The point we start out from this evening is, in time, the year
220 A.D., in place, West Asia: 220, or you may call it 226,--
sixty-five years, a half-cycle, after 161 and the accession of
Marcus Aurelius; and therewith, in Rome, the beginning of the
seasons prophetic of decline. So now we are in 226; look well
around you; note your whereabouts;--for there is no resting
here. You have seen? you have noted? On again then, I beseech
you; and speedily. And, please, backwards: playing as it were
the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is
skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an
elder day: looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps
394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline,--long
melancholy sands and shingle, to--there on the edge of the great
wan water,--that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his
king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from
Alexander;--and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end.
What a time it was that drifted into Limbo then! One unit of
history; one phase of the world's life-story! It had seen all
those world-shaking Tiglath-pilesers eastward; all those proud
Osirified kings by the Nile;--and now it was over; had died in
its last stronghold, Persia, and there was nowhere else for it to
be reborn; and, after a decent half-cycle of lying in state
under degenerate descendants of the great Darius, had been furied
(cataclysmal obsequies!) beneath a landslide of Hellenistic
Macedonianism. Its old civilization, senile long since, was
gone, and a new kind from the west superimposed;--Babylon was a
memory vague and splendid;--the Assyrian had gone down, and
should never re-arise:--Egypt of the Pharaohs had fallen forever
and ever;--Aryan Persia was over-run;--
"Iran indeed had gone, with all his rose,
And Jamshyd's seven-ringed cup, where no one knows:"
--And the angel that recorded their deeds and misdeed had written
_Tamam_ on the last page, sprinkled sand over the ink,--shut the
volume, and put it away on the shelf;--and with a _Thank God
that's done with!_ settled down to snooze for six hundred years
and ten.
For what had he to do with what followed? With Alexander's
wedding-feast in 324,--when upwards of ten thousand couples, the
grooms all Macedonian, the brides all Persian, were united: what
had he to do with the new race young Achilles Redivivus thus
proposed to bring into being? These were mere Macedonian doings,
to be recorded by his brother angel of Europe; as also were the
death of Alexander, and his grand schemes that came to nothing.
There was no West Asia now; only Europe: all was European and
Hellenized to the borders of India, with periodical overflowings
beyond;--just as, long afterwards, Spain was a province of West
Asia; and just as Egypt now is submerged under a European power.
Only the trouble is that the seed of something native always
remains in regions so overflowed with an alien culture; and
Alexander dreamed never of what might lie quiescent, resurrectable
in time, in the mountains of Persis, the Achaemenian land,
out of the path of the eastward march of his phalanxes;--or
indeed, in those wide deserts southward, parched Araby, that
none but a fool--and such was not Alexander--would trouble
to invade or think of conquering: something that should
in its time reassert West Asia over all Hellenedom, in Macedonia
itself, and West beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of
the world. But let that be: it need trouble no one in this year
of 324 B.C.! Only remember that "that which hath been shall be
again, and there is nothing new under the sun."
In this study of comparative history one finds after awhile that
there are very few dates that count, and they are very easy to
keep in mind. The same decades are important everywhere; and
this because humanity is one, and however diversified on the
outside, inwardly all history is the history of the one Host of
Souls. Take 320 B.C. Alexander is dead three years, but the
world is still vibrating with him. Chandragupta Maurya has just
started his dynasty and great age in India, which is to last its
thirteen decades until the neighborhood of 190. Seleucus
Nicataor, the only one of the Macedonian _diadochi_ who has not
divorced his Persian bride, is about to set up for himself a
sovereignty in Babylon,--which Scipio Africanus, thirteen decades
afterwards, struck from the list of the Great Powers when he
defeated Seleucus' descendant Antiochus at Magnesia,--in 190
again; at which time the Romans first broke into Asia. And it
was in the one-nineties, too, that the second Han Emperor came to
the Dragon Thone, and the glorious age of the Western Hans began.
Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of
Darius Hystaspes' empire,--and, except Egypt, all the old
imperial seats of the foregone manvantara,--they do not belong to
West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European;
they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting
West from Greece to Italy. The history of all the Macedonian
kingdoms is profoundly uninteresting. There was enough of Greek
in them to keep them polished; enough of Macedonian to keep them
essentially barbarous; they sopped up some of the effeteness of
the civilizations they had displaced, Egyptian and Asiatic; but
the souls of those old civilizations remained aloof. There was
mighty little Egypt in the Egypt of the Ptolemies: what memories
and atmosphere of a grand antiquity survived, hid in the crypts
and pyramids; all one saw was a sullen fanatic people scorning
their conquerors. So too in Seleucus' Babylon there was little
evidence of the old Childacan wisdom, or the Assyrian power, or
the pride and chivalry of the Persian. It was Europe occupying
West Asia; and not good Europe at that; and only able to do so
(as is always the case) because the Soul of West Asia was
temporarily absent. The Seleucidae maintained a mimic greatness
in tinsels until 190 and Scipio and Magnesia; then a mere
rising-tide-lapped sand-castle of a kingdom until, in 64 B.C.,
Pompey made what remained of it a Roman province,--just twice
thirteen decades after the marriage-feast at Babylon; just when
the great age of the Western Hans was ending, and when Augustus
was thinking of being born, and (probably or possibly) Vikramaditya
of starting up a splendor at Ujjain. What Pompey took,--what
remained for him to take,--consisted only of Syria; all the
eastern part of the Seleucid empire had gone long since.
