And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.
The Upanishads affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller's translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether their uplift and quality of song. They sing the philosophy of the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the highest thing in extant literature. They do not come to us whole or untainted. We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati said to H. P. Blavatsky: that he could show the excellent "Moksh Mooller" that "what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books." Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books. Also the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;—it was the Brahmans, by that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office. And no doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added: the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred literature. Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark's song,— but a spiritual lark's song, floating and running in the golden glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its holiness,—haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but with a wisdom gay and ancient,—eternal, laughter-laden, triumphant,—at once hoary and young,—like the sparkle of snows on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky. Here almost alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age: not a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions (which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open and free;—and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the wisdom. One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely on India for the nexus of her teachings. That country has performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the Golden Age.—Well; each of the races has some function to fulfil. And it is not modern India that has done this; she has not done it of her own good will,—has had no good will to do it. It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses, —and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,—whom we have to thank.
So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature. It passed, and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred. It seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a very long time for this to happen. You may say that in the one analogy we have whose history is well known,—the Koran,—we have an example of a book sacred as soon as written. But I do not believe the analogy would hold good here. The Koran came as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual wisdom on to the world-currents;—and there were the precedents of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed, for making the new religious movement center about a Book. But in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs as this: classes there would be, according to the natural differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there was,—that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the spiritual side of life; but no religions,—no snarling sects and jangling foolish creeds. Those things (a God's mercy!) had not been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years. The foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the headship of tribes and nations; they were the kings, as was proper they should be: King-Initiates, Teachers as well as Rulers of the people. And they ordained public ceremonies in which the people, coming together, could invoke and participate in the Life from Above. So we read in the Upanishads of those great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples. Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really inspired, suitable—what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,— would be used at such ceremonies: sung by the assembled multitudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing them. So a class rose with this special function; and there were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for men of the right temperament;—so a class arose, of priests: among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,—for convenience we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,—at which they performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them;—how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of the Soul behind it really is;—but credited with an extra-human sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration? —To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's The World is too much with us, or Henley's I am the Captain of my Soul. And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration, —but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.
Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and somewhat fallen from it again,—or whether their rise was still in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings from their lead,—who can say? But this much, perhaps, we may venture without fear: the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not the same as those of the Upanishads. They were not Adept-Kings and Teachers in the same way. By Epic age, I mean the age in which the epics were written, not that of which they tell. And neither the Mahabharata nor the Ramayana was composed in a day; but in many centuries;—and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work. Some parts of them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about twenty-four thousand couplets;—the Mahabharata being about seven times, the Ramayana about twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. So the Age of the Epics must be narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the nuclei of them.
As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr. Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the Mahabharata that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the Ramayana, that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.—Is believed by whom, pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the Mahabharata, died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, was the seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;—it is always likely that half the circumstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; —say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,—somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.
Why before Buddha?—Because they are still Kshattriya works; written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;—and because Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman ascendency well established then,—a revolt that by Asoka's time had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's reign itself, for example?—Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely. Panini in his Grammar cites the Mahabharata as an authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C. Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. En passant, we may quote this from the Encyclopaedia Britannica as to Panini's Grammar: "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled in the literature of any language."—Panini, then, cites the Mahabharata; Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such period;—and from all this I think we may argue without much fear that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;—there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the Mahabharata is, martial.
There is this difference between the two epics,—I speak of the nucleus-poems in each case;—the Mahabharata seems much more a natural growth, a national epic,—the work not of one man, but of many poets celebrating through many centuries a tradition not faded from the national memory;—but the Ramayana is more a structural unity; it bears the marks of coming from one creative mind: even western criticism accepts Valmiki (whoever he may have been) as its author. To him it is credited in Indian tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the Mahabharata to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the Vedas;—and this last is manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a great age elapsed between the Vedas and the Epics. So I think that the Mahabharata grew up in the centuries, many or few, that followed the Great War,—or, say, during the second millennium B.C.; that in that millennium, during some great 'day' of literary creation, it was redacted into a single poem;— and that, the epic habit having thus been started, a single poet, Valmiki, in some succeeding 'day,' was prompted to make another epic, on the other great traditional saga-cycle, the story of Rama. But since that time, and all down through the centuries, both poems have been growing ad lib.
This is an endeavor to take a bird's-eye view of the whole subject; not to look at the evidence through a microscope, in the modern critical way. It is very unorthodox, but I believe it is the best way: the bird's eye sees most; the microscope sees least; the former takes in whole landscapes in proportion; the latter gets confused with details that seem, under that exaggeration, too highly important,—but which might be negatived altogether could you see the whole thing at once. A telescope for that kind of seeing is not forthcoming; but the methods of thought that H. P. Blavatsky taught us supply at least the first indications of what it may be like: they give us the first lenses. As our perceptions grow under their influence, doubtless new revelations will be made; and we shall see more, and further. All we can do now is to retire from the confusion brought about by searching these far stars with a microscope; to look less at the results of such searching, than at the old traditions themselves, making out what we can of them through what Theosophic lenses we have. We need not be misled by the ridiculous idea that civilization is a new thing. It is only the bias of the age; the next age will count it foolishness.—But to return to our epics.—
First to the Mahabharata. It is, as it comes down to us, not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's Commentaries, Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,—all done into blank verse and incorporated with Paradise Lost. You have a martial poem like the Iliad, full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;—and you find the Bhagavad-Gita a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house, or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the original,—from the version, that is, that first appeared as an epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material; which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;—says Mr. Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer. Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;—as if they had been actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,—all India has so understood, always,—that the poem is a Soul-symbol, standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it, or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their writings into an epic for the first time.
For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,— the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of opinion. Just as in the Iliad it is the Trojan Hector who is the most sympathetic character, so in the Mahabharata it is often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the assertion,—with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they are given no credit. Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in the Bhagavad-Gita and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation of Vishnu,—of the Deity, the Supreme Self. As such, he does neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his protegees. Philosophically and symbolically, this is sound and true, no doubt, but one wonders whether the poem (or poems) ran so originally; whether there may not be passages written at first by Kuravist poets; or a Brahminical superimposition of motive on a poem once wholly Kshattriya, and interested only in showing forth the noble and human warrior virtues of the Kshattriya caste. I imagine that in that second millennium B. C., in the early centuries of Kali-Yuga, you had a warrior class with their bards, inspired with high Bushido feeling,—with chivalry and all that is fine in patricianism—but no longer under the leadership of Adept Princes;—the esoteric knowledge was now mainly in the hands of the Priest-class. The Kshattriya bards made poems about the Great War, which grew and coalesced into a national epic. Then in the course of the centuries, as learning in its higher branches became more and more a possession of the Brahmans,—and since there was no feeling against adding to this epic whatever material came handy,—Brahmin esotericists manipulated it with great tact and finesse into a symbol of the warfare of the Soul.
