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.