In 255 Diodotus, the Seleucid satrap of Bactria, rebelled and
made himself a kingdom; and that the kingdom might become an
empire, went further on the war-path. On the eastern shores of
the Caspian he defeated one of the myriad nomad tribes of
Turanian stock that haunt those parts,--first cousins, a few
times removed perhaps, to our friends the Huns; a few more times
removed, to that branch of their race that had, so to say,
married above them and become thus a sort of poor relations to
the aristocracy,--the Ts'inners who were at that time finishing
up their conquest of China. Thus while the far eastern branch of
the family was prospering mightily, the far western was getting
into trouble: I may mention that they were known, these far
westerners, as the _Parni;_ and that their chief had tickled his
pride with assumption of the Persian name of Arsaces;--just as I
dare say you should find various George Washingtons and Pompey
the Greats now swaying empire in the less explored parts of
Africa. South of this Parnian country lies what is now the
province of Khorasan, mountainous; then a Seleucan satrapy known
as Parthia;--also inhabited by Turanians, but of a little more
settled sort; the satrap was Andragoras, who, like Diodotus in
Bactria (only not quite so much so), had made himself independent
of the reigning Antiochus (II). With him Arsaces found refuge
after his defeat by Diodotus, and there spent the next seven
years:--whether enjoying Andragoras' hospitality, or making
trouble for him, this deponent knoweth not. In 248, however, he
proceeeded to slay him and to reign in his stead. Two years
later, Arsaces died, and his brother Tiridates succeeded him and
carried on the good work; he was driven out by Seleucus II in
238, but returned to it when the latter was called westward by
rebellions soon after. Thenceforward the Parthian kingdom was,
as you might say, a fact in nature; though until a half-cycle
had passed, a small and unimportant one, engaged mostly in
reinvogorating the native Turanianism of the Parthians with fresh
Parnian importations from the northern steppes. Then, in 170,
Mithradates I came to the throne, and seriously founded an
empire. He fought Eucratidas of Bactria, and won some territory
from him. He fought eastward as far as to the Indus; then
conquered Meida and Babylonia in the west. In 129 Demetrius II
Nicator, the reigning Seleucid, attacked Mithradates' son,
Phraates II, and was defeated; and the lands east of the
Euphrates definitely passed from Seleucid to Parthian control.
Why not, then, count as manvantaric doings in West Asia
this rise of the Parthians to power? Why relegate them
and their activities to the dimness of pralaya? Says the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica:_
"The Parthian Empire as founded by the conquests of Mithradates I
and restored, once by Mithradates II (the Great, c. 124 to 88
B.C.), and again by Phraates II (B.C. 76 to 70), was, to all
exterior appearances, a continuation of the Achaemenid dominion.
Thus the Arsacids now began to assume the old title 'King of
kings' (the shahanshah of modern Persia), though previously their
coins as a rule had borne only the legend 'great king.' The
official version preserved by Arrian in his _Parthica,_
derives the line of These Parnian nomads from [the Achaemenian]
Artaxerxes II. In reality however the Parthian empire was
totally different from its predecessor, both externally and
internally. It was anything rather than a world empire. The
countries west of the Euphrates never owned its dominion, and
even of Iran itself not one half was subject to the Arsacids.
There were indeed vassal states on every hand, but the actual
possessions of the kings--the provinces governed by their
satraps--consisted of a rather narrow strip of land stretching
from the Euphrates and north Babylonia through southern Media and
Parthia as far as north-western Afghanistan... Round these
provinces lay a ring of minor states which as a rule were
dependent on the Arsacids. They might, however, partially
transfer their allegiance on the rise of a new power (e.g.
Tigranes in Armenia) or a Roman invasion. Thus it is not without
justice that the Arsacid period is described, in the later
Persian and Arabian tadition, as the period of the 'kings of the
part-kingdoms'--among which the Ashkanians (i.e. the Arsacids)
had won the first place....
"It may appear surprising that the Aracids made no attempt to
incorporate the minor states in the empire and create a great and
united dominion, such as existed under the Achaemenids and was
afterwards restored by the Sassanians. This fact is the clearest
symptom of the weakness of their empire and of the small power
wielded by their King of kings. In contrast alike with its
predecessors and successors the Arsacid dominion was peculiarly a
chance formation--a state which had come into existence through
fortuitous external circumstances, and had no firm foundation
within itself, or any intrinsic _raison d'etre._"
A Turanian domination over Iran, it had leave to exist only
because the time was pralaya. When a man dies, life does not
depart from his body; but only that which sways and organizes
life; then life, ungoverned and disorganized, takes hold and
riots. So with the seats of civilization. One generally finds
that at such times some foreign power receives, as we are getting
to say, a mandate (but from the Law) to run these dead or
sleeping or disorganized regions,--until such time as they come
to life again, and proceed to evict the mandataries.--As well to
remember this, now that we are proposing, upon a brain-mind
scheme, to arrange for ourselves what formerly the Law saw to:--
the nations that are now to be great and proud manditaries,
shall sometime themselves be mandataried; and those that are
mandataried now, shall then arrange their fate for them; there
is no help for it: you cannot catch Spring in a trap, or cage
up Summer lest he go.--It seems now we must believe in a new
doctrine: that certain 'Nordics' are the Superior Race, and you
must be blue-eyed and large and blond, or you shall never pass
Peter's wicket. One of these days we shall have some learned
ingenious Hottentot arising, to convince us poor others of the
innate superiority of Hottentottendom, and that we had better bow
down! . . . But to return:
The Parthians remained little more than Central-Asian nomads:
something between the Huns who destroved civilization, and the
Turks who cultivated it for all they were worth (in a Central
Asian-nomad sort of way). All their magnates were Turanian;
they retained a taste for tent-life; their army and fighting
tactics where of the desert-horseman type: mounted bowmen,
charging and shooting, wheeling and scattering in flight,--which
put not your trust in, or 'ware the "Parthian shot." They were
not armed for close combat; and were quite defenseless in
winter, when the weather slackened their bow-string. True, Aryan
Iran put its impress on them: so that presently their kings wore
long beards in the Achaemenian fashion, made for themselves an
Achaemenian descent, called themselves by Achaemenian names.