There is the story of the death of the Kurava champion Bhishma. The Pandavas had been victorious; and Duryodhana the Kurava king appealed to Bhishma to save the situation. Bhishma loved the Pandava princes like a father; and urged Duryodhana to end the war by granting them their rights,—but in vain. So next day, owing his allegiance to Duryodhana, he took the field; and
"As a lordly tusker tramples on a field of feeble reeds,
As a forest conflagration on the parched woodland feeds,
Bhishma rode upon the warriors in his mighty battle car.
God nor mortal chief could face him in the gory field of war." *
——— * The quotations are from Mr. Romesh Dutt's translation. ———
Thus victorious, he cried out to the vanquished that no appeal for mercy would be unheard; that he fought not against the defeated, the worn-out, the wounded, or "a woman born." Hearing this, Krishna advised Arjuna that the chance to turn the tide had come. The young Sikhandin had been born a woman, and changed afterwards by the Gods into a man. Let Sikhandin fight in the forefront of the battle, and the Pandavas would win, and Bhishma be slain.—Arjuna, who loved Bhishma as dearly as Bhishma loved him and his brothers, protested; but Krishna announced that Bhishma was so doomed to die, and on the following day; a fate decreed, and righteously to be brought about by the stratagem. So it happened:
"Bhishma viewed the Pandav forces with a calm unmoving face;
Saw not Arjun's bow Gandiva, saw not Bhima's mighty mace;
Smiled to see the young Sikhandin rushing to the battle's
fore
Like the white foam on the billow when the mighty storm
winds roar;
Thought upon the word he plighted, and the oath that he had
sworn,
Dropt his arms before the warrior that was, but a woman
born;"
—and so, was slain…. and the chiefs of both armies gathered round and mourned for him.—Now it seems to me that the poets who viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem advised by Krishna,—which you have to meet, to find it acceptable, on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.
There is a quality in it you do not find in the Illiad. Greek and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir their enthusiasm highly;—but as to faults, neither takes thought for his own; each concentrates on the other's; and a war of words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds. Before fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him, dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy. But Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to his enemies than—Valiant are ye, noble princes! and if you think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain nobility in the Despondency of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Says the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:
"To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word: though often disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggerations, they are yet noble works, abounding in passages of remarkable descriptive power; and while as works of art they are far inferior to the Greek epics, in some respects they appeal far more strongly to the romantic mind of europe, namely, by the loving appreciation of natural beauty, their exquisite delineation of womanly love and devotion, and their tender sentiment of mercy and forgiveness."
—Precisely because they come from a much higher civilization that the Greek. From a civilization, that is to say, older and more continuous. Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving humanitarian and compassionate ideas quite unlike their old-time callousness. And no, it was not the influence of Christianity; we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius. These feeling grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every war puts back their growth. The fall of Rome and the succeeding pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow again; and has been gaining ground especially since H. P. Blavatsky began her teaching. But not much more than a century ago they were publicly hanging, drawing, and quartering people in England; crowds were gathering at Tyburn or before the Old Bailey to enjoy an execution. We have hardly had four generations in Western Europe in which men have not been ruthless and brutal barbarians with a sprinkling of fine spirits incarnate among them; no European literature yet has had time to evolve to the point where it could portray a Yudhishthira, at the end of a national epic, arriving at the gates of heaven with his dog,—and refusing to enter because the dog was not to be admitted. There have been, with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little continuity. We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was:— a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for our sins done in the prime of manvantara.
A word or two as to the Ramayana. Probably Valmiki had the other epic before his mental vision when he wrote it; as Virgil had Homer. There are parallel incidents; but his genius does not appear in them;—he cannot compete in their own line with the old Kshattriya bards. You do not find here so done to the life the chargings of lordly tuskers, the gilt and crimson, the scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war. The braying of the battle conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life.—This poem, like the Mahabharata, has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the Ramayana grew by the re-telling of old ones. Thus you may get book after book telling the same story of Rama's life in the forest-hermitage by the Godavari; each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his own language. India never grows tired of these Ramayanic repetitions. Sita, the heroine, Rama's bride, is the ideal of every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no truer or more beautiful figure. To the Mahabharata, the Ramayana stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton; it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it. Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people: children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and conditions make them the staple of their mental diet. Both are semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.
And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of
Ujjain,—to the Nine Gems of Literature,—to a secular era of
literary creation,—to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its
Shakespeare;—and to his masterpiece, The Ring of Sakoontala.
There is a tendency with us to derive all things Indian from Greek sources. Some Greek writer says the Indians were familiar with Homer; whereupon we take up the cry,—The Ramayana is evidently a plagiarism from the Iliad; the abduction of Sita by Ravan, of the abduction of Helen by Paris; the siege of Lanka, of the siege of Troy. And the Mahabharata is too; because,—because it must be; there's a deal of fighting in both. (So Macedon plagiarized its river from Monmouth.) We believe a Greek at all times against an Indian; forgetting that the Greeks themselves, when they got to India, were astounded at the truthfulness of the people they found there. Such strained avoidance of the natural lie,—the harmless, necessary lie that came so trippingly to a Greek tongue,—seemed to them extraordinary.—So too our critics naturally set out from the position that the Indian Drama must have been an offshoot or imitation of the Greek. But fortunately that position had to be quitted toute de suite; for the Indian theory is much nearer the English than the Greek;—much liker Shakespeare's than Aeschylus's. Sakoontal is romantic; it came in a Third or Alawn Period; of all Englishmen, Keats might most easily have written it; if Endymion were a play, Endymion would be the likest thing to it in English. You must remember that downward trend in the Great Cycle; that make each succeeding period in Sanskrit literature a descent from the heights of esotericism towards the personal plane. That is what brings Kalidasa on to a level with Keats.
