speak to, and are
answered by, men not yet in sight.--Dequincey gives several other
such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very
convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to
the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, _alias_ Homer, must
have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;--say, was brought
up there.

Now Crete is much nearer Egypt than the rest of Greece is; and
may very likely have shared in a measure of Egyptian culture at
the very beginning of the European manvantara, and even before.
Of course, in past cycles it had been a great center of culture
itself; but that was long ago, and I am not speaking of it.  In
the tenth century A.D., three hundred years before civilization,
in our own cycle, had made its way from the West Asian Moslem
world into Christendom, Sicily belonged to Egypt and shared in
its refinement--was Moslem and highly civilized, while Europe
was Christian and barbarous; later it became a main channel
through which Europe received enlightenment.  May not Crete
have played a like part in ancient times?  I mean, is it
not highly probable?  May it not have been--as Sicily was
to be--a mainly European country under Egyptian influence,
and a seat of Egyptianized culture?

Let us, then, suppose Homer a Greek, born early in the ninth
century B.C., taken in childhood to Crete, and brought up there
in contact with cultural conditions higher than any that obtained
elsewhere among his own people.

But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep
enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and
culture, to wander forth among the islands singing.--

     _En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi
     Melpomen,_

says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi,
perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island
in the Cyclades.

He would have had some training, it is likely, as an Aoidos: a
good founding in the old stories which were their stock in trade,
and which all pointed to the past glory of his race. In Crete he
had seen the culture of the Egyptians; in Asia Minor, the
strength and culture of the Lydians; now in his wanderings
through the isles he saw the disunion and rudeness of the Greeks.
But the old traditions told him of a time when Greeks acted
together and were glorious:  when they went against, and
overthrew, a great West Asian Power strong and cultured like the
Lydians and Egyptians.  Why should not he create again the glory
that once was Greece?

     _Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achileos!_

--Goddess, aid me to sing the wrath (and grandeur) of a Greek
hero!--Let the Muses help him, and he will remind his people of
an ancient greatness of their own:  of a time when they were
united, and triumphed over these now so much stronger peoples!
So Dante, remembering ancient Rome, evoked out of the past and
future a vision of United Italy; so in the twelfth century a
hundred Welsh bards sand of Arthur.

I think he would have created out of his own imagination
the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans.  It
does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition.  Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself.  Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it, by two conditions:  what he saw of the life of
his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of
civilization in Egyptianized Crete.  He was consciously picturing
the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more
cultured than his own.  Floating legends would tell him much
of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.
Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.
How would he go to work?  In this way, I think.  The Greeks,
says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not,
as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous.  Now what is strength
like, and civilization?  Why, I have them before me here to
observe, here in Crete.  But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a
Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown
among Greeks.--I do not mean that he consciously set this plan
before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that
he, or anyone, would follow.  Civilization would have meant for
him Cretan civilization:  the civilization he knew:  that part of
the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness.  But in his
conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire
to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the
Egyptianized culture he knew.  So I think that the conditions of
life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination,
working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and
Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that.  He made his people
essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features
drawn from civilized life.

One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances:  tales from of
old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to
fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers.  The bards
saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the
far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in
trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.
When they wrote of Cai--Sir Kay the Seneschal--that so subtle was
his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall
as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely
celtic element:  the tradition of the greatness of, and the
magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set
him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were
simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans.  Material culture,
as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.

Lying was traditionally a Greek vice.  The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth.  Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections.  He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul.  On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was.  Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed.  This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high:  very much
higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that
had been made by that time in general culture.  Andromache, in
Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a
Greek, but Egyptian idea.

Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of
the plebeian and peasant life of his time.  Hesiod had not the
grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down
the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of
the English Crabbe.  It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of
things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and
slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from
the background of his own day.  Nor did Shakespeare, trying to
paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan
Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from
the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London
prentices, cobblers and the like.  Learned Ben, on the other
hand, contrives in his _Sejanus_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and
sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and
clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson;
never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly.  But Shakespeare
rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less
Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the
life, and from the life he saw about him.  The deeper you see
into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter;
you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the
externals worry about themselves.  Now Homer was a deal more
like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:
he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his
contemporaries.  Men in those days, he says, were of huger
stature than they are now.  And yet, when his imagination is not
actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero,
real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to
obtrude on him.  So he lets in bits now and again that belong to
the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of
Hesiod's dismal picture.

Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his
songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just
now, "in the ancient sacred hymns."  As Shakespeare was first an
actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on
his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old
hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker
of new ones.  He saw the wretched condition of his people,
contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and
was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as
yoke-fellow with race-pride.  You shall see presently how the
intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been
something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression:  he had
seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to
fate no quality but cruelty.  Impassioned by what we may call
patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for
Greek epic:  the story of a Greek contest with and victory over
West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West
Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and
Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth
the hand of the great enemy, fate.  In different moods and at
different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a
large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.

And the Odyssey?  Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his
old age.  Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and
many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and
there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all.  Someone
says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than
from that of Homer.  I do not know.  It is a better story than
the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind.  Yet
it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are
discrepant and incompatible parts.

There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed
down unwritten for several centuries.  Well; I can imagine the
Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the
verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so
preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But
I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to
imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me
Homer must have written or dictated them at first.  Writing in
Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times.  It is
now, anywhere, to illiterates.  In Caesar's day, as he tells us,
it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but
the people did not.  It seems probable that writing was not in
general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me,
certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services
to those who did.  But there was writing in Crete long before the
Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the
first Egyptian Dynasties, for example.  And here is a point to
remember:  alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost
and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of
writing.  Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since
Lemurian days.  When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a
poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine
Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he
chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.

Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer?  What
can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the
picture I have attempted to make?  Very little; yet perhaps
something.  I think his historical importance is greater, for us
now, than his literary importance.  I doubt you shall find in him
as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the
hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example.  I doubt he was
an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious
mind the truths that make men free.  Plato did not altogether
approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not
fear to follow.  I think the great Master-Poets of the world have
been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they
presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul.  I believe
that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that
therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated.  He
pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation:  his fame is
chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and
use their hats for speaking-trumpets.  We have in English no
approximately decent translation of him.  Someone said that Pope
served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince
was moved to cry:  "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful
and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in
intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true
respect.  Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of
Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would
loathe Homer.  Pope held that water should manifest, so to say,
through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to
be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer.  Homer was more
familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the
yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands.  Which
pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous
sea-epithet:  the thunder-on-the-precipices of

     _poluphloisboio thalasses,_

or the lisping-on-the-sands of

    _ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_

(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates
of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to
Mr. Pope.

As to his style, his manner or movement:  to summarize what
Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do):  it is as direct
and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but
noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's.  There is no Dantesque
periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but
he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly,
clearly, and yet with exultation.  (Yet there is retardation
often by long similes.)  And he either made a language for
himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous
as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation.  But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music.  Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom
Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect.  Newman
had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that
it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's
side.  Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary
virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to
certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity,
designate imperfections:  therein following De Quincey, who read
Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a
critic, saw things sometimes.  _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says
Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked."  He was
the product of a great creative force; which did not however
work in a great literary age:  and all I am going to say is
merely a bearing out of this.