They took on, too, the Achaemenian religion of Zoroaster:--so,
but much more earnestly and adventurously and _opera-bouffe_
grimly. Ts'in Shi Hwangti took on the quest of Tao. There was
also a stratum of Hellenistic culture in their domains, and they
took on something of that. When they conquered Babylonia, it was
inevitable that they should move their headquarters down into
that richest and most thickly-populated part of their realm--to
Seleucia, the natural capital, one might suppos?--a huge
Hellenistic city well organized for world-commerce.--But let
these nomad kings come into it with their horde, and what would
become of the ordered civic life? Nomads do not take well
to life in great cities; they love the openness of their
everlasting plains, and the narrrow streets and high buildings
irk their sensibilities. For this reason, and perhaps because
they recognised their deficienceies, they shunned Seleucia; and
built themselves lumbering straggling gawky Ctesiphon across the
Tigris to be their chief capital;--for they had many; not
abiding to be long in one place, but gadding about as of old.
Still, Greek culture was not to be denied. They coined money,
copying the inscriptions on the coins of the Seleucids, and
copyting them ever worse and worse. Not until after 77 A.D., and
then only occasionally, do Parthian coins bear inscriptions in
Aramaic. Yet sometimes we hear of their being touched more
deeply with Greekness. Orodes I,--he who defeated Crassus,--
spoke good Greek, and Greek tragedies were played at his court.--
As with nomads generally, it was always easy for a Parthian king
to shark up a great army and achieve a striking victory; but
as a rule impossible to keep the horde so sharked up thogether
for solid conquests; and above all, it was impossible to
organize anything.
But they played their part in history: striking down to cut
off the flow of Greek culture eastward. It had gone, upon
Alexander's impulse, up into Afghanistan and down into India;
may even have touched Han China,--probably did. I do not suppose
that the touch could have done anything but good in India and
China; where culture was well-established, older, and in all
essentials higher, than in Greece. But in Persia itself the case
was different. Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its
original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might
have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism.
Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt
fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old
Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a
thing of the past. When Egypt rose again, under the Esotericist
Sultans of the tenth century A.D., I dare not quite say that her
new glory was linked by nothing whaterver to the ancient glory of
the Pharaohs; but that would be the general--as it is the
obvious--view. Fallen into pralaya, she had no positive strength
of her own to oppose to the active manvantaric influence of
Greekism under the Ptolemies; and in Roman days it was her
imported Greekism that she opposed to the Romans, not her own old
and submerged Khemism. Her soul was buried very deep indeed, if
it remained with her at all. In Persia, on the other hand,
West Asia retained much more clearly its cultural identity.
Persianism was submerged for about thirteen decades under the
Seleucids; then the Parthians cut in, and the drowning waters
were drained away. The Parthians had no superior culture to
impose on the Persians; whereas the Greeks had,--because theirs
was active and in manvantara, while that of the Persians
themselves was negative, because in pralaya. One might say
roughly that a nation under the dominance of a people more highly
or actively cultured than itself, tends to lose the integrity of
its own culture,--as has happened in Ireland and Wales under
English rule:--they take on, not advantageously, an imitation of
the culture of their rulers. But under the dominance of a
stronger, but less advanced, people, they tend to seek refuge the
more keenly in their own cultural sources: as the Finns and
Poles have done under the Russians. This explains in part the
difference between Egypt and Persia it the dawn of the new
West-Asian manvantara. We have seen that in the former the seeds
were ready to sprout, and did,--in Ammonius Saccas and his movement.
They were Egyptian seeds; but the soil and fertilizers were so
Greek that the blossom when it appeared seemed not Egyptian, not
West-Asian, but Neo-Greek; and turned not to the rising, but to
the setting sun. The new growth affiliated itself to the
European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one
that was to begin. Persia was in a different position.
Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the
Parthian empire. One was the rise of the Yueh Chi. During the
period between the end of the brilliance of the Western, and the
beginning of that of the Eastern Hans, these people were
consolidating an empire in Northern India, and figuring there as
the Kushan Dynasty: their power culminated, probably, in the
reign of Kanishka. They had wrested from the Parthians some of
their eastern provinces;--really, the overlordship of these
rather than the sovereignty, for the Parthians held all things
lightly except the ground they happened to be camping on; and
this made a change in the center of Parthian gravity which was of
enormous help to the Persians.