Behind Sakoontala, as behind Endymion, there is a Soul-symbol; only Kalidasa, like Keats, is preoccupied in his outer mind more with forest beauty and natural magic and his romantic tale of love. It marks a stage in the descent of literature from the old impersonal to the modern personal reaches: from tales told merely to express the Soul-Symbol, to tales told merely for the sake of telling them. The stories in the Upanishads are glyphs pure and simple. In the epics, they have taken on much more human color, though still exalting and ennobling,—and all embodying, or molded to, the glyph. Now, in The Ring of Sakoontala,—and it is typical of its class,—we have to look a little diligently for the glyph; what impresses us is the stillness and morning beauty of the forest, and,—yes, it must be said.—the emotions, quite personal, of King Dushyanta and Sakoontala, the hero and heroine.
She is a fairy's child, full beautiful; and has been brought up by her foster-father, the yogi Kanwa, in his forest hermitage. While Kanwa is absent, Dushyanta, hunting, follows an antelope into that quiet refuge; finds Sakoontala, loves and marries her. Here we are amidst the drowsy hum of bees, the flowering of large Indian forest blossoms, the scent of the jasmine in bloom; it is what Keats would have written, had his nightingale sung in an Indian jungle.—The king departs for his capital, leaving with Sakoontala a magical ring with power to reawaken memory of her in his heart, should he ever forget. But Durvasas, a wandering ascetic, passes by the hermitage; and Sakoontala, absorbed in her dreams, fails to greet him; for which he dooms her to be forgotten by her husband. She waits and waits, and at last seeks the unreturning Dushyanta at his court; who, under the spell of Durvasas, fails to recognise her. If what she claims is true, she can produce the ring?—But no; she has lost it on her journey through the forest. He repudiates her; whereupon she is caught up by the Gods into the Grove of Kasyapa beyond the clouds.
But the ring had fallen into a stream in the forest, and a fish had swallowed it, and a fisherman had caught the fish, and the police had caught the fisherman …. and so it came into the hands of Dushyanta again; who, at sight of it, remembered all, and was plunged in grief over his lost love.
Years pass, and Indra summons him at last to fight a race of giants that threaten the sovereignty of the Gods. In the course of that warfare, mounting to heaven in the car of Indra, Dushyanta comes to the Grove of Kasyapa, and is reunited with Sakoontala and with their son, now grown into an heroic boy.
As in The Tempest a certain preoccupation with the magical beauty of the island dims the character-drawing a little, and perhaps thereby makes the symbol more distinct,—so in Sakoontala. It is a faery piece: begining in the morning calm and forest magic; then permitting passion to rise, and sadness to follow; ending in the crystal and blue clearness of the upper air. In this we see the basic form of the Soul-Symbol, which is worked out in the incidents and characters. Dushyanta, hunting in the unexplored forest, comes to the abode of holiness, finds and loves Sakoontala;—and from their union is born the perfect hero,—Sarva-Damana, the 'All-tamer.'—Searching in the impersonal and unexplored regions within us, we do at some time in our career of lives come to the holy place, get vision of our Immortal Self; from the union of which with this, our human personality is to be born some time that new being we are to become,—the Perfect Man or Adept. But that first vision may be lost; I suppose almost always is;—and there are wanderings and sorrows, forgetfulness and above all heroic services to be performed, before the final reunion can be attained.
XVI. THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME
We have seen an eastward flow of cycles: which without too much Procrusteanizing may be given dates thus:—Greece, 478 to 348; Maurya India, 320 to 190; Western Han China, 194 to 63; in this current, West Asia, being then in long pralaya, is overleaped. We have also seen a tide in the other direction; it was first Persia that touched Greece to awakenment; and there is that problematical Indian period (if it existed), thirteen decades after the fall of the Mauryas, and following close upon the waning of the first glory of the Hans. So we should look for the Greek Age to kindle something westward again, sooner or later;— which of course it did. 478 to 348; 348 to 218; 218 to 88 B.C.; 88 B.C. to 42 A. D.: we shall see presently the significance of those latter dates in Roman history. Meanwhile to note this: whereas Persia woke Greece at a touch, thirteen decades elapsed before Greece began to awake Italy. It waited to do so fully until the Crest-Wave had sunk a little at the eastern end of the world; for you may note that the year 63 B.C., in which Han Chaoti died, was the year in which Augustus was born.
With him in the same decade came most of the luminaries that made his age splendid: Virgil in 70; Horace in 65; Vipsanius Agrippa in 63; Cilnius Maecenas in what precise year we do not know. The fact is that the influx of vigorous light-bearing egos, as it decreased in China, went augmenting in Italy: which no doubt, if we could trace it, we should find to be the kind of thing that happens always. For about four generations the foremost souls due to incarnate crowd into one race or quarter of the globe; then, having exhausted the workable heredity to be found there,—used up that racial stream,—they must go elsewhere. There you have the raison d'etre, probably, of the thirteen-decade period. It takes as a rule about four generations of such high life to deplete the racial heredity for the time being,—which must then be left to lie fallow. So now, America not being discovered, and there being no further eastward to go, we must jump westward the width of two continents (nearly), and (that last lecture being parenthetical as it were) come from Han Chaoti's death to Augustus' birth, from China to Rome.
But before dealing with Augustus and the Roman prime, we must get some general picture of the background out of which he and it emerged: this week and next we must give to early and to Republican Rome. And here let me say that these two lectures will be, for the most part, a very bare-faced plagiarism; summarizing facts and conclusions taken from a book called The Grandeur that was Rome, by Mr. J. C. Stobart, of the English Cambridge. One greatest trouble about historical study is, that it allows you to see no great trends, but hides under the record of innumerable fidgety details the real meanings of things. Mr. Stobart, with a gift of his own for taking large views, sees this clearly, and goes about to remedy it; he does not wander with you through the dark of the undergrowth, labeling bush after bush; but leads you from eminence to eminence, generalizing, and giving you to understand the broad lie of the land: he makes you see the forest in spite of the trees. As this is our purpose, too, we shall beg leave to go with him; only adding now and again such new light as Theosophical ideas throw on it;—and for the most part, to avoid a tautology of acknowledgments, or a plethora of footnotes in the PATH presently, letting this one confession of debt serve. The learning, the pictures, the marshaling of facts, are all Mr. Stobart's.
