VENICE: by Grace Knoche
IT is one of the world's wonders that a little community should rise up from the midst of untillable marsh lands—literally out of the sea—and within a few centuries, through its energy, thrift, invention, and sheer ability, should become a world power not only in diplomacy, arms, and commerce, but in architecture, art, philosophy, and belles lettres. And all this, in spite of envy and attacks from without and conspiracies from within.
The power of Venice, "the wealthy republic," was so great in her palmy days that the honor of alliance with her was covetously sought by emperors and popes alike. At a time when, as history declares, a dictum from the Pope, or a threat of excommunication, would have brought almost any other nation of Europe to its knees in groveling terror, Venice laughed at both and pursued the even tenor of her imperial way.
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FRA PAOLO SARPI
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CARTA GATE AND CORNER OF DUCAL PALACE, VENICE, ITALY
The climax of her independence of dogmatic rule was reached in those glorious and courageous later days when Fra Paolo Sarpi lived and guided her destinies, Sarpi, "the noblest of the Venetians," who realized more fully than any other in that republic the dangers that would threaten should outside influences ever gain a foothold in the chambers of government. Had there been a successor to Fra Paolo, one worthy of his example, one who grasped his purposes, knew the spirit of the teacher that molded them and what beneficent power lay behind, who possessed as well the power to continue Sarpi's work—had such an exceptional soul appeared, Venice would not have decayed. At Fra Paolo's death the decline of Venetian greatness set in.
In the course of her history—and three centuries practically included the period of her undisputed greatness—Venice attained a position of supremacy on virtually every line of activity. In war she was dreaded. Says Yriarte, author of L'Histoire de Venise:
The arsenal of Venice, which still exists, was its palladium; the high organization of this establishment, the technical skill of its workmen, the specially selected body of the "arsenalotti," to whom the republic entrusted the duty of guarding the senate and great council, and its admirable discipline, were for centuries the envy of other European powers.... At the most critical period in its history, when it (Venice) was engaged in its great struggle with the Turks ... the arsenal regularly sent forth a fully equipped galley each morning for a hundred successive days.... At the acme of its prosperity the arsenal employed 16,000 workmen.
It is impossible to touch upon the political life and fortunes of Venice in the short space of a single article. Moreover, information on this is very accessible, for the Venetians themselves were great chroniclers, who firmly believed that their city was building in a strange way for the future and that its foundation stones should not rest unmarked. And though the last thing these old recorders dreamed of was the imminent decay of their proud city—their idol, their divinity, the object of their passionate adoration—they were right. Venice was building for the future—to which seeming mystery Theosophy also has the key.
Suffice it to say that when the inner history of Katherine Tingley's visit to Venice, upon the occasion of her first trip around the world in the interest of Theosophy, is given out publicly, a new interpretation will be given to some of these old records. The spirit of Venice has never died although untoward aims and evils have for nearly four centuries obscured the outer expression of it. But that, like the history of Fra Paolo, is another story, too, and volumes would be needed to contain it.
Venice was in her days the commercial link between Europe and the Orient and her merchants neglected no opportunity. The result was that not only did the city become fabulously wealthy but new trades and wonderful art-crafts sprung up. Rare damasks, glass, tapestries, silks, enamels, metal-work of various kinds, plastic work, mosaics, brought from the countries of the Orient by Venetian merchants, served as models to craftsmen who not only copied but improved upon them in the great industrial centers which sprang up. Venetian art-craftsmanship became throughout Europe a synonym for the ultra, the perfect.
A link between Italy and Greece, Venice afforded an asylum for Grecian men of letters when the light in their own land failed. These men Venice honored. They taught in her universities; they lighted up in the city not only a knowledge of the great literary monuments of the ancients but a love for them; they filled her libraries with translations. Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Strabo, Xenophon, Homer, and Orpheus, became something more than names. Says Yriarte:
Venice, more than any other town, has the credit of having rescued from oblivion, by editions and translations, the master-pieces of Greek literature.
The art of printing was welcomed upon the very threshold of its discovery and the services of Venice on this line are unique in the history of letters. Her printers were not mere workmen; some of them were scholars. "The Aldine Press" is synonymous with scholarship today as it was in renaissance Italy. Symonds describes the enthusiasm of the elder Aldus (or Aldo) for Greek literature, and his life-ambition, which was "to secure the literature of Greece from further accident by committing its chief masterpieces to type." He relates how Aldo, already a scholar and qualified as a humanist, "according to the custom of the country," spent a further two years in a study of Greek literature. Not a Venetian himself and with no ties in the city, by some "accident of fortune" he selected Venice as the place in which to build up a work whose parallel the world has not since afforded and of which a similar record is not to be found in the past unless possibly in the secret records of ancient China.
