Part 42

But look outside of Rome, and the picture is very different. The Spaniard, Gaul, Illyrian, Asiatic and the rest, were enjoying the Roman Peace. There was progress; if not at the center, everywhere between that and the periphery of civilization. Life, even in Italy (in the country parts) was growing steadily more cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with perhaps not much to counter-balance them, _in Rome._ Paris has been latterly the capital of civilization; and one of its phases as such has been to be the capital of the seven deadly sins. The sins are or were there: Paris provided for the sinners of the world, in her capacity of world-metropolis; just as she provided for the artists, the _litteratuers,_ and so on. Foolish people drew from that the conclusion that therefore Frenchmen were more wicked than other people: whereas in truth the life of provincial France all along has probably been among the soundest of any. So we must offset Martial's and Juvenal's pictures of the calm and gracious life in the country: virtuous life, often, with quiet striving after usefulness and the higher things. He reveals to us, in the last quarter of the century, interiors in northern Italy, by Lake Como; you should have found the like anywhere in the empire. And where, since Rome fell, shall you come on a century in which Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Asia and Africa, enjoyed a Roman or any kind of peace? Be not deceived: there has been no such success in Europe since as the empire that Augustus the Initiate made, and for which Tiberius his disciple was crucified.

Yet they captured it, as I find things, out of the jaws of failure and disaster. Failure: that of Pythagoreanism six centuries before;--disaster: Caesar's conquest of Gaul and destruction of the Mysteries there. Men come from the Masters of the World to work on this plane or on that: to found an empire perhaps, or to start a spiritual movement. Augustus came commissioned to the former, not to the latter, work. Supposing in his time the Gaulish Mysteries had been intact. We may trust him to have established relations somehow: he would have had close and friendly relations with the Gaulish hierophants; even if he had conquered the people, he would not have put out their light. But I imagine he would have found a means to union without conquest. Then what would have happened? We have seen that the cyclic impulse did touch Gaul at that time; it made her vastly rich, hugely industrial;--as Ferero says, the Egypt of the West. That, and nothing better than that, because she had lost her spiritual center, and might not figure as the world Teacher among nations. But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism--which sounds like carrying on Julius' nefarious work. He did, I believe;--but why? Because Julius had seen to it that the white side of Druidism had perished. The Druids were magicians; and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained among them,--at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.

Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea that she might have been, and should have been, something far higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant. I think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the kings of night to forestall. And so, that Augustus lacked that reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.

And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great defeat;--and this has been the inner history of europe ever since. This: raidings from the Godworld: swift cavalry raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds here on hell's border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off captives. Set up no strongholds;--that is, until our own times; so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established base 'but here upon this bank and shoal,' from which the shining squadrons of the Gods might ride. Such a base was lost when Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say, abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but the _membra disjecta_ of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work, distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy. So latterly H.P. Blavasky must gather up fragments in the East for the nexus of her teaching; she must find seeds in old sarcophagi, and plant and make them grow in this soil so uncongenial; because there was no well-grown Tree patent to the world, with whose undeniable fruitage she might feed the nations. This was one great difficulty in her way; whe had to introduce Theosphy into a world that had forgotten it ever existed.