In the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., when the old manvantara was closing, Europe was flung into the Cauldron of Regeneration. Nations and fragments of nations were thrown in and tossing and seething; the broth of them was boiling over, and,—just as the the Story of Taliesin, flooding the world with poison and destruction: and all that a new order of ages might in due time come into being. One result that a miscellany of racial heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island extremities of the continent. In the British you had four Celtic and a Pictish remnant,—not to mention Latins galore,—pressed on by three or four sorts of Teutons. In Spain, though it was less an extremity of Europe than a highway into Africa, you had a fine assortment of odds and ends: Suevi, Vandals, Goths and what not; superimposed on a more or less homogenized collection of Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, and Italians;—and in Italy you had Italians broken up into numberless fragments, and overrun by all manner of Lombards, Teutons, Slavs, and Huns. Welded by cyclic stress, presently first England, then Spain, and lastly Italy, became nations; in all three varying degrees of homogeneity being attained. But the next peninsula, the Balkan, has so far reached no unity at all; it remains to this day a curious museum of racial oddments, to the sorrow of European peace; and each of them represents some people strong in its day, and perhaps even cultured.
What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of Rome: a job-lot of race-fragments driven into that extremity of Europe by the alarms and excursions of empires in dissolution whose history time has hidden. The end of a manvantara, the break-up of a great civilization and the confusion that followed, made the Balkans what they are now, and Italy what she was in the Middle Ages. The end of an earlier manvantara, the break-up of older and forgotten civilizations, made Italy what she was in the sixth century B.C. Both peninsulas, by their mere physical geography, seem specially designed for the purpose.
Italy is divided into four by the Apennines, and is mostly Apennines. Everyone goes there: conquerors, lured by the dono fatale, and for the sake of the prizes to be gathered; the conquered, because it is the natural path of escape out of Central Europe. The way in is easy enough; it is only the way out that is difficult. The Alps slope up gently on the northern side; but sharply fall away in grand precipices on the southern. There, too, they overlook a region that would always tempt invaders: the great rich plain the Po waters; a land no refugees could well hope to hold. It has been in turn Cisalpine Gaul, the Plain of the Lombards, and the main part of Austrian Italy; this thrice a possession of conquerors from the north. It is the first of the four divisions.
There never would be safety in it for refugees; you would not find in it a great diversity of races living apart; conquerors and conquered would quickly homogenize,—unless the conquerors had their main seat in, and remained in political union with, transalpine realms. Refugees would still and always have to move on, if they desired to keep their freedom. Three ways would be open to them, and three destinies, according to which way they chose. They might go down into the long strip of Adriatic coastland, where there are no natural harbors—and remain isolated and unimportant between the mountain barrier and the sea. Those who occupied this cul de sac have played no great part in history: the isolated never do.—Or they might cross the Apennines and pour down into the lowlands of Etruria and Latium, where are rich lands, some harbors, and generally, fine opportunities for building up a civilization. Draw-backs also, for a defeated remnant: Etruria is not too far from Lombardy to tempt adventurers from the north, the vanguard of the conquering people;—although again, the Apennine barrier might make their hold on that middle region precarious. They might come there conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of the northern empire: they would mix with the conquered, and at any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break away. So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the Lombard Plain. Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt adventurers from the Near East.
But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and this is the road most of them traveled. Their fate, taking it, would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy. Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains: outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly, I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from material things. Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations. Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and dear knows what all:—open your Roman Histories, and in each one of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or south of the Alps;—just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians, Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.
One more element is to be considered there in the far south. Our Lucanian and Bruttian and Iapygian refugees,—themselves, or some of them, naturally the oldest people in Italy, the most original inhabitants,—would find themselves, when they arrived there, very much de-civilized; but, because the coast is full of fine harbors, probably sooner or later in touch with settlers from abroad. It is a part that would tempt colonists of any cultured or commercial peoples that might be spreading out from Greece or the West Asian centers or elsewhere; and so it was Magna Graecia of old, and a mixing-place of Greek and old Italian blood; and so, since, has been held by Saracens, Normans, Byzantines, and Spaniards.
The result of all this diversity of racial elements would be that Italy could only difficultly attain national unity at any time; but that once such unity was attained, she would be bound to play an enormous part. No doubt again and again she has been a center of empire; it is always your ex-melting-pot that is.
Who were the earliest Italians? The earliest, it least, that we can guess at?—Once on a time the peninsula was colonized by folk who sailed in through the Straits of Gibraltar from Ruta and Daitya, those island fragments of Atlantis; and (says Madame Blavatsky) you should have found a pocket of these colonists surviving in Latium, strong enough for the most part to keep the waves of invaders to the north of them, and the refugees to the high Apennines. Another relic of them you would have found, probably, driven down into the far south; and such a relic, I understand, the Iapygians were.
One more ethnic influence,—an important one. Round about the year 1000 B.C., all Europe was in dead pralaya, while West Asia was in high manvantara: under which conditions, as I suggested just now, such parts as the Lombard Plain and Tuscany might tempt West Asians of enterprise;—as Spain and Sicily tempted the Moslems long afterwards. Supposing such a people came in; they would be, while the West Asian manvantara was in being, much more cultured and powerful than their Italian neighbors; but the waning centuries of their manvantara would coincide with the first and orient portion of the European one; so, as soon as that should begin to touch Italy, things would begin to equalize themselves; till at last, as Europe drew towards noon and West Asia towards evening, these West Asians of Etruria would go the way of the Spanish Moors. There you have the probable history of the Etruscans.
All Roman writers say they came from Lydia by sea; which statement could only have been a repetition of what the Etruscans said about themselves. The matter is much in dispute; but most likely there is no testimony better than the ancient one. Some authorities are for Lydia; some are for the Rhaetian Alps; some are for calling the Etruscans 'autochthonous,'—which I hold to be, like Mesopotamia, a 'blessed word.' Certainly the Gauls drove them out of Lombardy, and some of them, as refugees, up into the Rhaetian Alps,—sometime after the European manvantara began in 870. We cannot read their language, and do not know enough about it to connect it even with the Turanian Group; but we know enough to exclude it, perhaps, from every other known group in the Old World,—certainly from the Aryan. There is something absolutely un-Aryan (one would say) about their art, the figures on their tombs. Great finish; no primitivism; but something queer and grotesque about the faces…. However, you can get no racial indications from things like that. There is a state of decadence, that may come to any race,—that has perhaps in every race cycles of its own for appearing,—when artists go for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human: realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and drug-victims I suppose always. Denizens of these regions, I take it, are the models for some of our cubists and futurists. . . . I seem to see the same kind of influence in these Etruscan faces. I think we should sense something sinister in a people with art-conventions like theirs;—and this accords with the popular view of antiquity, for the Etruscans had not a nice reputation.