First there is his poverty of epithets.  He repeats the same ones
over and over again.  He can hardly mention Hector without
calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering-
helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_--
"of Hector the tamer of war-steeds."  Over and over again we have
_anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles."  Over and
over again is the sea _poluphloisbois-terous,_ as if he could say
nothing new about it.  Having discovered one resounding phrase
that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just
content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his
imagination as to flash some new revelation on it.  As if Hamlet
should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet
as "the hesitating Dane."......  But think how the Myriad-minded
One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up
new revelatory figures and epithets about everything:  how he
could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough
hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human
lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous
burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but
pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour
you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have
said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it
all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to
Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer,
with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.

Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you
a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:

     _Ten d'apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?_

--Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But
no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted
Hector;" or _tout simplement,_ 'Hector answered.' And hardly can
anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some
variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:

     _Ton d'emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon.
     Hos phato.  Ten d'outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus_

--whereafter at seven lines down we get again:

     _Ten de meg' ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;_

--in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and
unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no
adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators,
whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will
remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has
fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme
thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest
over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always
some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So
he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and
so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's--would
still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel-
values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the
Soul and the Eternal.

Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true
that his reputation gains on the principle of _Omne ignotum pro
magnifico_--because he is unknown to most that praise him--let
none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His
faults--to call them that--are such as you would expect from his
age, race, and peculiar historic  position; his virtues are
drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from
the Unfathomable that flowed through him.  He had the high
serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them
highly, deeply and seriously.  We may compare him to Dante:  who
also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with
a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more:  a
purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.
Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important
poetical monument existing."  Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry
would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.
But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a
less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante,
Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe--to name only poets
of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul-
symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.

Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism.  If there is paucity
of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his
surgery.  I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the
Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was
dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way.  Now Poetry
essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations
are with the Soul.

"From Homer and Polygnotus,"  says Goethe, "I daily learn more
and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly
speaking, to enact Hell."  A truth, so far as it goes:  this
Earth is hell; there is no hell, says H.P. Blavatsky, but a man-
bearing planet.  But we demand of the greatest, that they shall
see beyond hell into Heaven.  Homer achieves his grandeur
oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human
fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the
bright Reality.  Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy,
Helen says:

     "Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
     Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
     Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders,
     Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus--
     Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
     Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved
         Lacedaimon?
     Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound
         through the waters,
     Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes,
     All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?"

And then:

     _Hos phato.  Tous d'ede kalechen phusizoos aia,
     En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie._

     "--So spake she; but they long since under Earth were
         reposing
     There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon."

                [From Dr. Hawtrey's translation, quoted by
Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]

There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry
about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that
strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner.  Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:

  "Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them:  the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."

You hear the high pride and pathos in that.  To be a poet, he
says:  to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing:  is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate.  It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner.  The pride is lacking quite:  the intuition for a
divinity within man.  But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate:  even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down.  Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said:  "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses."  How different the note of Milton:

     "Those other two, equal with me in fate,
     So were I equal with them in renown--"

or:

     "Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
     On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
     In darkness, and by dangers compassed round."

And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows
of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been
astonished at fate's presumption.

We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:

     _Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--

     "Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"

      _Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
     Zoein achnumenous.  Autoi de l'akedees eisin_--

     "The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
     Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."

Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense;
there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty
resignation.  As if he said:  We are miserable; there is nothing
else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss
about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth
hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in
these cases his grand manner.  His attitude is, I think, nearer
the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons,
were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night.  But he
and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did
not.  His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past
glory beyond the nightfall.

But where does this Homeric mood lead us?  To no height of truth,
I think.  Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature
of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the
life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be
Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the
Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is
Joy."  Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the
veil that hides it.  God knows we see enough of the veil; but
the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show
the brightness which it hides.  If the personality were all, and
a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave;
then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in
all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses
of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as
something unknowable, adverse and aloof.  But the Greater Part of
a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little
incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is
understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur
the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon
its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad:  the passion and
spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough
to let him see this outward world:  personalities, with their
motive-springs of action within themselves:  his greatness, his
sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he
lacked vision for the Meanings.  I found him then less than
Shakespeare:  whose clear knowledge of human personalities--
ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument;
who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set
forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma,
and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the
triumph of the soul, the Magician, in _The Tempest._  And I count
him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to
justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of
fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the
Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not
yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior
to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;--I count
him less than the "Evening Dragon" of _Samson Agonistes,_ whose
last word to us is

     "Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
     Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."

And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose
words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his
journey

       .... _pei dolci pomi
     Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
     Ma fino al centro pria convien ch'io tomi:_--

"to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my
true Leader; but first is"--convien--how shall you translate the
pride and resignation of that word?--"it behoves,"  we must say,
"it convenes"--"first it is convenient that I should fall as far
as to the center (of hell);"--who must end the gloom and terror
of that journey, that fall, with

     _E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,_

"And then we came forth to behold again the Stars;"  and who came
from his ascent through purifying Purgatory with

     _Rifatto si, come piante novelle
     Rinnovellate di novella fronda,
     Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle_--

"So made anew, like young plants in spring with fresh foliage, I
was pure and disposed to come forth among the Stars;"--and who
must end his _Paradiso_ and his life-work announcing

     _L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,_

"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars."  Ah, glory
to this Dante!  Glory to the man who would end nothing but
with the stars!




III.  GREEKS AND PERSIANS


Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece.
Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited
England, and was duly amazed at all he saw.  Being a very
important person indeed, he was invited to pay his respects to
Queen Victoria.  he told her of the many wonders he had seen;
and took occasion to ask her, as the supreme authority, how such
things came to be.  What was the secret of England's greatness?
--She rose to it magnificently, and did precisely what a large
section of her subjects would have expected of her.  She solemnly
handed him a copy of the Bible, and told him he should find his
answer in that.

She was thinking, no doubt, of the influence of Christian
teaching; if called on for the exact passage that had worked the
wonder, very likely she would have turned to the Sermon on the
Mount.  Well; very few empires have founded their material
greatness on such texts, as _The meek shall inherit the earth._
They take a shorter road to it.  If a man ask of thee thy coat,
and thou give him thy cloak also, thou dost not (generally) build
thyself a world-wide commerce.  When he smiteth thee on they left
cheek, and thou turnest to him thy right for the complementary
buffet, thou dost not (as a rule) become shortly possessed of his
territories.  Queen Victoria lived in an age when people did not
notice these little discrepancies; so did Mr. Podsnap.  And yet
there was much more truth in her answer than you might think.

King James's Bible is a monument of mighty literary style; and
one that generations of Englishmen have regarded as divine, a
message from the Ruler of the Stars.  They have been reading it,
and hearing it read in the churches, for three hundred years.
Its language has been far more familiar to them than that of any
other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it,
probably, than from all other sources combined.  The Puritans
of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified
themselves with the folk it tells about:  Cromwell's armies saw
in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of
Gideon."  When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the
Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command
of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite
Amalek hip and thigh."  Phrases from the Old Testament are in the
mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the
grand literary style.

Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness.
When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind
the words.  It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the
Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul's existence.  So
you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the
soul.  There are periods when the soul draws near its racial
vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and us:  through all
the utterances of such times one is apt to hear the thunder from
beyond.  Although the soul have no word to say, or although it
message suffer change in passing through the brain-mind, so that
not high truth, but even a lie may emerge--it still comes, often,
ringing with the grand accents.  Such a period was that which
gave us Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible, and Brown, and
Taylor, and all the mighty masters of English prose.  Even when
their thought is trivial or worse, you are reminded, by the march
and mere order of their words, of the majesty of the Soul.