The heart of Persiandom was the province of Fars or Persis, the
mountain-land lying to the east of the Persian Gulf, and between
it and the Great Persian Desert. Mesopotamia, where were
Ctesiphon, the Parthian's chief capital, and Seleucia, their
greatest city,--the richest and most populated part of their
empire, stretches northward from the very top of the gulf, a long
way from Fars; and the main routes eastward from Mesopotamia run
well to the north of the latter avoiding its mountains and desert
beyond. So this province is remote, and well calculated to
maintain appreciable independence of any empire not born in
itself. The Parthian writ had never run there much; nor had the
Median in the days when the Medes were in power; though of that
empire, as of the Parthian, it had been more or less nominally a
dependent province. It was from these mountains that a chieftain
came, in the five-fifties B.C., to over turn Astyages the Mede's
sovereignty, and replace it with his own Achaemenian Persian;
and to take Persianism out of mountain Fars, and spread it over
all West Asia. Back to Fars, when the Achaemenians fell, that
Persianism receded; there to maintain itself unimportantly aloof
through the Seleucid and Arsacid ages; probably never very
seriously menaced by Greekism, even in Seleucid times, because so
remote from the routes of trade and armies. The conquests of the
Yueh Chi put Fars still nearer the circumference of Parthia:
threw the center of that more definitely into Mesopotamia, and
closed the avenues eastward. The change made Fars the more
conscious of herself.
But there were Persians all over the Parthian domain; and had
been ever since they first went down out of their mountains under
Cyhrus to conquer. It was in accordance with what I may call the
Law of Cyclic Backwashes, that the rise of Yueh Chi should have
stirred up Persian feeling in them everywhere. Thus: the
impulse of Han Wuti's westward activities passed as a quickening
into the Yueh Chi; and on from them, not into the Parthians, who
were but an unreality and mirage of empire, but into these
Persians, the true possessors of the land whose turn it was to be
quickened. They began remembering, now, their ancient greatness;
and turning their eyes to their still half-independent ancestral
mountains, whence--dared they hope it?--another Cyrus might appear.
Then came another psychic impulse, from the west: when Trajan's
eastward victories shook the Parthian power again. Then,--you
will remember how the Roman world was shaken at the time
of Marcus Aurelius' accession: how Vologaeses seized the
opportunity to attack; how Verus the co-emperor went against
him, and made a mess of things; how Avidius Casius (who brought
back the plague to Rome) saved the situation. In doing so, he
conferred unwittingly untold benefits on the Persian subjects of
Parthia. He destroyed Seleucia as a punitive measure. Now
Seleucia had been the cultureal capital of the Parthian empire;
and it was a Greek city. Its culture was Greek; and Greek
culture had ever been, for Persianism, a graver danger and more
present check than Parthian ignorance; or it submerged and
abashed, where the other only ignore, the Persian spirit. So
when Seleucia was wiped out, in 165, the chief and real enemy of
the National Soul had vanished. The Persians might no longer
look to Hellenism for their cultural inspiration; might no more
set up _Its_ light against the Parthian darkness; they must find
a light instead proper to their own souls;--and must look
towards mountain Fars to find it. Within a half-cycle they
were up. They were due to be up, as you will remember, in
the two-twenties: the decade in which we saw the stream in
China, as in Rome, diminish. Troubles had begun in Rome in
162, the second year of Aurelisus. 162 plus 65 are 227. In
227 Persia rose and Parthia vanished.
In the second century A.D. there had been a man in Fars named
Papak the son of Sassan, who took as his motto the well-known
lines from Marlowe:
"Is it not passing brave to be a king
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?"
--Persepolis, indeed, was gone, and only its vast and pillared
ruins remained in the wilderness; but near by the town of
Istakhr had grown up, to be what Persepolis had been in the old
Achaemenian days,--the heart and center of Fars, which is
spiritually, the heart and center of all Iran. Papak thought he
would make Istakhr serve his purpose; and did;--and reigned
there in due course without ever a Parthian to say him nay. In
212 he died; and what he had been and desired to be, that his
son Ardashir would be in turn, and much more also. This Ardashir
was very busy remembering the story of the Achaemenidae: men,
like himself, of Fars; men, like himself, of the One and Only
True Religion: but further, conquerors of the world and Kings of
the kings of Iran and Turan. And if they, why not he?--So he
goes to it, and from king of Istakhr becomes king of Fars; and
then unobtrusively takes in Karmania eastward;--until news of his
doings comes to the ears of his suzerain Artabanus King of
Parthis, who does not like it. Artabanus has recently (217)
received in indemnity a matter of seven and a half million
dollars from a well-whipped Roman emperor; and is not prepared
to see his own uderlings give themselves airs;--so whistles up
his horde of cavalry, and marches south and east to settle
things. Three battles, and the Parthian empire is a thing of the
past; and Ardashir (which is Artaxerxes) the son of Papak the
son of Sassan sits in the great seat of the Achaemenidae.
Now this is the key to all the history of the west in those
times; and we may include West Asia in the west:--the world was
going down, and each new phase of civilization was something
worse than the one before. I cannot but see degeneracy, and with
every age a step further from ancient truth: Rome with less
light than Greece; the Sassanians a feebble copy of the
Achaemenians:--knowledge of the Realities receding ever into the
past. A new spirit had been coming in since the beginning of the
Christian era, or since the living flame of the last-surviving
Mysteries was quenched. It is one we are but painfully
struggling away from now; it has tainted all life west of China
since. China, with her satellite nations, alone in the main
escaped it: I mean, the spirit of religious intolerance.