The probability appears to be that they became a nation in their Italian home in the tenth or eleventh century B.C.; were at first war-like, and spread their power considerably, holding Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, with Lombardy until the Gauls dispossessed them, and presently Corsica under a treaty with Carthage that gave the Carthaginians Sardinia as a quid pro quo. Tuscany, perhaps, would have been the original colony; when Lombardy was lost, it was the central seat of their power; there the native population became either quite merged in them, or remained as plebeians; Umbria and Latium they possessed and ruled as suzerains. The Tuscan lands are rich, and the Rasenna, as they called themselves, made money by exporting the produce of their fields and forests; also crude metals brought in from the north-west,—for Etruria was the clearing-house for the trade between Gaul and the lands beyond, and the eastern Mediterranean. From Egypt, Carthage, and Asia, they imported in exchange luxuries and objects of art; until in time the old terror of their name,—as pirates, not unconnected with something of fame for black magic; one finds it as early as in Hesiod, and again in the _Medea _of Euripides,—gave place to an equally ill repute for luxurious living and sensuality. We know that in war it was a poor thing to put your trust in Etruscan alliances.
According to their own account of it, they were destined to endure as a distinct people for about nine centuries; which is probably what they did. Their power was at its height about 600 B.C. As they began to decline, certain small Italian cities that had been part of their empire broke away and freed themselves; particularly in Latium, where lived the descendants of those old-time colonists from Ruta and Daitya,—priding themselves still on their ancient descent, and holding themselves Patricians or nobles, with a serf population of conquered Italians to look down upon. Or, of course, it may have been vice versa: that the Atlanteans were the older stock, nearer the soil, and Plebeians; and that the Patricians were later conquerors lured or driven down from Central Europe.
At any rate, as their empire diminished, Etruria stood like some alien civilized Granada in the midst of surrounding medieval barbarism; for Italy, in 500 B.C., was simply medieval. Up in the mountains were war-like highlanders: each tribe with its central stronghold,—like Beneventum in Samnium, which you could hardly call a city, I suppose: it was rather a place of refuge for times when refuge was needed, than a group of homes to live in; in general, the mountains gave enough sense of security, and you might live normally in your scattered farms.—But down in the lowlands you needed something more definitely city-like: at once a group of homes and a common fortress. So Latium and Campania were strewn with little towns by river and seashore, or hill-top built with more or less peaceful citadel; each holding the lands it could watch, or that its citizen armies could turn out quickly to defend. Each was always at war or in league with most of the others; but material civilization had not receded so far as among the mountaineers. The latter raided them perpetually, so they had to be tough and abstemious and watchful; and then again they raided the mountaineers to get their own back, (with reasonable interest); and lastly, lest like Hotspur they should find such quiet life a plague, and want work, it was always their prerogative, and generally their pleasure, to go to war with each other.—A hard, poor life, in which to be and do right was to keep in fit condition for the raidings and excursions and alarms; ethics amounted to about that much; art or culture, you may say, there was none. Their civilization was what we know as Balkanic, with perpetual Balkanic eruptions, so to speak. Their conception of life did not admit of the absence of at least one good summer campaign. Mr. Stobart neatly puts it to this effect: no man is content to live ambitionless on a bare pittance and the necessaries; he must see some prospect, some margin, as well; and for these folk, now that they had freed themselves from the Etruscans, the necessaries were from their petty agriculture, the margin was to be looked for in war.
Among these cities was one on the Tiber, about sixteen miles up from the mouth. It had had a great past under kings of its own, before the Etruscan conquest; very likely had wielded wide empire in its day. A tradition of high destiny hung about it, and was ingrained in the consciousness of its citizens; and I believe that this is always what remains of ancient greatness when time, cataclysms, and disasters have wiped all actual memories thereof away. But now, say in 500 B.C., we are to think of it as a little peasant community in an age and land where there was no such wide distinction between peasant and bandit. It had for its totem, crest, symbol, what you will, very appropriately, a she-wolf….
Art or culture, I said, there was none;—and yet, too, we might pride ourselves on certain great possessions to be called (stretching it a little), in that line; which had been left to us by our erstwhile Etruscan lords, or executed for us by Etruscan artists with their tongues in their cheeks and sides quietly shaking.—Ha, you men of Praeneste! you men of Tibur! sing small, will you? We have our grand Jupiter on the Capitoline, resplendent in vermilion paint; what say you to that? Paid for him, too, (a surmise, this!) with cattle raided from your fields, my friends!
Everything handsome about us, you see; but not for this must you accuse us of the levity of culture. We might patronize; we did not dabble.—One seems to hear from those early ages, echoes of tones familiar now. Ours is the good old roast beef and common sense of—I mean, the grand old gravitas of Rome. What! you must have a Jupiter to worship, mustn't you? No sound as by Parliament-Established-Religion of Numa Pompilius, Sir, and the world would go to the dogs! And, of course, vermilion paint. It wears well, and is a good bloody color with no levity about it; besides, can be seen a long way off—whereby it serves to keep you rascals stirred up with jealousy, or should. So: we have our vermilion Jupiter and think of ourselves very highly indeed.
Yes; but there is a basis for our boasting, too;—which boasting, after all, is mainly a mental state; we aim to be taciturn in our speech, and to proclaim our superiority with sound thumps, rather than like wretched Greeks with poetry and philosophy and such. We do possess, and love,—at the very least we aim at,—the thing we call gravitas; and—there are points to admire in it. The legends are full of revelation; and what they reveal are the ideals of Rome. Stern discipline; a rigid sense of duty to the state; unlimited sacrifice of the individual to it; stoic endurance in the men; strictest chastity in the women:—there were many and great qualities. Something had come down from of old, or had been acquired in adversity: a saving health for this nation. War was the regular annual business; all the male population of military age took part in it; and military age did not end too early. It was an order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally. There was discipline, and again and always discipline: paterfamilias king in his household, with power of life and death over his children. It was a regime that gave little chance for loose living. A sterile and ugly regime, Nevertheless; and, later, they fell victims to its shortcomings. Vice, that wrecks every civilization in its turn, depend upon it had wrecked one here: that one of which we get faint reminiscences in the stories of the Roman kings. Then these barren and severe conditions ensued, and vice was (comparatively speaking) cleaned out.