When Deborah sings of that treacherous murderess, Jael the wife
of Heber the Kenite, that before she slew her guest and ally
Sisera, "He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought
forth butter in a lordly dish,"--you are aware that, to the
singer, no question of ethics was implied.  Nothing common,
nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct
destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible.
It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself
was protagonist.  Little Israel rose against the mighty of
this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and
the Unseen was with little Israel.  The application is false,
unethical, abominable--as coming through brain-minds of that
kind.  But you must go back behind the application, behind
the brain-mind, to find the secret of the air of greatness that
pervades it.  It is a far-off reflection of this eternal truth:
that the Soul, thought it speak through but one human being, can
turn the destinies and overturn the arrogance of the world.  When
David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered;
yea, let all his enemies be scattered!"  he, poor brain-mind, was
thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with
whom he had better have been finding a way to peace;--but the
Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his
passions and his treacheries.  So such psalms and stories,
though their substance be vile enough, do by their language
yet remind us somehow of the grandeur of the Spirit.  That
is what style achieves.

Undoubtedly this grand language of the Bible, as that of Milton
and Shakespeare in a lesser degree--lesser in proportion as they
have been less read--has fed in the English race an aptitude, an
instinct, for action on a large imperial scale.  It is not easy
to explain the effect of great literature; but without doubt it
molds the race.  Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral
import, is very mixed.  There is much that is true and beautiful;
much that is treacherous and savage.  So that its moral and
ethical effects have been very mixed too.  But its style, a
subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large
and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might
find.  The more spiritual is any influence--that is, the less
visible and easy to trace--the more potent it is; so style in
literature may be counted one of the most potent forces of all.
Through it, great creative minds mold the destinies of nations.
Let Theosophy have expression as noble as that of the Bible--as
it will--and of that very impulse it will bite deep into the
subconsciousness of the race, and be the nourishment of grand
public action, immense conceptions, greater than any that have
come of Bible reading, because pure and true.  Our work is to
purify the channels through which the Soul shall speak; the
Teachers have devoted themselves to establishing the beginnings
of this Movement in right thought and right life.  But the great
literary impulse will come, when we have learned and earned the
right to use it.

Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the
Greeks--and more also.  They heard his grand manner, and were
billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane.  _Anax andron
Agamemnon_--what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream
he compounded of common clay?  Never mind what this king of men
did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you
have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul!
The _human_ Soul?

"Tush!" said they, "the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we
are!".... And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian
tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and
dream grand racial dreams.  For this is a much more impressionable
people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows
in upon their minds quickly and easily.  Homer in Greece
--once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and
canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public
reading (as the Bible in the churches)--had an advantage even
over the Bible in England.  When Cromwell and his men grew mighty
upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to
the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished,
and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living
representatives of Israel.  But the Greek, rising on the swell of
Homer's roll and boom, had need of no such transformation.  The
uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no
pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race.  We have seen in
Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and
embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to
change them.--Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but
Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at
Ilion!  There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had
within and the squalor he saw without.  Yes, he could sing; he
could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their
magnificence.  But what could a song do?  Had it feet to travel
Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly
authority to command her sons into redemption?--Ah, poor blind
old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs
than these!

Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your
poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to
make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to
do it, if done it could be.  Then for about two hundred and sixty
years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having
your way with your Greeks.  Your music was ringing in the ears of
mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long
roll of your hexameters.  There came to be manuscripts of you in
every city:  corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of
them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi,
to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good
speculation to praise.  You were everywhere in Greece:  a great
and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature:  by the time
Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the
foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized.  Solon, Pisistratus, or
one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a
vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of
the Hellenes.  From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period
we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece
for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating
them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at
last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less
articulate Iliad.  From Plato and others we get hints leading to
the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that
it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the
Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy
being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see
there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering
songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred
Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

------
* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer
and the Homeridae.
------

Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens.  A mighty Power
in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent
islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border.  But an old
blind minstrel has been having his way with these:  and the
punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish,
but where you are punished;--has been suggesting to them, from
the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great
racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally,
in their hearts.--The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt
has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go
down before them.  But there is an old blind minstrel, long since
grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside
Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart.
Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian:  Athens and
Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under
the urge of archaic hexameters and in the face of this common
danger, they can co-operate after a fashion.  The world is in a
tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and
ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters,
and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting.  The soul of a
nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music
of olden proud resounding lines.  Who led the Grecian fleet at
Salamis?--Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these
centuries.  Who led the victors at Marathon?  Not sly Athenian
Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth:
blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on
the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian
eye could see:  the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of
his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias;
Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek
side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically
Prohellene.  We are to think that Europe since has been great and
free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held
back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism.  All of which is great
nonsense.  Europe since has not been great and free and glorious;
very often she has been quite the reverse.  She has, at odd
times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government;
which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found
long ago.  As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been
with the one, now with the other.  And the Persians were not
barbarians by any means.  And when you talk of Asia, remember
that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to
England.  Let us have not more of this preoccupation with
externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man.  I suppose
ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were
specified, when it was said  _Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?_...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if  Marathon,
Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane
like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed
by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately,
upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that
wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two
things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its
maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on
its  boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because
all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been
found, nor ever will be. There is an  impulse from  the inner
planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and
carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and
leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or
shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound
to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered
Rome from  mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it
forever?  Nothing--but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began
in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a
splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we
find, being  always the length of a national illumination. She
began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out under Cambyses and Darius to
her maximum growth--for half the thirteen decades expanding
steadily. Then she touched Greece, where a younger cycle was
rising, and recoiled. She should have been at high tide precisely
three years before-Marathon--a  half-cycle after the accession of
Cyrus, or in 493;--and was. Then the Law-pronounced its  _Thus
far and no further;_ and enforced it  with Homer's songs, and
Greek valor, and Darius' death, and Xerxes' fickle childishness
(he smacked the Hellespont because it was naughty). These things
together brought to naught the might and ambition and bravery of
Iran; but had they been lacking, the Law would have found other
means. Though Xerxes and Themistocles had both sat at home doing
nothing, Alexander would still have  marched east in  his time,
and  Rome conquered the world. So discount all talk of Greece's
having saved  Europe, which was never in danger. But you may say
Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires--was used
by the Law for that purpose--which so brilliantly have illumined
Europe since.

Persia rose in the evening of that  West Asian manvantara; the
empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria  chiefly, had been
slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her
one, had several periods of glory.  A long habit of empire
-building had been formed there, which carried Persia rapidly and
easily to her far limits.  Assyria, the _piece de resistance_ of
the whole manvantara, with huge and long effort had created, so
to say, an astral mold; of which Persia availed herself, and
overflowed its boundaries, conquering regions east and west
Assyria never knew.  But if she found the mold and the habit
there to aid her, she came too late for the initial energies of
the morning, or the full forces of the manvantaric noon.  Those
had been wielded by the great Tiglath Pilesers and Assurbanipals
of earlier centuries; fierce conquerors, splendid builders,
ruthless patrons of the arts.  What was left for the evening and
Persia could not carry her outward her full thirteen decades, but
only half of them:  sixty-five years her tides were rising, and
then she touched Greece.  Thence-forward she remained stationary
within her borders, not much troubled internally, until the four
-twenties.  To a modern eye, she seems on the decline since
Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on
the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough.  A Pancho Villa
to chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing!
Xerxes is no Darius, true:  Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing
like.  But through both their reigns there is in the main good
government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order;
and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the
Persians.  Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you
would have seen no great falling off.  Hystaspes himself had
been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the
Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;--though great at
that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample
provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that
failed.  For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors,
and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had
explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by
a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile.  Well; and Xerxes carried
it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send
ships to sail round Africa?  If there was no more conquering, it
was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would
bother about that Greece?--Darius Hystaspes was the last strong
kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at
least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til
434.  So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of
comfortable, even glorious, years.

   Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic
impulses down to her final fall.  For lack of another to take her
place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit
here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble.
When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial
backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her
heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to
say them effectually nay.  Had there been some other West Asian
power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish
its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the
Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that
other supreme during the remaining years.  But there was none.
The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian
central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had
their many days long since.  Egypt would have done something, if
she could; would have like to;--but her own cycles were against
her.  She had the last of her cyclic days under the XXVIth
Dynasty.  In 655 Psamtik I reunited and resurrected her while his
overlord Assurbanipal was wrecking his--Assurbanipal's--empire
elsewhere; thirteen decades afterwards, in 525, she fell before
Cambyses.  Thirteen decades, nearly, of Persian rule followed,
with interruptions of revolt, before she regained her independence
in 404;--stealing, you may say, the nine years short from
the weakness of Persia.  Then she was free for another half
-cycle, less one year; a weak precarious freedom at best, lost to
Artaxerxes Ochus in 340.  All but the first fourteen years of it
fell beyond the limits of the manvantara; the West Asian forces
were spent.  Egypt was merely waiting til the Greek cycle should
have sunk low enough and on to the military plane; and had not
long to wait.  She paid back most of her nine years to Persia;
then hailed Alexander as her savior; and was brought by him, to
some extent, under the influence of European cycles; to share
then in what uninteresting twilight remained to Greece, and
presently in the pomps and crimsons of Rome.

Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it
should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia.
The Athenian first half-cycle--sixty-five years from the
inception of the hegemony--ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian
War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase.  Another
half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time
became dominant in Greece.  But not yet had a power consolidated,
which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world.
Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps
turned their attention to finding those who should put down
Sparta.  Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and
Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395.  A year after, he and
Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet.  In 387 came the Peace of
Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of
old; the suzerainty of Greece.  But she was not strong; her
cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of
her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries.
Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus,
between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored
her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as
great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch.  He
prepared the way for Alexander.

So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high
spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call
Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations
of clean and noble lives.  From that spirituality the impulse
descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with
results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor
of a few ruins in the wilderness--the course the lion and the
lizard keep.  It reached the plane of military power, and flowed
over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them
with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire.
Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in
Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and
on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward,
till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an
alertness in Athens.  It contacted then the crest of the Persian
wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor.  It
blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane  of mind and
creative imagination.  It came down presently on to the plane of
militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the
eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew.  Where it met
a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained
stationary before that.  And at last it was spent, and itself
overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on
impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact
with Persia.

The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European
manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were
uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their
great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations
of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the
unknown nations of the north or west already at that time
awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese.  Like
Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an
ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had
done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities.  Now
that they have emerged into modern history, as then when
they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like
characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which
they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under
the Byzantine Empire.  A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities;
these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that
pralaya had been at all disastrous.  With the ancient Greeks,
the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means;
they retained through their great age many of the vices of
plebeianism.  They won their successes for the most part on
sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary
intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large,
they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the
fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality
and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on
Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the
balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions
commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein
lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and
there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole,
says Mahaffy--I think rightly--there was something sordid,
grasping, and calculating: _noblesse oblige_ made little appeal
to  them--was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did
exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know
best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was
a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been
mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of
myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless
carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had
Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;--of her we have only heard
Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a
Greek  _gentleman_ in public life; hardly that combination of
personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured
and cultured living;--with, very often, ultra-conservatism,
narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The
Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached
their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier;
probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration
which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he
brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other
Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but
took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those
tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox
nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took
always most of its features from Lacedaemon.

All of which I quote for the light's sake it throws on the past
of Greece: the past of her past, and the ages before her history.
Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it
is what you shall find always, or almost always. I spoke of the
Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are
plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal. As a
pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its
refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life
currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods.
Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization,
mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back
into the vortex;--and then to be cast up anew with the new
manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped
and infused by the life-currents again.  In Greece an old
manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the
pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in
Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta.
Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid
system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual:  there is that about
pouring new wine into old bottles.  Sparta was old and conservative;
covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior;
was inept politically--as old aristocracies so commonly are;
she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of
the mind which is the grace, as Bushido--to use the best
name there is for it--is the virtue, of the patrician.  You
may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she
began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the
cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian
democracy had imposed on them:  when there is a war, some men
will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.--
Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she
naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came.  But
she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits,
through lack of culture, were something dull.  She lost that
leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed
with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained
immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything
to the quickening of her wits--this having at her doors so
contrasting a neighbor, for example.--Young?  Well, yes; I
suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was
ages before Troy fell.  She plays no great part in the legends of
the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her.  She
had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her
greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.

As all Greeks admired the Spartans--what we call a 'sneaking'
admiration--so too they admired the Persians; who were gentleman
in a great sense, and in most moral qualities their betters.  Who
was _Ho Basileus, The King_ par excellence?  Always 'the Great
King, the King of the Persians.'  Others were mere kings of
Sparta, or where it might be.  And this Great King was a far-way,
tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy
tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities
compared with which even Athens seemed mean.  Greek drama sought
its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in
the myths of prehistory, save once--when Aeschylus found a
kindred atmosphere, and the material he wanted, in the palace of
the Great King.  To whom, as a matter of history, not unrecorded
by Herodotus, his great chivalrous barons accorded a splendid
loyalty,--and loyalty is always a thing that lies very near the
heart of Bushido.  Most Greeks would cheerfully sell their native
city upon an impulse of chagrin, revenge, or the like.  Xerxes'
ships were overladen, and there was a storm; the Persian lords
gaily jumped into the sea to lighten them.  Such Samurai action
might not have been impossible to Greeks,--Spartans especially;
but in the main their eyes did not wander far from the main
chance.  You will think of many exceptions; but this comes as
near truth, probably, as a generalization may.  We should
understand their temperament; quick and sensitive, capable of
inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on
enduring principles.  That jumping into the seas was nothing to
the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in
defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or
the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them
to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do.  But if Greeks
had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have
come down!