The odium of introducing it belongs not (as you might think) to
one particular religious body, but to the evil in humanlty; on
which, since the Mysteries were destroyed, there had been no
effective check. The corner-stone of true religion is the Divine
Spirit omnipresent in Nature; the Divine Soul in Man. As well
forbid the rest of men to breathe the air you breathe, or walk
under your private stretches of sky, as try to peg yourself out a
special claim in these! You cannot do it, and the first
instinct of man should be that you cannot do it. But lose sight
of these Divine Things; lose the sense that perceives them,
their essential universality, their inevitable universality;--and
where are you? What are you to do about the inner life?--Why,
for lack of reality, you shall take a sham: you shall hatch up
some formula of words; or better still, take the formula already
hatched that comes handiest; call it your creed or confession of
faith; fix your belief on that, as supreme and infallible, the
sure and certain key to the mysteries within and around you;--
then you may cease to think of those mysteries altogether; the
word-formula will be enough; it is that, not thought, not
action, that saves. I believe in--such and such an arrangement of
consonants and vowels;--and therefore I am saved, and highly
superior; and you, poor reptile, who possess not this arrangement,
but some other and totally false one;--you, thank God, are
damned. You are lost; you shall go to hell; I scorn and
look down on you from the heights of the special favor of the
Maker of the Stars and Suns: as if I lay already snug in
Abraham's bosom, and watched you parched and howling.--The
Mysteries were gone; there was no Center of Light in the West,
from which the thought-essence of common sense might seep out
purifying year by year into men's minds; Theosophy the grand
antiseptic was not; so such tomfoolery as this came in to take
its place. You must react to this from indifference, and to
indifference from this;--two poles of inner darkness, and
wretched unthinking humanity wobbling between them;--so long as
you have no Light. What then is the Light?--Why, simply
something you cannot confine in a church or bottle in a creed:
and this is a proposition that needs no proving at all, because
it is self-evident. There was a fellow in English Wiltshire
once, they say, who planted a hedge about his field to keep
in the cuckoo from her annual migration. The spirit of
Cuckoo-hedging came in, in the first centuries A. D.
It was totally unknown to the Roman polity. Whatever inner
things any man or nation chose to bear witness to, said the Roman
state, were to be supposed to exist; and might be proclaimed,
were they not subversive of the public order, for the benefit of
any that needed them. There were two exceptions: Druidism; we
have glanced at a possible reason why it was proscribed in Gaul
by Augustus; another reason may been that the Druids clung to
the memories of Celtic--and so anti-Roman--great things forelost.
The other exception was the first historical world-religion that
proclaimed the doctrine,--_Believe or be damned!_
Over the portals of the first century A.D., says H.P. Blavatsky,
the words "the Karma of Israel" are written. Judaism had never
tried to impress itself on the world, as the religion that was
born from it did.--It is rarely that one finds sane views taken
as to Jewish history; it is a history, and a race, that provoke
extreme feelings. A small people, originally exiled from India,
that had had eight thousand years of vicissitudes since;
sometimes, it is necessary to think, high fortunes;--no doubt an
age of splendor once under their great king Solomon, or some one
else for whom the traditional Solomon stands; oftenest, perhaps,
subjected to their powerful neighbors in Egypt, Babylon, or
Assyria, and latterly Rome: you may say that no doubt they were
in the long run no better and no worse than the rest of mankind.
They had great qualities, and the failings correspondent. They
had, like all other races, their champions of the Light, their
Prophets and wise Rabbis; and in ages of darkness their stiff
necked fierce materialism incased in dogma and inthroned in high
places in the national religion. Their history has been lifted
to a bad eminence,--bad for them and the rest of us,--by the
ignorance of the last two millenniums; in reality, that history,
sanely understood, and not gathered too much from their own
records, amply explains their failings and their virtues, and
should leave us not unduly admiring, nor unfraternally the
reverse. They were human; which means, subject to human
duality, to cycles of light, and cycles of darkness. The
centuries after the sixth B.C. were, as we have seen, a cycle of
growing darkness for most of the world. The position of the
Jews, a small people surrounded by great ones, and therefore
always liable to be trampled on, had intensified their national
feeling to an extraordinary pitch; and their religion was the
one lasting bond of their nationality. So, at the beginning of
the Christian era, they were notoriously the most difficult
people to govern in the Roman world. The passing of the Egyptian
Mysteries had left those Egyptians who still were Egyptian
sullenly fanatical; but the reaction from ancient greatness kept
that fanaticism aloof,--the energies were dormant: Egypt,
thoroughly conquered, turned her face from the world, and hoped
for nothing. But the Jews maintained an inextinguishable hope;
they nourished on it a fighting spirit which entered fiercely
into the religion that was for them the one and only truth, and
that lifted them in their own estimation high above the rest of
mankind. Romans and Egyptians alike worshiped the Gods, though
they called them by different names; but the Jews abhorred the
Gods. The Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the
galaxy was a good Jew like themselves, their peculiar property;
He had his earthly headquarters in Jerusalem; spoke, I suppose,
only Hebrew, and considered other languages gibberish; of
all this earth, was only interested in a tiny corner at the
south-east end of the Mediterrancan; and of all the millions of
humanity only in the million or two of his Chosen People. I say
at once that, considering their history, and the universal
decline of the Mysteries, and the gathering darkness of the age,
there is nothing surprising in their attitude. Much oppression,
many conquests,--never accepted by themselves,--had driven them
in on themselves and kept their racial self-consciousness at a
perpetual boiling-point; and it all went into their religion,
which compensated them with unearthly dignities for the
indignities they suffered on earth .... _them_.... the Chosen
People of the Lord! It bred in them scorn of the Gentiles, for
which there was no solvent in the Roman polity, the Roman
citizenship, the Roman peace.--There must have been always noble
protest-ants among them. The common people,--as the picture in
the Gospels shows,--were ready enough to fraternize humanly with
Gentiles and Romans; but the fact remains that at the time
Judaism gave birth to Christianity, this narrow fierce antagonism
to all other religions was the official attitude of the Jewish
church. It was, perhaps, the darkest moment in Jewish spiritual
history; and it was the moment chosen by a Teacher as that in
which he should be born a Jew.