What were the inner sources of this people's strength? What light from the Spirit shone among them? Of the Sacred Mysteries, what could subsist in such a community?—Well; the Mysteries had, by this time, as we have seen, very far declined. Pythagoras had made his effort in this very Italy; he died in the first year of the fifth century soon after the expulsion of the kings, according to the received chronology;—in reality, long before there is dependable history of Rome at all. There had been an Italian Golden Age, when Saturn reigned and the Mysteries ruled human life. There were reminiscences of a long past splendor; and an atmosphere about them, I think, more mellow and peace-lipped than anything in Hesiod or Homer. I suppose that from some calmer, firmer, and more benignant Roman Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya; that an echo lingered,—at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,— or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains. Certainly nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other nations had their rights. Yet there was something to make life sweeter than it might have been.
They said that of old there had been a King in Rome who was a Messenger of the Gods and link between earth and heaven; and that it was he had founded their religion. Was Numa Pompilius, a real person?—By no means, says modern criticism. I will quote you Mr. Stobart:—
"The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names which have been fitted by rationalizing historians, presumably Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Tomulus is simply the patron hero of Rome called by her name. Numa, the second, whose name suggests numen, was the blameless Sabine who originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon."
—He calls attention, too, to the fact that Tarquin the Proud is made a typical Greek Tyrant, and is said to have been driven out of Rome in 510,—the very year in which that other typical Greek Tyrant, Hippias, was driven out of Athens;—so that on the whole it is not a view for easy unthinking rejection. But Madame Blavatsky left a good maxim on these matters: that tradition will tell you more truth than what goes for history will; and she is quite positive that there is much more truth in the tales about the kings than in what comes down about the early Republic. Only you must interpret the traditions; you must understand them. Let us go about, and see if we can arrive at something.
Before the influx of the Crest-Wave began, Rome was a very petty provincial affair, without any place at all in the great sweep of world-story. Her annals are about as important as those of the Samnium of old, of which we know nothing; or those, say, of Andorra now, about which we care less. Our school histories commonly end at the Battle of Acium; which is the place where Roman history becomes universal and important: a point wisely made and strongly insisted on by Mr. Stobart. I shows how thoroughly we lack any true sense of what history is and is for. We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions of the Human Spirit is obscured. There were lots of politics in Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness whose effects are felt yet. Rome played at politics: old-time conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race Plebians: till the two were merged into one and she grew tired of the game. She played at war until her little raidings and conquests had carried her out of the sphere of provincial politics, and she stood on the brink of the great world. Then the influx of important souls began; she entered into history, presently threw up politics forever, and performed, so far as it was in her to do so, her mission in the world. What does History care for the election results in some village in Montenegro? Or for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits of Terentilius Harsa?
Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its fulness. But we must see the forest, and not lose sight and sense of it while botanizing over individual trees. We must forget the interminable details of wars and politics that amount to nothing; that so we may apprehend the form, features, color, of this aspect of humanity.
Here is a mighty river: the practical uses of mankind are mainly concerned with it as far up as it may be navigable; or at most, as far up as it may be turning mills and watering the fields of agriculture. There may be regions beyond when poets and mythologists may bring great treasures for the Human Spirit; but do you do well to treat such treasures as plug material for exchange and barter? They call for another kind of treatment. The sober science of history may be said to start where the nations become navigable, and begin to affect the world. You can sail your ships up the river Rome to about the beginning of the third century B.C., when she began to ermerge from Italian provincialism and to have relations with foreign peoples: Pyrrhus came over to fight her in 280. What is told of the century before may be true or not; as a general picture it is probably true enough, and only as a general picture does it matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here is pouting through the gorges, or shallowly meandering the meads. It is watering Farmer Balbus's fields; Grazier Ahenobarbus's cows drink at it; idle Dolabell angles in its quiet reaches: there are bloody tribal affrays yearly at its fords. It is important, certainly, to Babbus and Dolabella, and the men slain in the forays;—but to us others—.
And then at 390 there are falls and dangerous rapids; you will get no ships beyond these. The Gauls poured down and swept away everything: the records were burnt; and Rome, such as it was, had to be re-founded. Here is a main break with the past; something like Ts'in Shi Hwangti's Book-burning; and it serves to make doubly uncertain all that went before. Go further now, and you must take to the wild unmapped hills. There are no fields beyond this; the kine keep to the lush lowland meadows; rod and line must be left behind,—and angler too, unles he is prepared for stiff climbing, and no marketable recompense. Nor yet, perhaps, for some time, much in things unmarketable: I will not say there is any great beauty of scenery in these rather stubborn and arid hills.
As to the fourth century, then (or from 280 to 390)—we need not care much which of Ahenobarbus's cows was brindled, or which had the crumpled horn, or which broke off the coltsfoot bloom with lazy ruthless hoof. As to the fifth,—we need not try to row the quinqueremes of history beyond that Gaulish waterfall. We need not bother with the weight Dolabella claims for the trout he says he caught up there: that trout has been cooked and eaten these twenty-three hundred years. Away beyond, in the high mountains, there may be pools haunted by the nymphs; you cannot sail up to them, that is certain; but there may be ways round…..
Here, still in the foot-hills, is a pool that does look, if not nymphatic, at least a little fishy, as they say; the story of Rome's dealings with Lars Porsenna. It even looks as if something historical might be caught in it. The Roman historians have been obviously camouflaging: they do not want you to examine this too closely. Remember that all these things came down by memory, among a people exceedingly proud, and that had been used to rely on records,—which records had been burnt by the Gauls. Turn to your English History, and you shall probably look in vain in it for any reference to the Battle of Patay; you shall certainly find Agincourt noised and trumpted ad lib. Now battles are never decisive; they never make history; the very best of them might just as well not have been fought. But at Patay the forces which made it inevitable France should be a nation struck down into the physical plane and made themselves manifest: as far as that plane is concerned, the centuries of French history flow from the battlefield of Patay. But what made trumpery Agincourt was only the fierce will of a cruel, ambitious fighting king; and what flowed from it was a few decades of war and misery. That by way of illustration how history is envisaged and taught: depend upon it, by every people; it is not peculiar to this one or that.—Well then, the fish we are at liberty to catch in this particular Roman pool is a period during which Rome was part of the Etruscan Empire.