At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors around him. His trade was carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language of his household. Instructions to typesetters and binders were given in Greek. The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek. Greeks from Crete collated MSS., read proofs, and gave models of calligraphy for casts of Greek type.
Not counting the craftsmen employed in merely manual labor, Aldo entertained as many as thirty of these Greek assistants in his family.
His own energy and industry were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first volume of his Aristotle. Four more volumes completed the work in 1497-98. Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon's Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504.
The troubles of Italy, which pressed heavily on Venice, suspended Aldo's labors for awhile. But in 1508 he resumed his work with an edition of the minor Greek orators; and in 1509 appeared the lesser works of Plutarch.
Then came another stoppage. The league of Cambray had driven Venice back to her lagoons, and all the forces of the republic were concentrated on a struggle to the death with the allied powers of Europe. In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato ... in a preface eloquently and earnestly comparing the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy with the sublime and tranquil objects of a student's life. Pindar, Hesychius, and Athenaeus followed in 1514.
But Aldo's enthusiasm for the classics was not confined to those of Greece. He issued superb editions of the principal Latin and Italian classics as well, in an exquisite type especially cast for his Press and which it is said he had copied from the very handwriting of Petrarch.
There is something very reminiscent of the Orient in Aldo's reverence for beautiful calligraphy. To the Chinese scholar the ideograph is sacred and to write it well demands art and philosophy both. There is an ancient Chinese legend which says that once upon a time certain ideographs "came down from their tablets and spoke unto mankind." Curious, that one should recall it here. But not to know Aldo is to miss a great light upon the spirit that made Venice what it became, the spirit that animated every soul in that wonderful city—devotion to a high ideal, absolute unselfishness and service. Where is the Press today that combines these unpurchasable qualities with the acme of scholarship? We know of one—but only one.
Even in a short article, with Venice herself a subject for volumes, libraries, it is impossible to omit the following—also from Symonds:
Aldo ... burned with a humanist's enthusiasm for the books he printed; and we may well pause astonished at his industry, when we remember what a task it was in that age to prepare texts of authors so numerous and so voluminous from MSS. Whatever the students of this century may think of Aldo's scholarship, they must allow that only vast erudition and thorough familiarity with the Greek language could have enabled him to accomplish what he did. In his own days Aldo's learning won the hearty acknowledgment of ripe scholars.
To his fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free from jealousy and prodigal of praise. His stores of MSS. were as open to the learned as his printed books were liberally given to the public. While aiming at that excellence of typography which renders his editions the treasures of the book-collector, he strove at the same time to make them cheap.... His great undertaking was carried on under continual difficulties, arising from strikes among his workmen, the piracies of rivals, and the interruptions of war. When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor man.
To touch with any show of justice upon the architecture of Venice would task the eloquence of a Ruskin. But it is possible to indicate a few of the causes that contributed to make Venice the architectural marvel of Europe and her palaces and churches unique in the world.
According to tradition, there were both castles and "churches" in Venice several centuries before the earliest examples that survive. The first "church," it is said, was founded in 432 by one Giacomo del Rialto, but the earliest of which we have tangible evidence—and it is still standing—was built in the eleventh century. Of the eleventh and twelfth century castles or palaces, a number still may be seen.
Venetian architecture, like her literary and industrial life—indeed, like her whole life—was a combination of Oriental and Occidental influences. Her people were discoverers, adapters; they had a perfect genius for appreciation of the artistic, the eloquent, the statesmanlike, the progressive—in a word, "the Good, the Beautiful and the True" in the work of others—and with opportunities strewn along her path thicker than flowers in June, Venice seemed to grasp them all.
Although Venetian architecture was complex and composite to a degree, it is possible to trace the predominating influences as they set their mark upon style after style. Up to the thirteenth century the prevailing style was Byzantine, of which the leading characteristics seem to have been in Venice the semi-circular arch and a prodigal use of sculptured ornament. The method of construction employed by the Venetians—the walls being of a fine hard brick which was covered with stucco, or in the finer buildings with thin slabs of costly marbles and porphyries—permitted no end of surface decoration. And in this the color-loving Venetians reveled. Moldings, carvings, rolls, cavettos, flutings, panels, bands and diapers of flowing scroll work, lent their support to most varied adaptations of characteristic Persian or Moslem design, with its semi-conventional foliage, animals, dragons, birds, flowers, etc. Markedly beautiful, and in a way peculiar, is the effect of the façades of many buildings, "studded with gorgeous panels like jewels on a rich brocade."