The story in the Gospels cannot, I suppose, be taken as _au pied
de lettre_ historical; but no doubt it gives a general picture
which is true enough. And the picture it gives shows the Jewish
proletariat in very favorable contrast with the officials heads
of the church and state. They, the common people, received the
Teacher well; to them, he was a gracious figure whom they came
in multitudes to hear. He was in fierce opposition to the
hierarchic aristocracy,--the "scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,"
as he called them: the body that nourished the tradition of
exclusiveness and intolerance. He preached pure ethics to the
people, and they loved him for it. He gathered round him
disciples,--men eager to learn from him that which it would have
been ridiculous to have tried to teach the mob: the Secret
Wisdom, without which to keep them sweet, ethics become
sentimentalism, and philosophy a cold corpse. It is a law
in the Schools of this Wisdom that seven years of training
are necessary before the disciple can reach that grade of
insight and self-mastery which will enable him in turn to
become a Teacher: seven years at the very least. Within
four years of the beginning of his mission, before, in the
nature of things, one single disciple could have been more
than half-trained, the hierarchic aristrocracy had had this
Teacher crucified.
Who, then, was to transmit his doctrine? he wrote nothing of it
down; in the truest sense it never can be written down: had
never had time to teach it; from any writings whatsoever each
student can only gain the nexus of what he is to learn from life;
for teaching does not mean giving dissertations, arguments,
proofs; enunciating principles, and explaining them, or the
like. It means, so far as one dare try to express it, bringing
such experiences to bear on the lives of those who are to be
taught, as shall awaken their own inner perceptions to truth. So
this Man's doctrine _was never transmitted._ His disciples, good
and earnest men, as we may imagine, had not the weapons spiritual
wherewith to wage effective warfare for the Light. Supposing
H.P. Blavatsky had died in 1879....?
The next step was, the inevitable materialization of the whole
movement. It followed the course all such movements must follow,
that are without spiritual leadership at the head, spiritual
wisdom at the core. It reacted against the exclusiveness of
Judaism,--and at the same time inherited it. Feelings of that
sort lie far deeper than the articles of belief; a change of
creed will not remove them; it needs special, defined, and
herculean efforts to remove them. You might, for example, react
from a bigoted creed to one whose sole proclaimed article was
universal toleration, and become a fierce bigot in that,--for the
creed, not the idea; because creeds always obscure ideas: when a
creed is formulated, it means that ideas are shelved. So now
Chrisitianity inherited the Chosen People dogma, but transferred
it from a racial-ecclesiastical to a wholly ecclesiastical basis;
and, since every Teacher comes upon a cyclic impusle outward,
took on a missionary spirit. The Chosen People now were the
members of the church, who might belong to any race. Within that
churchly pale you were saved; you were a special protege of the
Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the galaxy;
who had--for a dogma had to be invented to explain the untimely
disastrous death of the Teacher,--incarnated and been crucified
in Judea. Outside that pale you were damned,--from Caesar on his
throne to the smallest newsboy yelling false news in the Forum.
While such a spirit had been confined to the Jews, it had been
comparatively harmless; now it was spreading broadcast through
the Roman world, an entirely new thing, and the darkest and most
ominous yet.
Whom, then, shall we blame? These sectarians?--No: to understand
is to forgo the imagined right apportioning blame. It was that
humanity had entered on a dark region in time: a region whose
terrors had not been forefended; to be entered perforce by a
humanity, or section of humanity, that had no Center of Light
established in its midst. Had Croton of Pythagoras survived; or
the Mysteries at Gaulish Bibracte: had there been but one firm
foothold for the Lodge in the world of men;--I think none of
these things could have come about; and that for the same reason
that you cannot have total darkness in a room in which a lamp is
lighted. But this darkness was total: intolerance is the
negation of spiritual light. Of all the various movements in the
Roman world that had not actual members of the Lodge behind and
moving them, Christianity had the greatest impetus; and it was
the one that first entered into this murk and deadly gloom. So
that it may seem, to an impartial but not too deeply-seeing eye,
as if it were Christianity that invented the gloom. Not so; nor
Judaism neither; nor any Christians nor Jews. It was the men
who burned Croton; the man who killed the Mysteries in Gaul.
For every disaster there are causes far and far back.
Christianity had spread, by this third century, perhaps as
much through the Parthian empire as through the Roman. The
Zoroastrians had been as tolerant as the Romans; much more so to
Christianity;--though the motive of their toleration had been
pure indifference to everything religious; whereas in Rome there
was statesmanship and wisdom behind theirs. The Persians reacted
against Parthianism in all its manifestations. They were shocked
at Parthian indifference. The Persian is as naturally religious
as the Hindoo: and has the virtues and vices of the religious
temperament. The virtues are a tendency to mysticism, a need to
concern oneself with the unseen; the vices, a non-immunity to
fanaticism and bigotry. They came down now from their mountains
determined to combat the slackness; the indifference, the
materialism of the world. The virus of intolerance was in the
air,--a spirit like the germ of plague or any epidemic; one
religion catches it from another. Let it be about, and you are
in danger of catching it, unless your faith is based on actual
inner enlightenment, and not faith at all, but knowledge; or
unless you have a Teacher so enlightened to adjust you, and keep
you too busy to catch it;--or unless you are totally heedless of
the unseen. The Persians were not indifferent, but very much in
earnest; and they had no knowledge, but only faith: so they
stood in peculiar danger. And presently a Teacher came to them,
and they rejected him.