They were great magnificoes, very lordly gentlemen, those Persian
nobles; _hijosdalgo,_ as they say in Spain; men of large lives,
splendor and leisure, scorning trade; mighty huntsmen before the
Lord.  Of the Greeks, only the Spartans were sportsmen; but
where the Spartans hunted foxes and such-like small fry, The
Persians followed your true dangerous wild-fowl:  lions,
leopards, and tigers.  A great satrap could buy up Greece almost
at any time; could put the Greeks to war amongst themselves, and
finance his favorite side out of his own pocket.  On such a scale
they lived; and travelers and mercenaries brought home news of
it to Greece; and Greeks whose wealth might be fabulous strove
to emulate the splendor they heard of.  The Greeks made better
heavy armor--one cause of the victories; but for the most part
the Persian crafts and manufactures outshone the Greek by far.
All these things I take from Mahaffy, who speaks of their culture
as "an ancestral dignity for superior to, and different from, the
somewhat mercantile refinement of the Greeks."  The secret of the
difference is this:  the West Asian manvantara, to which the
Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the
European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the
latter, beside the former, had an air of _parvenu._  The Greeks
dwelt on the Persian's borders; and fought him when they must;
intrigued with or against him when they might; called him
barbarian for self-respect's sake--and admired and envied him
always.  Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their
superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the
contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops
up the vices only of his betters.  But Alexander found the
Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty
huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was
ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms
and learn their virtues.

Where and when did this high tradition grow up?  There was not
time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of
Cyrus and Marathon.  In truth we are to see in these regions
vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to
sort out and fix their chronology.  Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian;
from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen
years or so before.  The Medes had been rising since the earlier
part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the
kindred race of Persians under their sway.  Sometime then, too, I
am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster: about whose
date there is more confusion than about that of any other World
Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years.  But
Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all
had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then;
it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the
spiritual climate of the world.  The _Bundahish,_ the Parsee
account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander;
almost all scholars reject the figure--once more, "it is their
nature to."  But you will note that 258 is about as much as to
say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think
the probabilities are strong that the _Bundahish_ is right.  The
chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these:  Greek
accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and
there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before
Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,--which word is from
Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism.  The
explanation is this:  you shall find it in H.P. Blavatsky:  there
were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last
(as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he
invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a
religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries.  Where
then did his predecessors teach?--Where Zal and Rustem thundered
as they might; in the old Iran of the _Shah Nameh,_ the land of
Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru.  Too remote for all scholars
even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it
at about 1100 B.C.--we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria"--
which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this
the Persian tradition came--last down to, and through, the period
of the Achaemenidae.  What arts, what literature, these latter
may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative
and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is
exceedingly unlikely they had none.  Dio Chrysostom, in the first
century B.C., says that "neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the
chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster"; which may
mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a
great Achaemenian poetry.  Why then is this culture lost, since
if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that
of the Greeks?  Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving
thing; there is nothing in it.  Persia now is not contemporary
with Japan; nor modern China with Europe or America.  The
Achaemenians are separated from us by two pralayas; while
between us and the Greeks there is but one.  When our present
Europe has gone down, and a new barbarism and Middle Ages have
passed over France, Britain and Italy, and given place in turn to
a new growth of civilization--what shall we know of this Paris,
and Florence, and London?  As much and as little as we know now
of Greece and Rome.  We shall dig them up and reconstruct them;
found our culture on theirs, and think them very wonderful for
mere centers of (Christian) paganism; we shall marvel at their
genius, as shown in the fragments that go under the names of
those totally mythological poets, Dante and Milton; and at their
foul cruelty, as shown by their capital punishment and their
wars.  And what shall we know of ancient Athens and Rome?  Our
scholars will sneer at the superstition that they ever existed;
our theologians will say the world was created somewhat later.

Or indeed, no; I think it will not be so.  I think we shall have
established an abiding perception of truth:  Theosophy will have
smashed the backbone of this foolish Kali-Yuga as a little,
before then.

So that Creasy is all out in his estimate of the importance
of Marathon and the other victories.  Wars are only straws
to show which way the current flows; and they do that only
indifferently.  They are not the current themselves, and they do
not direct it; and were men wise enough to avoid them, better
than the best that was ever won out of war would be won by other
means that the Law would provide.  And yet the Human Spirit will
win something out of all eventualities, even war, if Kama and the
Cycles permit.  In a non-political sense the Persian Wars bore
huge harvest for Greece; the Law used them to that end.  The
great effort brought out all the latent resources of the Athenian
mind:  the successes heightened Greek racial feeling to a pitch.
--What! we could stand against huge Persia?--then we are not
unworthy of the men that fought at Ilion, our fathers; the race
and spirit of _anax andron Agamemnon_ is not dead!  Ha, we can do
anything; there are no victories we may not win!  And here is the
dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is
no anxiety now to hold our minds.  We may go forth conquering and
to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and
subdue unknown empires of the spirit!--And here is Athens the
quick-witted, hegemon of Greece; her ships everywhere on the
wine-dark seas; her citizens everywhere; her natural genius
swelled by an enormous sense of achievement; her soul, grown
great under a great stress, now freed from the stress and at
leisure to explore:--in contact with opposite-minded Sparta; in
contact with conservative and somewhat luxuriously-living slow
Thebes;--with a hundred other cities;--in contact with proud
Persia; with Egypt, fallen, but retaining a measure of her old
profound sense of the Mysteries and the reality of the Unseen;
--from all these contacts and sources a spirit is born in Athens
that is to astonish and illumine the world.  And Egypt is now in
revolt from the Persian; and intercourse with her is easier than
ever before in historical times; and the triremes, besides what
spiritual cargoes they may be bringing in from her, are bringing
in cargoes of honest material papyrus to tempt men to write down
their thoughts.--So the flowering of Greece became inevitable;
the Law intended it, and brought about all the conditions.





IV--AESCHYLUS AND HIS ATHENS


Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave
rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time;
whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the
truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.

The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in
which the world took a definite step downward. There had been
present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations
sweet: that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity. Whether
they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race
began, who can say? Very possibly not; for in a million years
cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions
as desolate as our own have obtained. There may have been
withdrawals, and again expansions outward. But certainly they
were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before.
What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when
the history that we know begins, they were already declining:--we
get no definite news, except of the Iron Age. The Mysteries were
not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire;
and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be
initiated. But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing
source of inspiration; already a good century before Pericles
they must have ceased to rule life. Pythagoras--born, probably,
in the five-eighties--had found it necessary, to obtain that with
which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what
he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry
and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul--and very likely Britain,
their acredited headquarters. From these countries he brought
home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he--and
the race--needed something that Eleusis could no longer give.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India,
Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also
Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries,
more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own;
--which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the
Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to
be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge. The substance of
the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely
gone.

Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity
to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in
her. He died in  527; two years later a son was born to the
Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some
such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parnassus, as happened
over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence
in the May of 1265. In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the
assassination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens
already fomenting with the yeast of new things. About that time
this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening
for the vintage, and fell asleep. In his dream Dionysos, God of
the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for
the Dionysian Festival. On waking, he found himself endowed with
genius: beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to
clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he
had been trained to it for years.

He competed first in 499--against Choerilos and Pratinas, older
poets--and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily,
where he remained for seven years. The dates of Pythagoras are
surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his
death. I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that
great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the
years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there,
were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and
initiation? "Veniat Aeschylus," says Cicero, "non poeta solum,
sed etiam Pythagoreus: sic enim accepimus ";--and we may accept
it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age;
and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great
Theosophist. They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and
Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated
into them--since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus
alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power
of Theosophy.

Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the
inner history of his age;--the life of Aeschylus, I think, can
interpret for us that of Athens. There are times when the
movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the
great wheel turning; this was one.  Aeschylus had proudly
distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest
honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in
the battle-picture painted for a  memorial of the victory.  He
fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction.
In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the
dramatic competitions.  These were the years during which Athens
was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides' ascendency.
 In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on,
great in faith. In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting.
Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the
Gods, was wholly at one with his Athens--an Athens alive enough
then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest
when it spoke to her--to award Aeschylus, year after year, the
chief dramatic prize. Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a
new position:  her heroism and intelligence had won their reward,
and she was set at the head of Greece. Six years later Aeschylus
produced _The Persians,_ the first of the seven extant out of the
seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely
the patriotic Athenian. In 471 came the  _Seven against Thebes;_
from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the
whole future history of Athens.

Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during
those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the
Just--inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the
other, Themistocles--precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as
a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a
genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides,
despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he
persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens:  he
was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content.
That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any
means: should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating
the Greek world. Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to
holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough;
but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails
to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of
mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing
fatally. He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he
had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy.
Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the
moral cost. She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered
them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty. The
_Seven against Thebes_ was directed by Aeschylus against the
Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy.
Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of
the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the Gods.

His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes;
he had been, in _The Persians,_ the laureate of Salamis; by the
sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times
in succession.--And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of
Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those
obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated
them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine _Samson Agonistes_ put
on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of
classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand
sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker
and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering
the elite:--and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused
to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and
acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the
_Ten O'Clock_--seems really to have been the kind of thing that
happened in Athens.  Tomides was there, with his companions--
little Tomides, the mender of bad soles--and intoxicated by the
grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;--
poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they
understood  and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot
imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside
remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we
need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and
re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult;
and we should have understood him better, with no more than our
present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and
contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to
the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens.  The
human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more
civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The
cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal
plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than
they were.

And yet they were going wrong:  the great cycle had begun
its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our
fool-headed materialism.  In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus
protested against the current of the age. Three years later,
Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.

He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He
gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words--
tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of
the heights of an angry eternity--

     _"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"_

--and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when
they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to
grand aspirations--goes mad now in another sense. She has grown
used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her
own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses;
and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed
complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell
from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt,
lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers,
demagogs and demagoged:  intent--yes--to kill. But he, having yet
something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a
maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising
star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is
formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."

Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this:
his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any
secret--was unaware that what he had said pertained to the
Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known
he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not
been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was
an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement
upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old
and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.--Well, the judges
were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to
what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea;
to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on
poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved
at Salamis":

     _"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"_

--and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to
prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do
much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and
thither he went.

He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing;
with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely
set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing
institutions once held sacred; was the rage;--that funeral speech
of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority
to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.
When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!--it
is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in
the _Agamemnon_--the first play of this last of  his trilogies;
and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the
_Eumenides_--where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened
Areopagus.  Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he
returned to Sicily to die.

Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.
And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.
True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the
Athenian spite.  Though it was the rule that no successful play
should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals'
of Aeschylus should always be in order.  And Aristophanes
testifies to his lasting popularity--when he shows little Tomides
with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had
gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";--and when he shows
Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with
him, and so he had it there for a weapon--whereas Aeschylus's was
still alive and on earth.  Yes; Athens took him again, and
permanently, into favor:  took the poet, but not the Messenger
and his message.  For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of
him:  she had let the divine force, the influx of the human
spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity,
flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of
imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to
the Greeks in vain--as all Greek history and Karma since has been
proclaiming.  But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for
all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece
worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles--is
vital today.  Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks
through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are
the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.

Even the political aspect of his message--the only one I have
touched on--is vital.  It proclaims a truth that underlies all
history:  one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical
Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that
wars may end:  namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy
thing, foundationed upon the human spirit:  a means designed by
the Law for humanity's salvation.  But like all spiritual forces,
it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will
damn.  In its inception, it is vision of the Soul:  of the Racial
or National Soul--which is a divine light to lure us away from
the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and
private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in
a consciousness vastly greater than out own.  But add to that
saving truth this damning corolary:  _I am better than thou; my
race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and
our rights may be your wrongs:_--and you have, though it appear
not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:--you have
debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions
and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering,
you may win to your desire, if you _will;_  because now the
spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and
the national will must become, under that pressure, almost
irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel
before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;--but you
shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the
axe": _Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay._ The
cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run
its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself
shall kneel to races you now sniff at for 'inferior.' You have
brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on
its upward trend there gaily--

     "Ah, let no evil lust attack the host
     Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not;
     For yet they need return in safety home,
     Doubling the goal to run their backward race"
                            [_Agamemnon,_ Plumtre's translation]

The downtrend of the cycle awaits you--the other half--just as
the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the
far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.--That is
among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the  _Agamemnon_ to an
Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of
Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory. The
obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.

I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his _Hamlet;_ with the
_Prometheus Bound_--another tremendous Soul-Symbol--it is
what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of
later Western Literature. I suppose it is pretty certain that
Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot
of his _Agamemnon._ But look here:--

There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his
kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of
an afternoon). And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent
from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the
siege of Troy. Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife
Clytemnestra. Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover
of Gertrude. Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the
paramour of Clytemnestra. Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby
came by his throne and queen. Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered
Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne
and queen. Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his
father's murder. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes,
who avenged  his father's murder.

There, however, the parallel ends. Shakespeare had to paint the
human soul at a certain stage of its evolution: the 'moment of
choice,'  the entering on the path: and brought all his genius to
bear on revealing that. He had, here, to teach Karma only
incidentally; in _Macbeth,_ when the voice cried  'Sleep no
more!'  he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice
rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the
majesty and awfulness of Karma.  It is what he cried to Athens
then, and to all ages since, reiterating _Karma_ with terrible
sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.--I have quoted the
wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from
Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:

     'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'

which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of
Browning's version of the _Agamemnon:_  it gives you some color,
some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we
compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain
of Song?  Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are
storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all
this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind:  Dante--a
prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride
of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to
correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within
that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and
excoriata of the Universe of the Soul.  Milton--a Titan Soul
hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep
to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record--
those two profound significant words, _Titan_ and _Soul,_ for a
memorial to Man of the real nature of Man.  Aeschylus--the
barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of
ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma,
mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph
of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us:  he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.

Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him.  They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling
for expression through a vehicle less than itself.

Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps:  "His genius is so near the
verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into
the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the
nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's _Prometheus;_ but of his
diction alone; for "his power is in concentration--that of
Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he
says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command
over the passions. The interest he excites is startling,
terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but
left the thought, in an English _Double-Dutched,_ far remoter
than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in
English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is
not crystal-clear:  so close-packed and vast are the ideas that
there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only
conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one
is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor
Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need
to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from
the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make
it, I think, any translation of the _Agamemnon_--which so many
have tried to translate--would be fatiguing and a great bore to
read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's
_David and Bethsabe,_ which have been often called Aeschylean
in audacity:--

     "At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
     And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
     Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"

His--the thunder's--fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine
images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out
in language terse, sudden, lofty--and you may get an idea of what
this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and
resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens
then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.

He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and
drove it home. Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of
others; was in fact abominably cruel. Well; she should hear about
Karma; and in such a way that she should--no, but she _should_--
give ear. Karma punished wrong-doing. It was wrong-doing that
Karma punished. You could not do wrong with impunity.--The common
thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the
jealousy of the Gods, and so bring on disaster. This was what
Pindar taught--all-worshiped prosperous Pindar, Aeschylus'
contemporary, the darling poet of the Greeks. The idea is
illustrated by Herodotus' story of the Ring of Polycrates.