So,--but with a difference,--in that first century. The difference was that Pythagoreanism, the nexus, was only six hundrd years away, and the memory of it fairly fresh. Stoicism was the most serious living influence within the empire; a system that concerned itself with right and brave living, and was so far spiritual; but perhaps not much further. The best in men reacted against the sensuality of the mid-century, and made Stoicism strong; but this formed only a basis of moral grit for the higher teaching; of which, while we know it was there, there is not very much to say. I shall come to it presently; meanwhile, to something else.--In literature, this was the cycle of Spain: the Crest-Wave was largely there during the first thirteen decades of the Christian era. Seneca was born in Cordova about 3 B. C.; Hadrian, the last greatman of Spanish birth (though probably of Italian race), died in 138. Seneca was a Stoic: a man with many imperfections, of whom history cannot make up its mind wholly to approve. He was Nero's tutor and minister during the first five golden years of the reign; his government was wise and beneficent, though, it is said, sometimes upheld by rather doubtful means. In the growing gloom and horror of the nightmare reign of Nero, he wrote many counsels of perfection; his notes rise often, someone has said, to a sort of falsetto shriek; but then, the wonder is he could sing at all in such a hell's cacophony. A man with obvious weaknesses, perhaps; but fighting hard to be brave and hopeful where there was nothing in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he might even, had he been another man, have made himself emperor; perhaps the worst thing against him is that he did not. His counsels and aspirations were much better than his deeds;--which is as much as to say his Higher Self than his lower. He stood father-confessor to Roman Society: a Stoic philosopher in high, luxurious, and most perilous places: he cannot escape looking a little unreal. Someone in some seemingly petty difficulties, writes asking him to sue his influence on his behalf; and he replies with a dissertation on death, and what good may lie in it, and the folly of fearing it. Cold comfort for his correspondent; a tactless, strained, theatrical thing to do, we may call it. But what strain upon his nerves, what hideous knowledge of the times and of evils he did not see his way to prevent, what haunting sense of danger, must have driven him to that fervid hectic eloquence that now seems so unnatural! One guesses there may be a place in the Pantheons or in Valhalla of the heroes for this poor not untawdry not unheroic Seneca. One sees in him a kind of Hamlet, hitting in timorous indecision on the likely possibility of converting his Claudius by a string of moral axioms and eloquence to a condition that should satisfy the Ghost and undo the something rotten in the state.... Yet the Gods must have been grateful to him for the work he did in holding for Stoicism and aspiration a center in Rome during that dreadful darkness. Perhaps only the very strongest, in his position, could have done better; and then perhaps only by killing Nero.*

* Dill: _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius._ ------

But there was a greater than Seneca in Rome, even in Nero's reign;--there intermittently, and not to abide: Appollonius of Tyana, presumably the real Messenger of the age:--and by the change that had come over life by the second century, we may judge how great and successful. But there is not getting at the reality of the man now. We have a _Life_ of him, written about a hundred years after his death by Philostratus, a Greek sophist, for the learned Empress Julia Domna, Septimius Severus' wife; who, no doubt, chose for the work the best man to hand; but the age of great literature was past, and Philostratus resurrects no living soul. The account may be correct enough in outline; the author was painstaking; visited the sites of his subject's exploits, and pressed his inquiries; he claims to have based his story on the work of Damis of Neneveh, a disciple of Apollonius who accompanied him everywhere. But much is fabulous: there is a gorgeous account of dragons' in India, and the methods used in hunting them; and you know nothing of the real Apollonius when you have read it all. Here, in brief, is the outline of the story: Apollonius was born at Tyana in Cappodocia somewhere about the year 1 A.D., and died in the reign of Nerva at nearly a hundred: tradition ascribed to his birth its due accompaniment of signs and portents. At sixteen he set himself under Pythagorean discipline; kept silence absolute for five years; traveled, healing and teaching, and acquired a great renown throughout Asia Minor. He went by Babylon and Parthia to India; spent some time there as the pupil of certain Teachers on a sacred mountain; they, it appears, expected his coming, received him and taught him; ever afterwards he spoke of himself as a disciple of the Indian Master Iarchus. Nothing in the book is more interesting than the curious light it throws on popular beliefs of the time in the Roman World as to the existence of these Indian masters of the Secret Wisdom;--India, of course, included the region north of the Himalayas. Later he visited the Gymnosophists of the Tebaid in Egypt; according to the account, these were of a lower standing than the Indian Adepts; and Apollonius came among them not as a would-be disciple, but as an equal, or superior.--He was persecuted in Rome by Nero; but over awed Tigellinus, Nero's minister, and escaped. He met Vespasian and Titus at Alexandria, soon after the fall of Jerusalem; and was among those who urged Vespasian to take the throne. He was arrested in Rome by Domitian, and tried on charges of sorcery and treason; and is said to have escaped his sentence and execution by the simple expedient of vanishing in broad daylight in court. One wonders why this from his defense before Domitian, as Philostratus gives it, has not attracted more comment; he says: "All unmixed blood is retained by the heart, which through the blood-vessels sends it flowing as if through canals over the entire body."--According to tradition, he rose from the dead, appeared to several to remove their doubts as to a life beyond death, and finally bodily ascended into heaven. Reincarnation was a very cardinal point in his teaching; perhaps the name of Neo-Pythagoreanism, given to his doctrine, is enough to indicate in what manner it illuminated the inner realms and laws which Stoicism, intent only on brave conduct and the captaincy of one's own soul, was unconcerned to inquire into. Another first century Neo-Pythagorean Teacher was Moderatus of Gades in Spain. The period of Apollonius's greatest influence would have corresponded with the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, from 69 to 83; the former, when he came to the throne, checked the orgies of vice and brought in an atmosphere in which the light of Thesophy might have more leave to shine. The certainty is that the last third of the first century wrought an enormous change: the period that preceded it was one of the worst, and the age that followed it, that of the Five Good Emperors, was the best, in known European history.--Under the Flavians, from 69 to 96,--or roughly, during the last quarter,--came the Silver Age, the second and last great day of Latin literature: with several Spanish and some Italian names,--foam of the Crest-Wave, these latter, as it passed over from Spain to the East. It will, by the way, help us to a conception of the magnitude of the written material at the disposal of the Roman world, to remember that Pliny the Elder, in preparing his great work on Natural History, consulted six thousand published authorities. That was in the reign of Nero; it makes one feel that those particular ancients had not so much less reading matter at their command than we have today.