His name was Mani; he was born in Ctesiphon, of noble Persian
family, probably in 215; and came forward as a Teacher (according
to the Mohammedan tradition, which is the most trustworthy)
at the coronation of Sapor I, Ardashir's successor, in 242.
Sapor at first was disposed to hear him; but the Magi moved
heaven and earth to change that disposition. Ardashir had
bound church and state together in the closest union: no worship
but the Zoroastrian was allowed in his dominions. This was
mainly aimed at the Christians, and must have caused them much
discomfort. But Mani, it would seem, rose against all this
narrow-ness. It has been said that he taught Reincarnation, and
again denied;--this much he taught certainly,--that all religions
are founded on one body of truth. He drew his own doctrine from
Zoroistrianism, Christianity (chiefly Gnostic), and Buddhism;
taking from each what he found to be true. Manichaeism spread
quickly, through the Roman world as well as through Persia; in
the former it replaced Mithraism, another Persian growth, that
had come to be preeminently the religion of the Roman soldier.
Sapor looked on him favorably; Hormizd, the heir apparent, was
more or less a disciple; but the Magi agitated. They arranged a
great debate before the king, and therein convinced him;
persuaded him, at least, to withdraw from the Teacher the light
of his countenance;--and Mani found it expedient, or perhaps was
compelled, to go into exile. In China; where the fimily of the
Ts'ao Ts'ao who expelled the Eastern Hans, was reigning as the
House of Wei in the north. There Mani busied himself, less in
teaching his religion than in studying Chinese civilization,--
especially its arts and crafts, and most of all, carpet-weaving.
Presently he ventured back to Persia, with a large knowledge of
Chinese methods and a large collection of specimens;--with which
he gave a new impetus to Persian art and manufactures. Hormizd
came to the throne in 271, and befriended him and his doctrine;
but reigned only a single year. His successor Bahram I in the
name of Zoroastrianism had him flayed and crucified.
So Sassanian history is, on the whole, uninteresting. Their
culture stood for no great ideas; only for a narrow persecuting
church. West Asia was not ready yet for great and world-important
doings; it must wait for these till Mohammed, who struck
into the very least promising quarter of it, and kindled
in the barbarous wilderness a light to redeem the civilization of
the western world. I shall hardly have to turn to the Sassanians
again; so will say here what is to be said. We have seen that
their empire was quite unlike the Parthian; it was a reversion
to, and copy in small of, the Achaemenian of Cyrus and Darius.
It never attained the size of that; and only late in its
existence, and to a small degree, overflowed the Parthian limits.
But it was a well-organized state, with a culture of its own;
and enough military power to stand throughout its existence the
serious rival of Rome. Its arts and crafts became famous,
--thanks largely to Mani; in architecture it revived the
Achaemenian tradition, with modifications of its own; and passed
the result on to the Arabs when they rose, to be the basis of the
Saracenic Style. There was a fairly extensive literature:
largely religious, but with much also in _belles lettres,_
re-tellings of the old Iranian sagas, and the like. Its history is
mainly the record of gigantic wars with Rome; these were
diversified later by tussles with the Turks, Ephthalites or White
Huns, _et hoc genus omne._ Its whole period of existence lasted
from 227 to 637; 410 years;--which we may compare with the 426
of the Hans, and the Roman 424 from the accession of Augustus to
the final division of the empire. Of its cycles, there is a
little information forthcoming; but we may say this: Sapor I
came to the throne in 241, succeeding his father Ardashir; he
had on the whole a broad outlook; favored Mani at first; was at
pains to bring in teachers of civilization from all possible
sources;--with his reign the renaissance of the arts and
learning, such as it was,--and it was by no means contemptible,--
began. Three times thirteen decades from that, and we are at
631. The thirteen decades (less a year) from 499 to 628 are
mainly filled with the reigns of Kavadh I and the two Chosroeses,--
"Kai-Kobad the great and Kai-Khusru,"
--all three strong kings and conquerors. When Chosroes II was
killed in 628, after a war with Heraclius that began brilliantly
and ended in disaster,--the empire practically fell: split up
under several pretenders, to be an easy prey for the Moslems a
few years later. Was the whole Sassanian period divisible into a
day, a night, and a day? Information is not at hand whereby one
might gauge the life of the people, and say. The last thirteen
decades, certainly, seem to have left their mark as an age of
glory on the Persian imagination, and to have been remembered as
such in the days of Omar Khayyam.--And here we must leave the
Sassanians, having other fish to fry.
We saw the Crest-Wave strike Rome (at Nerva's accession) in 96;
then, 131 years later, raise up Ardashir and Persia in 227;
--and so, I suppose, should incline to look east again, and
jump another thirteen decades, and land in India, in 357 or
thereabouts,--praying God to keep us from a bad fall. _India_
I allow; but look before you leap;--or, if you will, in mid-air
turn over in your minds the old Indian cycles, as far as you know
them, and see if they offer you any prospect of a landing-place.
As thus: there were the Mauryas, 320 to 190 B. C.; thence on
thirteen decades to 60 B.C.,--and near enough to the reputed 58
of the reputed Vikramaditya of Ujjain. On again (thirteen
decades as usual) to the seventies A.D.--and good enough in all
conscience for that slippery Kanishka who so dodges in and out
among the early centuries, and is fitted with a new date by
everyone who has to do with him. On again, from 70 to 200;
nothing doing there, I regret to say, (that we know about).