The fact is generally accepted, I believe; and is, of course, the proposition we started from. How long the period was, we cannot say. The Tarquins were from Tarquinii in Etruria; perhaps a line of Etruscan governors. The gentleman from Clusium who swore by the Nine Gods was either a king who brought back a rebellious Rome to temporary submission, or the last Etruscan monarch in whose empire it was included. But here is the point: whether fifty or five hundred years long—and perhaps more likely the former than the latter—this period of foreign rule was long enough to make a big break in the national tradition, and to throw all preceding events out of perspective.
At the risk of longueurs—and other things—let me take an illustration from scenes I know. I have heard peasants in Wales talking about events before the conquest;—people who have never learnt Welsh history out of books, and have nothing to go on but local legends;—and placing the old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago at "over a hundred years back, I shouldn' wonder." It is the way of tradition to foreshorten things like that,—Nothing much has happened in Wales since those ancient battles with the English; so the six or seven centuries of English rule are dismissed as "over a hundred years." Rome under the Etruscans, like Wales under the English, would have had no history of her own: there would have been nothing to impress itself on the race-memory. Such times fade out easily: they seem to have been very short, or are forgotten altogether. But this same Welsh peasant, who thus forgets and foreshortens recent history, always remembers that there were kings of Wales once. Perhaps, if he were put to it to write a history, with no books to guide him, he would name you as many as seven of them, and supply each with more or less true stories. In reality, of course, there were eight centuries of Welsh kings; and before them, the Roman occupation,—which he also remembers, but very vaguely; and before that, he has the strongest impression that there were ages of wide sovereignty and splendor. The kings he would name, naturally, are the ones that made the most mark.—I think the Romans, in constructing or making Greeks construct for them their ancient history, did very much the same kind of thing. They remembered the names of seven kings, with tales about them, and built on those. There were the kings who had stood out and stood for most; and the Romans remembered what they stood for. So here I think we get real history; whereas in the stories of republican days we may see the efforts of great families to provide themselves with a great past. But I doubt we could take anything aupied de la lettre; or that it would profit us to do so if we could. Here is a pointer: we have seen how in India a long age of Kshattriya supremacy preceded the supremacy of the Brahmins. Now observe Kshattriya Romulus followed by Brahmin Numa.
I do not see why Madame Blavatsky shold have so strongly insisted on the truth of the story of the roman Kings unless there were more in it than mere pralayic historicity. Unless it were of bigger value, that is, than Andorran or Montenegrin annals. Rome, after the Etruscan domination, was a meanly built little city; but there were remains from pre-Etruscan times greater than anything built under the Republic. Rome is a fine modern capital now; but there were times in the age of papal rule, when it was a miserable depopulated village of great ruins, with wolves prowling nightly through the weed-grown streets. Yet even then the tradition of Roma Caput Mundi reigned among the wretched inhabitants,—witness Rienzi: it was the one thing, besides the ruins, to tell of ancient greatness. Some such feeling, borne down out of a forgotten past, impelled Republican Rome on the path of conquest. It was not even a tradition, at that time; but the essence of a tradition that remained as a sense of high destinies.
Who, then, was Romulus?—Some king's son from Ruta or Daitya, who came in his lordly Atlantean ships, and builded a city on the Tiber? Very likely. That would be, at the very least, as far back as nine or ten thousand B.C.; which is contemptibly modern, when you think of the hundred and sixty thousand years of our present sub-race. The thing that is in the back of my mind is, that Rome is probably as old as that sub-race, or nearly so; but wild horses should not drag from me a statement of it. Rome, London, Paris,—all and any of them, for that matter.—But a hundred and sixty thousand or ten thousand, no man's name could survive so long, I think, as a peg on which to hang actual history. It would pass, long before the ten millenniums were over, into legend; and become that of a God or demigod,—whose cult, also, would need reviving, in time, by some new avatar. Now (as remarked before) humanity has a profound instinct for avatars; and also (as you would expect) for Reincarnation. The sixth-century Britons were reminded by one of their chieftains of some mighty king or God of prehistory; the two got mixed, and the mixture came down as the Arthur of the legend. This is what I mean by 'reviving the cult.' Now then, who was Romulus?—Some near or remote descendant of heroic refugees from fallen Troy, who rebuilt Rome or reestablished its sovereignty?—Very likely, again;—I mean, very likely both that and the king's son from Ruta or Daitya. And lastly, very likely some tough little peasant-bandit restorer, not so long before the Etruscan conquest, whom the people came to mix up witl mightier figures half forgotten. . . . .
We see his history, as the Romans did, through the lens of a tough little peasant-bandit city; through the lens of a pralaya, which makes pralayic all objects seen. It is like the Irish peasant-girl who has seen the palace of the king of the fairies; she describes you something akin to the greatest magnificence she knows,—which happens to be the house of the local squireen. Now the Etruscan domination, as we have noted, could probably not have begun before 1000 B.C.; at which time, to go by our hypothesis as to the length and recurrence of the cycles, Europe was in dead pralaya, and had been since 1480. So that, possibly, you would have had between 1480 and 1000 a Rome in pralaya, but independent—like Andorra now, or Montenegro. The stories we get about the seven kings would fit such a time admirably. They tell of pralayic provincials; and Rome, during that second half of the second millennium B.C., would have been just that.
But again, if the seven kings had been just that and nothing more, I cannot see why H. P. Blavatsky should have laid such stress on the essential truth of their stories. She is particular, too, about the Arthurian legend:—saying that it is at once symbolic and actually historical,—which latter, as concerns the sixth-century Arthur, it is not and she would not have considered it to be: no Briton prince of that time went conquering through Europe. So there must be some further value to the tales of the Roman kings; else why are they so much better than the Republican annals? Why?—unless all history except the invented kind or the distorted-by-pride-or-politics kind is symbolic; and unless we could read in these stories the record, not merely of some pre-Etruscan pralayic centuries, but of great ages of the past and of the natural unfoldment of the Human Spirit in history through long millenniums? Evolution is upon a pattern; understand the drift of any given thousand years in such a way that you could reduce it to a symbol, and probably you have the key to all the past.