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VENICE
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A "STREET" IN VENICE
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ST. MARK'S, VENICE
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RIO PINELLI
But in the thirteenth century a period of transition ushered out the round Byzantine arch, and in the pointed Gothic arch of the countries immediately north. Very soon, however, the Early Renaissance style, as exemplified in Verona and other Italian cities, became a dominating influence, this in turn to give way to the Classic, which became the "grand style" of sixteenth-century Venice. After that, the deluge—of mediocrity.
The Venetians, a conquering people by virtue of their navy which was the envy of Europe, made their city the storehouse of rich treasures stripped from the ruined cities of the past, and from other cities made her own by conquest. And her merchants did the rest. Quantities of rich marbles were brought from fallen Aquileia, Ravenna, and Heraclea, cities which in their turn had brought them from Egypt, Greece, and Arabia, and Numidia—
the red porphyry of Egypt and the green porphyry of Mt. Taygetus, red and gray Egyptian granites, the beautiful lapis Atracius (verde antico), Oriental alabaster from Numidia and Arabia, the Phrygian pavonazzetto with its purple mottlings, cipollino from Carystus, and, in great quantities, the alabaster-like Proconnesian marble with bluish and amber-colored striations.
Add to this magnificence a lavish use of gold and color, particularly the warm ochres and earth reds, and the costly ultramarine, and the modern mind, accustomed to uncolored and unstriated marbles and the quiet gray of stone, can hardly imagine the gorgeous luxuriance of color that marked the city in her prime.
The architectural glory of Venice is of course the Church of St. Mark, which, says Professor Middleton,
stands quite alone among the buildings of the world in respect of its unequaled richness of material and decoration, and also from the fact that it has been constructed with the spoils of countless other buildings, and therefore forms a museum of sculpture of the most varied kind, nearly every century from the fourth down to the latest Renaissance being represented in some carved panel or capital, if not more largely....
During the long period from its dedication in 1085 till the overthrow of the Venetian republic by Napoleon, every doge's reign saw some addition to the rich decorations of the church—mosaics, sculpture, wall linings or columns of precious marbles. By degrees the whole walls inside and outside were completely faced either with glass mosaics on gold grounds or with precious colored marbles and porphyries, plain white marble being only used for sculpture, and then thickly covered with gold.... No less than five hundred columns of porphyry and costly marbles are used.... A whole volume might be written on the sculptured capitals, panels, screens.
The use of inlay is almost peculiar to St. Mark's, as is also the method of enriching sculptured reliefs with backgrounds of brilliant gold and colored glass mosaics, producing an effect of extraordinary magnificence.
One of the great glories of St. Mark's is the most magnificent gold retable in the world, most sumptuously decorated with jewels and enamels, usually known as the Pala d'Oro.... This marvelous retable is made up of an immense number of microscopically minute gold cloisonné enamel pictures, of the utmost splendor in color and detail.
Of the architecture and art of the great council hall of the doges, the Ducal Palace, little need be said after the description of St. Mark's, for while not so lavishly ornamented, it is a world in itself in the style of architectural beauty that most appealed to the Venetians.
The original Palace of the Doges was built in the ninth century, but the vicissitudes of war and of fire decreed its rebuilding several times, and the Ducal Palace that we know today dates from the fourteenth century. Says Professor Middleton:
The two main façades, those towards the sea and the Piazzetta, consist of a repetition of the same design, that which was begun in the early years of the fourteenth century.... The design of these façades is very striking, and unlike that of any other building in the world....
The main walls are wholly of brick; but none was left visible. The whole surface of the upper story is faced with small blocks of fine Istrian and red Verona marbles, arranged so as to make a large diaper pattern, with, in the center of each lozenge, a cross made of verde antico and other costly marbles. The colonnades, string-courses, and other decorative features are built in solid Istrian stone.
Very beautiful sculpture, executed with an ivory-like minuteness of finish, is used to decorate the whole building with wonderful profusion. At each of the three free angles is a large group immediately over the lower column. At the south-east angle is the Drunkenness of Noah, at the south-west the Fall of Man, and at the north-west the Judgment of Solomon. Over each at a much higher level is a colossal figure of an archangel—Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel.
