XXII. EASTWARD HO!
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.