You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to
Amasis of Egypt for an alliance.  But wary Amasis, noting his
invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest
the Gods should grow jealous:  so Polycrates threw a ring into
the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but
an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for
his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of
which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance
with thanks.  Such views or feelings had come to be Greek
orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far
from the orthodoxies--hence his extreme popularity:  we dearly
love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and
think it right to think.  But such a position would not do for
Aeschylus.  He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.

     "There live an old saw framed in ancient days
      In memories of men, that high estate,
      Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies,
      But that from good success
      Springs to the race a woe insatiable.
      But I, apart from all,
      Hold this my creed alone:
      Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill
      Like to their parent stock."

Needless to say the translation--Dean Plumptre's in the main--
fails to bring out the force of the original.

We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell
was not the important thing.  They knew it in advance; it was
one of their familiar legends.  What they went to hear was
Aeschylus' treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching.
That was what was new to them:  the thing for which their eyes
and ears were open.  We go to the theater, as we read novels, for
amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends.
So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not
suspect for using it.  We like Movies shows because they are
entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them
because they are inartistic.

I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a
statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the
drama.  It was, remember, an age of transition:  things were
passing out from the inner planes:  the Mysteries were losing
their virtue.  The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in
character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or
copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too.
Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in
honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with
rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character.  By 499, in
Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that
year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were
given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the
building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first
competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then
he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of
Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression--and something
more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do
their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came
after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship
of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the
Mysteries themselves;--indeed, he did much more than this; for he
infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found
in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean
Brotherhood.--And now as to this new art-form of his.

De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater
was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators
(every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements
that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge
dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you
produce such a play as _Hamlet?_--where the art of the actor
shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay
that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by
the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the
speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to
Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different
theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or
they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be
draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus
given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head
proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an
arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the
whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted,
not spoken;--though in any case, chanted they would be, for they
were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we
have, that verse is meant to be chanted.  So here, to begin with,
the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it
well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the
occasion--the religious nature of the whole festival.

Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps,
of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what
goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal
theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the
conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and
measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They
could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they
wanted to, so far as that goes. Coarse buffoonish country
festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn
occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it
in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for
such impulses are very mysterious. The Gods sow their seed in
season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the
greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries--drama
serious and religious--had been drifting outwards:  things had
been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take
hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an
Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the
method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less,
than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State.  I
imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his
victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean
knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which
suited him--rather than that conventions already existing imposed
formative limits on him.  His genius was aloof, impersonal,
severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need
precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they
not been there.  Briefly, I believe that this is what happened.
Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he
forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.

The theory of modern drama is imitation of life.  It has
nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate,
we call it trash.  But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy
is the illumination of life.  Illumination of life, through
a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane,
and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases
to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine
to be nature,--nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver
and well-atrophied pineal gland.

True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited
way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the
end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to
reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set
forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset
expressed.  Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced
in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that
can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem;
or with the notes of music;--in both of which cases the medium
used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which
the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.

Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we
get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing;
we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them.  Life
is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand
lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His
methods are the same as those of the artists:  between whose
office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_
means only, originally, an Adept Teacher.  Such a one selects
experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them
through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as
the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of
treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus.  He took fragments of possible
experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and
interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber-
portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the
externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner
recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the
lessons life may take many incarnations to teach.  This cannot be
done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than
which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life?  Personality.
Not only our own, but in all those about us.  Personality dodges
and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the
adumbrations of the augustness beyond.  We demand lots of
personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing.  We want
to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and
hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our
own) all springing from the personality.  Human life is what
interests us:  we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and
again.  The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music
of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before
you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime.  But what interested
Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life.  He said:
'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the
week; when you come to the theater you shall have something
else, and greater.'

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious
antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of
the Great King:  a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and
mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other.  Things
should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible.  The
plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance,
statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.
All the action was done off the scenes.  They did not portray the
evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the
personal sense--at all.  The _dramatis personae_ are types,
symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.
In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a
progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy
you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of
time that glimpses may be caught of eternity.  There was no
unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.
In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation
was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.
The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did:
that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered.  So all
was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.
There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the
poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize
upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions
of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and
absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity,
from which the grand truths are visible.  The actors' masks
allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and
it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce:  a unity;
one great word.  There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing
of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale.  The whole drama
is the unfoldment of a single moment:  that, say, in which
Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him--rather, leads him out to
kill him.  To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous
enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three
actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in
retrospect; much chanting by the chorus--Horatio multiplied by a
dozen or so--to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to
allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime
would bring about its karmic punishment.  It is a unity:  one
thunderbolt from Zeus;--first the growl and rumbling of the
thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,--and lo, the man
dead that was to die.  And through the bolt so hurled, so
effective, and with it--the eagle-bark--Aeschylus crying _Karma!_
to the Athenians.

So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied
to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.

Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression,
would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra
comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon.  She has her
handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she
makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice
of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;--
and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him.
They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them,
who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but
to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether.
With Agamemnon comes Cassandra from fallen Troy:  whose fate was
to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw--
and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful
cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning--
none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance.
And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive
elders.   They know or guess how things stand between the queen
and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the
play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the
House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the
foreshadowings of Karma.  But they many not understand or
give credence to the warnings of Cassandra:  Karma disallows
fore-fending against the fall of its bolts.  Troy has fallen, they
say:  and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting
him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,--to whom
the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in
mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.
--You may not that Aeschylus' freedom from the bonds of outer
religion is like Shakespeare's own:  here Zeus figures as symbol
of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments
of the Law;--but in the _Prometheus Bound_ he stands for the
lower nature that crucifies the Higher.

Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus)
let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark;
let there be no dishonoring the native Gods of Troy; (the
Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark
in some of their own conquests recently;)--let there be no
plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously
greedy and cruel;)--or Karma would overtake it own agents, the
Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say--who had not
yet returned home.  This was when the beacons had announced the
fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.

Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more
tragical figure.  Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his
queen's relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty
passion _ad lib._  Aeschylus never mentions love at all in
any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here.  It
may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it
lends irony to Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon--in which
only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady
does protest too much.  But she stands forth in her own eyes
as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible
and unhuman about her.  Early in the play she reminds the
Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed
his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind:  a deed
of blood whose consequences must be feared--something to
add to the Chorus's misgivings, as they chant their doubtful
hope that the king may safely return.  In reality Artemis
had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know
this, in assuming the position of her daughter's avenger
she put herself under the karmic ban.  And Agamemnon did
not know it:  he had intended the sacrifice:  and was therefore,
and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban
himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and
hence because of  Clytemnestra's useless crime--when she and
Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they
have done, the Chorus's dark foretellings--to come true presently
--of the Karma that is to follow upon it.

And here we must guard ourselves against the error--as I think it
is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final
art-form as such. I think he was just intent on announcing Karma
to the Athenians in the most effective way possible:  bent all
his energies to making that--and that the natural result
of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this
marvelous art-form--which Sophocles took up later, and in
some external ways perhaps perfected. Then came Aristotle after
a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make
Shakespeare impossible. The truth is that when you put yourself
to do the Soul's work, and have the great forces of the Soul to
back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for
the Aristotelian critic to define it. Then back comes the Soul
after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the
Aristotles. The grand business is done by following the Soul--not
by conforming to rules or imitating models. But it must be the
Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims;
they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.--
You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of
actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course
of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of
act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who
first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the
very night that Troy fell,--and the return of Agamemnon in his
chariot to Argos.