The sculpture of all the capitals, especially of those on the thirty-six lower columns, is very beautiful and elaborate, a great variety of subjects being introduced among the decorative foliage, such as the virtues, vices, months of the year, age of man, occupations, sciences, animals, nations of the world, and the like. On the whole, the sculpture of the fourteenth century part is finer than that of the later part near St. Mark's.
On the walls of the chief council chambers are a magnificent series of oil paintings by Tintoretto and other, less able, Venetians—among them Tintoretto's masterpiece, Bacchus and Ariadne and his enormous picture of Paradise, the largest oil painting in the world.
Up to and during a part of the sixteenth century the state prisons were on the ground floor of the Ducal Palace, but they were finally removed to a new structure on the opposite side of the narrow canal, and a bridge, the "Ponte dei Sospiri" or "Bridge of Sighs," was thrown across the canal, connecting the two buildings.
In the magnificence and beauty of its homes—its palazzi or palaces—Venice is unique in the world. It is said that no other city, then or since, is to be compared with Venice in the loveliness and romantic interest of its domestic architecture. Up to the twelfth century the Byzantine style of architecture prevailed, but the thirteenth and fourteenth century palaces—whose builders were more or less influenced by the design of the Ducal Palace, then nearing completion—are Venetian Gothic.
The climax of splendor was reached in the "Golden House" the wonderful Ca' d'Oro, so named from the lavish use of gold leaf on its sculptured ornamentations. It was literally a "golden house."
No words can describe the magnificence of this palace on the Grand Canal, its whole façade faced with the most costly variegated marbles, once picked out with gold, vermillion and ultramarine, the walls pierced with the elaborate traceried windows and enriched with bands and panels of delicate carving—in combined richness of form and wealth of color giving an effect of almost dazzling splendor.
But following close upon this magnificence—which was reflected in nearly all the palaces that were built toward the close of the fourteenth century—came the inevitable reaction toward a less ornate style, the Early Renaissance. Compared with the Ca' d'Oro one writer has described the sixteenth century palaces, which followed Early Renaissance and Classic models, as "dull and scholastic." They certainly must have been a restful change.
So much for the architecture of Venice—
White swan of cities, slumbering in her nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon.
But the visitor to the Venice of today finds his interest in her buildings doubled from the fact that upon the walls of many of them are to be found the works of some of the greatest painters the Occident has known. When we reflect that in the sixteenth century Venice possessed a school of art that for power, technical perfection, and gorgeous interpretation of color, stood pre-eminent in its own day and has not been surpassed in ours, little more need be said. Palma Vecchio, Giorgione, the great portraitist Lorenzo Lotto, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and—Titian! What a galaxy! Surely nothing more need be said upon the art of Venice. As in everything else, the impossible seemed not the exceptional but the mediocre.
In short, to give one the outline of only a few of the activities of the people of this City of Destiny is to drown oneself in superlatives. Her history is as fraught with heroism, with simple dauntless courage, as that of the Dutch Republic; it is as colored with romance as that of Palmyra or Thebes. Karma is the only key to an understanding of the strange destiny which brought to flower such transcendant energy in so seemingly sterile a soil. Reincarnation is the only theory which can hope to throw light upon the quality of effort that marked her citizens as a body of people apart, who must have worked together in the past as they unquestionably will in the future.
Not that Venice was perfect; her citizens made their mistakes; there were the jealous and the covetous, and there were conspiracies within her borders as well as without. Her doges were not all, like Caesar's wife, "above suspicion," her counsellors were not all like Fra Paolo nor all her scholars like Aldo. But there was no apathy and there was a nucleus of impersonal, united effort sufficiently vitalized to hold back the agencies of disintegration during century after century of steady upward effort. And then the Wheel of Destiny turned and the Venice of Sarpi passed.
But the days to dawn will again see Venice whirled upward into the light on the rim of this mighty Wheel. This is inevitable. It is Theosophical teaching. The old clans will gather—and there—and they will work again and aspire again and build again; and in the light of the lessons learned through the failures and successes of the past will rise again to greater heights.
Doge and counsellor, artist and craftsman, scientist and scholar, statesman, philosopher, and poet—as the "whirling wheel of spiritual will and power" brought to you great opportunities in the past, so will it bring them to you again and yet again, in the future.