Of the great Flavian names in literature, we have Tacitus; Pliny the Younger, with his bright calm pictures of life; Juvenal, with his very dark ones: these were Italians. Juvenal was a satirist with a moral purpose; the Spaniard Martial, contemporary, was a satirist without one. Martial drew from life, and therefore his works, though coarse, are still interesting. We learn from him what enormous activity in letters was to be found in those days in his native Spain; where every town had its center of learning and apostles and active propaganda of culture. Such things denote an ancient cultural habit, lapsed for a time, and then revived.

Another great Spainiard, and the best man in literature of the age, was Quintilian: gracious, wise, and of high Theosophic ideals, especially in education. He was born in A.D. 35; and was probably the greatest literary critic of classical antiquity. For twenty years, from 72 until his death, he was at the head of the teaching profession in Rome. The "teaching" was, of course, in rhetoric. Rome resounded with speech-makings; and Gaul, Spain, and Africa were probably louder with it than Rome. Though the end of education then was to turn out speech-makers,--as it is now to turn out money-makers,--I do not see but that the Romans had the best of it,--Quintilian saw through all to fundamental truths; he taught that your true speech-maker must be first a true man. He went thoroughly into the training of the orator,--more thoroughly, even from the standpoint of pure technique, than any other Greek or Roman writer;--but would base it all upon character, balance of the faculties,--in two words, Raja-Yoga. Pliny the Younger was among his pupils, and owed much to him; also is there to prove the value of Quintilian's method;--for Quintilian turned out Pliny a true gentlman. Prose in those days,--that is, rhetoric,--was tending ever more to flamboyancy and extravagance: a current which Quintilian stood against valiantly. We find in him, as critic, just judgment, sane good taste, wide and generous sympathies;--a tendency to give the utmost possible credit even where compelled in the main to condemn;--as he was in the case of Senaca. He had the faculty of hitting off in a phrase the whole effect of a man's style; as when he speaks of the "milky richness of Livy," and the "immortal swiftness of Sallust." *

* _Encyclopaedia Britannica;_ article 'Quintilian' ------

So then, to sum up a little: I think we gain from these times a good insight into cyclic workings. First, we shall see that the cycles are there, and operative: action and reaction regnant in the world,--a tide in the affairs of men; and strong souls coming in from time to time, to manipulate reactions, to turn the currents at strategic points in time; making things, despite what evils may be ahead, flow on to higher levels than their own weight would carry them to: thus did Augustus and Tiberius; --or throwing them down, as the merry Julius did, from bright possibilities to a sad and lightless actuality. For perhaps we have been suffering because of Julius' exploit ever since; and certainly, no matter what Neros and Caligulas followed them, the world was a long time the better for the ground the great first two Principes captured from hell.--And next, we shall learn to beware of being too exact, precise, and water-tight with out computations and conceptions of these cycles: we shall see that nature works in curves and delicate wave-lines, not in broken off bits and sudden changes. Rome was going down in Tiberius' reign: she was bad enough then, heaven knows; though we may put her passing below the meridian at or near the end of it;-- conveniently, in the year 36. And then, what with (1) the tenseness of the gloom and the severity of suffering in the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian;--and (2) the inflow of new and cleaner blood from the provinces at all times but especially under Vespasian; and above all, (3) the Theosophic impulse whose outward visible sign is the mission of Apollonius and Moderatus:--we find her ready to emerge into light in 96, when Nerva came to the throne, instead of having to wait the five more years for the end of the half-cycle;--although we may well suppose it took that time at least for Nerva and Trajan to clear things up and settle them. So we may keep this scheme of dates in memory as indicative: a (rough) half-cycle before 29 B.C., that of dawn and darkest hour preceding it; 29 B.C. to 36 A.D. daylight; 36 to 101, night and the beginnings of a new dawn.