So I imagine there would be seven interpretations to these kings, as to all other symbols. Romulus may represent a Kshattriya, and Numa a Brahmin domination in the early ages of the sub-race. Actual men, there may yet be mirrored in them the history—shall we say of the whole sub-race? Or Root-race? Or the whole natural order of human evolution? It is business for imaginative meditation,—which is creative or truth-finding meditation. But now let us try, diffidently, to search out the last, the historic, pre-Etruscan Numa.
If you examined the Mohammedan East, now in these days of its mid-pralaya and disruption: Turkey especially, or Egypt: you should find constantly the tradition of Men lifted by holiness and wisdom and power above the levels of common humanity: Unseen Guardians of the race,—a Great Lodge or Order of them. In Christendom, in its manvantara, you find no trace of this knowledge; but it may surprise you to know that it is so common among the Moslems, that according to the Turkish popular belief, there is always a White Adept somewhere within the mosque of St. Sophia,—hidden under a disguise none would be likely to penetrate. There are hundreds of stories. The common thought is that representatives of this Lodge, or their disciples, often appear; are not so far away from the world of men; may be teaching, quite obscurely, or dropping casual seeds of the Secret Wisdom, in the next village. Well; I imagine pralayic conditions may allow benign spiritual influences to be at work, sometimes, nearer the surface of life than in manvantara. The brain-mind is less universally dominant; there is not the same dense atmosphere of materialism. You get on the one hand a franker play of the passions, and no curbs imposed either by a sound police system or a national conscience; in pralaya time there is no national conscience, or, I think, national consciousness,—no feeling of collective entity, of being a nation,—at all; perhaps no public opinion. As it is with a man when he sleeps: the soul is not there; there is nothing in that body that feels then 'I am I'; nothing (normally) that can control the disordered dreams. . . . Hence, in the sleeping nation, the massacres, race-wars, mob-murders, and so on; which, we should remember, affect parts, not the whole, of the race. But on the other hand that very absence of brain-mind rule may imply Buddhic influences at work in quiet places; and one cannot tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . . Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste a deal less time and sanity in yelling condemnations.
Italy then was something like Turkey is now. Dear knows whom you might chance on, if you watched with anointed eyes . . . in St. Sophia . . . or among the Sabine hills. Somewhere or other, as I said just now, reminiscences of the Mysteries would have survived. I picture an old wise man, one of the guardians of those traditions, coming down from the mountains, somewhere between 1500 and 1000 B. C., to the little city on the Tiber; touching something in the hearts of the people there, and becoming,—why not?—their king. For I guess that this one was not so different from a hundred little cities you should have found strewn over Italy not so long ago. The ground they covered,—and this is still true,—would not be much larger than the Academy Garden; their streets but six or seven feet across. Their people were a tough, stern, robberish set; but with a side, too, to which saintliness (in a high sense) could make quick appeal. Intellectual culture they had none; the brain-mind was the last thing you should look for (in ancient Rome at least);—and just because it was dormant, one who knew how to go about it could take hold upon the Buddhic side. That was perhaps what this Numa Pompilius achieved doing. There would be nothing extraordinary in it. The same thing may be going on in lots of little cities today, in pralayic regions: news of the kind does not emerge. We have a way of dividing time into ancient and modern; and think the one forever past, the other forever to endure. It is quite silly. There are plenty of places now where it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was pompous 1919.—Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it happens to be in Europe now?
How much Numa may have given his Romans, who can say? Most of it may have worn away, before historic times, under the stress of centuries of summer campaigns. But something he did ingrain into their being; and it lasted, because not incompatible with the life they knew. It was the element that kept that life from complete vulgarity and decay.
You have to strip away all Greekism from your conceptions, before you can tell what it was. The Greek conquest was the one Rome did not survive. Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of her life. If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus? Not the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure. Who then? Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods? One shakes one's head in doubt: the Romans did not personalize their deities like the Greeks. Cato gives the ritual to be used at cutting down a grove; says he—"This is the proper Roman way to cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering. This is the verbal formula: 'Whether thou art a god or a goddess to whom that grove is sacred,' "—and so on. Their gods were mostly like that: potentialities in the unseen, with whom good relations must be kept by strict observance of an elaborate ritual. There were no stories about them; they did not marry and have families like the good folk at Olympus.
Which is perhaps a sign of this: that Numa's was a religion, the teaching of a (minor) Teacher who came long after the Mysteries had disappeared. Because in the Mysteries, cosmogenesis was taught through dramas which were symbolic representations of its events and processes; and out of these dramas grew the stories about the gods. But when the real spiritual teaching has ceased to flow through the Mysteries, and the stones are accepted literally, and there is nothing else to maintain the inner life of the people,—a Teacher of some kind must come to state things in plainer terms. This, I take it, is what happened here; and the very worn-outness of conditions that this implies, implies also tremendous cultural and imperial activities in forgotten time; I imagine Italy, then, at two or three thousand B.C., was playing a part as much greater outwardly than Greece was, as her part now is greater than Greece's, and has been during recent centuries.
This, then, is what Numa's religion did for Rome:—it peopled the woods and fields and hills with these impersonal divinities; it peopled the moments of the day with them; so that nothing in space or time, no near familiar thing or duty, was material wholly, or pertained to this world alone;—there was another side to it, connected with the unseen and the gods. There were Great Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial rather,—and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek influence began. Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on. But he had nearer and Numaish divinities much more a part of his life,—which indeed largely consisted of rituals in their honor. There were Lares and Penates and Manes, who made his home a kind of temple, and the earth a kind of altar; there were deities presiding over all homely things and occasions; formless impersonal deities; presences to be felt and remembered, not clothed imaginatively with features and myths:—Cuba, who gave the new-born child its first breath; Anna Perenna of the recurring year; hosts of agricultural gods without much definition, and the unseen genii of wood, field, and mountain. Everything, even each individual man, had a god-side: there was something in it or him greater, more subtle, more enduring, than the personality or outward show.—To the folk-lorist, of course, it is all 'primitive Mediterranean' religion or superstition; but the inner worlds are wonderful and vast, if you begin to have the smallest inkling of an understanding of them. I think we may recognise in all this the hand of a wise old Pompilius from the Sabine hills, at work to keep the life of his Romans, peasant-bandits as they were, clean in the main and sound. Yes, there were gross elements: among the many recurring festivals, some were gross and saturnalian enough. The Romans kept near Nature, in which are, both animal and cleansing forces; but the high old gravitas was the virtue they loved. And supposing Numa established their religion, it does not follow that he established what there came to be of grossness in it.