In the  _Choephori_ or _Libation-Pourers,_ the second play of the
trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to
avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of
Atreus. Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to
the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has
done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings,
leads her in to die beside her paramour. He comes out again,
bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of
Agamemnon;--but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of
matricide weighing on his soul. The Chorus bids him be of good
cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but
in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to
haunt him, "like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang
entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping
loathsome blood."  He must wander the world seeking purification.
In the _Eumenides_ we find him in the temple of Loxias (the
Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the god who had
prompted him to the deed. But even there the Furies haunt him--
though for weariness--or really because it is the shrine of
Loxias--they have fallen asleep.  From them even Loxias may not
free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias
announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and assures him
meanwhile of his protection.

To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes' case is tried:
Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the
accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of
these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in
his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into
Eumenides--from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune.
Orestes is free, and the end is  happy.

No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle-
barker to make it so.  What! clap on an exit to these piled-up
miseries?--he  should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us
to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable
effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But
unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of
helping, not plaguing, mankind:  he must follow the grand
symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and
showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye
to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path
of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism.
He must tell the whole truth:  building up, not merely destroying;
and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious.
It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that
happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies
themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments
of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.

And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the
scheme of evolution itself, I suppose.  It is _Hamlet_ over
again, and treated differently; that which wrote _Hamlet_
through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I
imagine  you are to find in the _Agamemnon_ the symbol of the
Spirit's fall into matter--of the incarnation (and obscuration)
of the  Lords of Mind--driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the
result--of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with
this retrospectively, in the Ghost's words to Hamlet on the
terrace. The 'death' of the Spirit is its fall into matter.

And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges
Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme
Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution,
to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most
interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul:
it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the
marriage does in the modern novel.  Shakespeare, whose mental
tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus's--they ran to
infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other's ran to
stern unity and simplicity (of plot)--made two characters of
Polonius and Gertrude:  Polonius,--the objective lower world,
with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,--Nature, the
lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul
incarnate in it.  Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former.
Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point;
thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling
sort sweep to his revenge.  Aeschylus makes that same turning-point
in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let
loose on Orestes.  If you think well what it means, it is
that "leap" spoken of in _Light on the Path,_ by which a
man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment
instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth."
He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he
has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within,
and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention.  That
step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun--the
life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into
the Life of the Soul:--all his past lives and their errors
rise against him; his passions are roused to fight for their
lives, and easy living is no longer possible.  He must fly
then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-God, the Supreme Self, who can
protect him from these Erinyes--but it is Pallas, Goddess of the
Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him
free.  And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes
who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):--a
man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his
mother:--this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in
truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in
which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we
grow to the point of birth;--but we ourselves are in our essence
flame of the Flame of God.  So Pallas--and you must think of all
she implied--Theosophy, right living, right thought and action,
true wisdom--judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and
transforms his passions into his powers.




V.  SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES


Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an
illuminating comparison between the modern western and the
ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the
one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of
intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for
carrying all things through in some shape that will serve--the
other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental
Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit,
which invited the presence thereof;--and hence results were
attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What
Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the
great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,--
that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for
us,--but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon:
could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes
to imitate.*

------
* I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his _Problems of Greek History._  He
also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in
naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme.
------

It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long
witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age
of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed,
yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time
and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it.
The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as
exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every
detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct
spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two
measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition,
every  difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the
perfection of the whole.  As if the same creative force had made
it, as makes of the sea and  mountains an inescapable perfection
of beauty.

It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and
his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and
Callicrates, adorned Athens.  It would serve no purpose to make a
list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough
already. The simple fact to note is this:  that at a certain
period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of
Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very
narrow channel.  The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under
pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards
exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden
from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so
was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward
as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we
do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may
be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its
manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric
activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece.
But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European
countries, to Greece:  the genius of the world, the energy of the
human spirit, was  mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in
the single not too large city of Athens.  It is true I am rather
enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced,
if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was
speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice--
that of Aeschylus--before the age of Pericles began.  Still,
these dates are significant:  477, in which year Athens attained
the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was
after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his
message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures
appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was
the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian
equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had
passed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.--
Aristotle?--I said, _the Soul_ had little more to say. . . .

About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the
destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did
not put an end to Athenian significance.  Mahaffy very wisely
goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War--as he does, too,
the Persian--from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks
ever since.  As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians:
in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of
synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting
mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these
twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions
and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy
puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant:
tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens
would have fallen.  Her political foundations were on the
sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying
good government and freedom:  Persian rule was far less
oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens
had no self-government, no representation; they were at the
mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled
about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be
swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them.  Thucydides was a great
master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of
importance all the matter of his tale.  Besides, he was the
only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives.
So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this
Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty
family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples,
the Greeks.--In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who,
whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a
way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility,
of war.

Greek history is merely a phase of human history. We have looked
for its significance exclusively in political and cultural
regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not
invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only
they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political
freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just
nonsense.  As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in
this:  human history, the main part of it, flowing in that age
through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to
secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which
the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and
events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle
through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men.
The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too
far from the Gods.  So the Gods tried a new method:  let loose a
new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly
(sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had
before been concealed and revealed systematically within the
Established  Mysteries.  What Athens did with that new force has
affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly
for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.

Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all
Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then
morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world
as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the
subliminal to heroic endeavor.  But his policy perished when the
visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean,
which passed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy,
"was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident
thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view
of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the
Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at
the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it
wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue
about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above
the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.

It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of
wars and politics; details of which you can get from any
textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit,
and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the
grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on:  they come by
law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming,
and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study
history, the more the significance of my present surroundings
impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time;
behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the
civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities?
Nothing is certain about the future--even the near future;--except
that it will be immensely unlike the past.  Whatever we have
learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us
daily for discovering those inward regions  whence all light
shines down into the world. Genius is one method of the Soul's
action; one aspect of its glory made manifest.  We are given
opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow.
To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control
of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming
in anywise foretold.  But we know that the Divine Self would act,
were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the
obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.

Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later
the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it;
and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure,
stable, equable and redeeming.

This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed. Cyclically
they were bound to come:  the fields ripened in due season;
but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers. The
Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English
mind, was coarse and wicked to a degree. All through the
wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little
Italian city-states was  producing genius enough to furnish forth
a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was
also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to
stock the nine circles of Malebolge.  So too Athens at the top of
her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and
those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which
probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself
over Greece ever since. It is a strange situation, that looks
like an anomaly:  that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most,
and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark
forces that undermine life are most at work. But we should have
no difficulty in understanding it. At such times, by such
influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined;
and not only the intellect and all noble qualities are quickened,
but the passions also. The race, and the individual, are stirred
to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest. What
then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for
foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses
up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at
last, or surrender to hell. Through lack of training, and
ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be
handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own
natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is
allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement
exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down
the creative force from the higher planes, to waste  it on the
lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to
lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a
new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy,
physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is
genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/14587