And now we must turn to China.

Dusk came on in Rome with the death of Tiberius in A.D. 37; but what is dusk in the west is dawn in the east of the world. In 35 Han Kwang-wuti had put down the Crimson-Eyebrow rebellion, and seated himself firmly on the throne. The preceding half-cycle, great in Rome under Augustus and Tiberius, had been a time, first of puppet emperors, then of illegalism and usurpation, then of civil war. Han Kwang-wuti put an end to all that, and opened, in 35, a new cycle of his own.

But there is also an old cycle to be taken into account: the original thirteen-decade period of the Hans, that began in 194, and ended its first "day" in 63 or so,--to name convenient dates. I should, if I believed in this cyclic law, look for a recurrence of that: a new day to dawn, under its influence, in 66 or 67 A.D., thirteen decades after the old one ended,--and to last until 196 or 197. But on the other hand, here is Han Kwang-wuti starting things going in 35, a matter of thirty-two years ahead of time,--catching the flow of force just as it diminished in Rome.--And this thirty-two years, you may note, with what odd months we may suppose thrown in, is in itself a quarter-cycle.

Now cyclic impulses waste; a second day of splendor will commonly be found a Silver Age, where the first was Golden: it will often be more perfect and refined, but much less vigorous, than the first. So I should look for the second "day" of the Hans to come on the whole with less light to shine and less strength to endure than its predecessor; I should expect a gentleness as of late afternoon in place of the old noontide glory. But then there is the complication induced by Han Kwang-wuti, who started his cycle in 35.... or more probably his half-cycle;--I should look for it to be no more than that, on account of this same wastage of the forces;--this also has to be taken into consideration.

Brooding over the whole situation, I should foretell the history of this second Han Dynasty in this way: from 35 to 67,--the latter date the point where the old and new cycles intersect,-- would be a static time: of consolidation rather than expansion; of the gathering of the wave, not of its outburst into any splendor of foam. Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some echo or repetition of the glories of Han Wuti,--perhaps for a finishing and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is clear.--Well, if you have followed so far, you have a basis for understanding what is to come.

The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason:--just as late in the days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia,-- Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium,--so was Han Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west, eastward to Loyang or Honanfu,--the old Chow capital,--in Honan.

While Rome was weltering under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, China was recovering herself, getting used to a calm equanimity, under Haii Kwang-wuti: the conditions in the two were as opposite as the poles. She dwelt in quietness at home, and held her own, and a little more, on the frontiers. In 57, two years before Nero went mad and took the final plunge into infamy, Han Kwang-wuti died, and Han Mingti succeeded him. As Nero went down, Han Mingti went up. His ninth or tenth year, remember, was to be that of the recurrence of the old Han cycle. It was the year in which the provinces rose against Nero,--the lowest point of all in Rome. I do not know that it was marked by anything special in China; the fact being that all the Chinese sixties were momentous.

In the third Year of his reign Han Mingti dreamed a dream: he saw a serene and "Golden Man" descending towards him out of the western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,--the Buddha. Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:-- he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at the great Burning. So there may have been Buddhists in China all through the Han time; but if so, they were few, isolated and inconspicuous; it is Han Mingti's proper glory, to have brought Buddhism in.

He liked well his brother's interpretation, and sent inquirers into the west. In 65 they returned, with scriptures, and an Indian missionary, Kashiapmadanga,--who was followed shortly by Gobharana, another. A temple was built at Loyang, and under the emperor's patronage, the work of translating the books began.--We have seen before how some touch from abroad is needed to quicken an age into greatness: such a touch came now to China with these Indian Buddhists;--who, in all likelihood, may also have been in their degree Messengers of the Lodge.