Never mind; on thence to 320,--the nearest point to our 357;
let us land in the three-twenties then, and see what happens.
On solid ground: for India, remarkably solid. There actually
was a Golden Age there at that time; and everybody seems to
agree that it lasted, say, one hundred and twenty-nine years;
from 326 to 455. This you will note, was the period of the last
phase of the Roman Empire: that of its rapid decline. In 323
Constantine came to the throne, and began making Chrisitianity
the state religion; in 330 he moved his capital. After 456, no
emperor ruled in the west but for puppets set up by the German
Ricimer, two set up by Constantinople, and Romulus Augustulus,
the last,--and all within twenty years. There is no bright spot
within the whole thirteen decades, except the two years of
Julian. The faucet was turned on in India; and the Roman garden
went waterless, and wilted.
What happened was this: in 320, one Chandragupta Gupta married
the Pincess of Magadha; and an era was dated from their
coronation on the 26th of February in that year. Their son
Samudragupta succeeded his father in 326, and reigned until 375.
It is characteristic of India that this, probably the greatest
monarch since Asoka, is absolutely unmentioned in any history or
contemporary literature: the sole evidence for his reign and
greatness comes from coins and inscriptions. One of the latter
is to be found on a pillar originally set up and inscribed by
Asoka, now in the fort at Allahabad. It shows him a mighty
conqueror, reigning over all Hindustan; victorious in the
Deccan; and, by influence and alliances, dominant from Ceylon to
the Oxus. His coins picture him playing on the lyre; the
inscriptions speak of him as a poet and musician; in his reign
began a great renaissance in art, architecture, literature, and
perhaps especially in music,--a renaissance which reached its
culmination in the reign of his successor. Another thing to
note: when of old time Pushyamitra overturned the Buddhist
Mauryas, he showed his Brahmin orthodoxy by performing the great
Horse Sacrifice;--a sign that the ancient religion had come back
in triumph. They let loose a horse to wander where it would, and
followed it with an army for a whole year; then sacrificed it.
Samudragupta performed the same rites;--and it is known that the
Gupta age was one of strong reaction against Buddhism. I know
that it is disputed now that there was ever a persecution of the
Buddhists in India; but the tradition remains; and one of the
Teachers, in a letter that appears either in the _Occult World_
or _Esoteric Buddhism,_ speaks of India as a land from which the
Light of the Lodge had been driven with the followers of the
Buddha. Certainly there were Buddhists in India long after this
time: even a great Buddhist king in the seventh century: but it
seems more than probably that the spirit of intolerance went east
with the eastward cyclic flow we have noted this evening: from
Christianity to Zoroastrianism: from Zoroastrianism under the
Sassanids to Brahminism under the Guptas.
Not, perhaps, that there was actual persecution, yet. Emissaries
from the king of Ceylon found the shrine at Buddhagaya fallen
into decay; and they themselves were not well treated at the
site. The Buddhist kind, however, determined to remedy things as
well as he could. He sent ambassadors with rich gifts to
Samundragupta; who called the gifts tribute, and permitted him,
on consideration thereof, to restore the shrine. The monastery
then built by the Sinhalese was afterwards visited by Hiuen
Tsang; who describes it as having three storeys, six halls,
three towers, and accommodation for a thousand monks. "On it,"
says Hiuen Tsang, "the utmost skill of the artist has been
employed; the ornamentation is in the richest colors, and the
statue of Buddha is cast in gold and silver, decorated with gems
and precious stones."
A revolution took place in architecture in this age: the
Buddhist style was abandoned, for something which, says Mrs.
Flora Annie Steel: *
".....more ornate, less self-evident, served to reflect the
new and elaborate pretensions of the priesthood."
------
* To whose book _India through the Ages,_ I am indebted for these
facts concerning the Gupta Age.
------
It is summed up, says Mrs. Steel, in the words:
"...._cucumber and gourd_... tall curved vimanas or towers,
exactly like two thirds of a cucumber stuck in the ground and
surmounted by a flat gourd-like 'amalika.' .... Exquisite in
detail, perfect in the design and execution of their ornamentation,
the form of these temples leaves much to be desired. The flat
blob at the top seems to crush down the vague aspirings of
the cucumber, which, even if unstopped, must erelong have
ended in an earthward curve again."
The age culminated in the next reign, that of Chandragupta II
Vikramaditya. Heaven knows how to distingusih between him and
his half-mythological namesake of B.C. 58 and Ujjain. Very
possibly the Nine Gems of Literature and Kalidasa and _The Ring
of Sakoontala_ belong to this reign really. At any rate it
was a wonderful time. Fa-hien, the Chinese Buddhist traveler,
obligingly visited India during its process, and left a picture
of conditions. Personal liberty, says Mrs. Steel, was the
keynote feature. There was no capital punishment; no hard
pressure of the laws; there were excellent hospitals and
charitable institutions of all sorts.--We are to see in the whole
age, I imagine, a period of great brilliance, and of humaneness
resulting from eight centuries of the really civilizing influence
of Buddhism: far higher conditions than you should have found
elsewhere to east or west at that time;--and also, the moment
when the impulse of culture had reached its outward limit, and
the reaction against the spiritual sources of culture began.
Chandragupta Vikramaditya reigned until 413; Kumaragupta, great
and successful also, until 455. Then, thirteen decades after
Samudragupta's accession, came Skandagupta; and with him, the
White Huns. He defeated them on a large scale in the fifties;
but they returned again and again to the attack; during the next
thirty years their pressure was breaking up the empire; till
when Skandagupta died in 480, it fell to pieces.