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THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE
IN THE FOREGROUND THE LION OF ST. MARK'S
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COURTYARD OF THE DUCAL PALACE
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BRIDGE OF THE RIALTO
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PONTE DEI SOSPIRI—THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, VENICE
HUMANITY AND THEOSOPHICAL EDUCATION:
by Elizabeth C. Spalding
Had our modern philosophers studied, instead of sneering at, the old Books of Wisdom—they would have found that which would have unveiled to them many a secret of ancient church and state. As they have not the result is evident. The dark cycle of Kali-Yug has brought back a Babel of modern thought, compared with which the "confusion of tongues" itself, appears a harmony.—H. P. Blavatsky
TO the placid minds of one part of humanity the idea that there is an imperious need for Humanity to be saved, may seem quite absurd. To them the world appears to be moving on well enough; children are born to them, and are trained in the same methods they were, and their ancestors before them for centuries, possibly; life passes smoothly along, so they ask in wonder, Why change?
On the other hand is noticeable amongst a large class, a great unrest, a fretting against established conditions, and a reaching out for something new. Individuals striving with different motives, but massing together into various societies, and associations, united in the purpose of breaking down the old, but with no ideals upon which to form new and better ones. It is like building an edifice on shifting sands.
This vague but extreme restlessness is permeating every race and country. Is it not pitiful that with such an expenditure of force, there should be a lack of the right understanding to lead men and women out of all their difficulties, discouragements, and adverse conditions, to the correct solution of life's problems? Truly the world is harvesting a chaotic mass of thought that unless checked, will tend rapidly towards degeneracy, and the disintegration of all things. We need a clearer and cleaner atmosphere mentally, morally, and physically, and to secure this the minds of people must be opened to the truth.
Theosophy offers to humanity this knowledge, and shows the way to restore balance and harmony. These few words convey a simple declaration of the truth, but a world of meaning lies in them.
Down through the ages has this touch of wisdom been kept burning in the hearts of a few. Great Teachers passing its light to their pupils, they in their turn to others, thus forming a noble and devoted band. They held the knowledge as a sacred trust awaiting the time to come, when humanity could receive these truths, without crucifying the great Souls who revealed to them the teachings.
H. P. Blavatsky had the key to this knowledge, the "Secret Archaic Doctrine" in other words "Theosophy," which she brought to the western world. In Isis Unveiled, written thirty-three years ago, she wrote:
The said key must be turned seven times before the whole system is divulged. We will give it but one turn, and thereby allow the profane one glimpse into the mystery. Happy he who understands the whole.
In her book, The Secret Doctrine, which followed later, she gave out much more information. So little did the world then understand her that she was considered a charlatan by some. But others did recognize that a Teacher had come, and they gathered around her. She appointed Wm. Q. Judge, another Teacher, as her successor, to carry on the work she had created, the Theosophical Society. He, in his turn, appointed Katherine Tingley, the present Leader of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, who is electrifying the world with her educational work in different countries.
Katherine Tingley is now making practical the true Theosophical education.
What is a Theosophical education?
"Man Know Thyself," was one of the most valued teachings of the ancients. To know that one is a compound being, spiritual, mental, and physical; to know that this trinity also makes man a dual being; that he has both the potentiality of the God, and the lower forces as well; to learn how to conquer the evil that the God may prevail, and the soul be liberated to become the living power in him for good. All this is but a part of what Theosophy teaches.
Socrates asked "Which of us is skilful or successful in the treatment of the Soul, and which of us has had good teachers?" If that question were asked today Katherine Tingley's students could answer, here, at Point Loma, and her various centers throughout the world. Consider what it means to a child, to enter upon life's path favored with an understanding of these truths, imparted to him in such a simple, practical, logical manner that he lives naturally from the beginning, the proper life. "The first shoot of every living thing is by far the greatest and fullest." Such a child has the right foundation on which to build; he is truly educated.
The physical has not been strengthened at a loss of the mental and spiritual; the intellectual has not been so abnormally developed that the intuitional and spiritual have been absolutely shut off. The Theosophical education gives a gradual unfolding of the whole nature, from within, outwards. Its growth may be likened to the ripening of the Lotus seed into the pure, white perfect blossom. The soul of the child who has developed under this training (making due allowance for Karmic heredity) will look forth, when matured, upon the world with so clear a vision, that confusion of ideas will be to him an unknown quantity. He can more clearly detect right from wrong—the necessary from the unnecessary, the practical from the unpractical—the true brotherhood from the selfish independence. In fact he will restore equilibrium, and always for humanity's welfare.
Theosophy has been a revelation to the women. Women as a rule cling to old established forms and conventionalities, some from fear of varying kinds, others from ignorance, or a lack of desire to take the initiative, owing to an inertia which the habits and customs of centuries have bred in them. It is mainly because of the manifold possibilities which have been dormant so long in woman that she feels the impelling urge to do something now, perhaps more than ever before. In her effort to respond, she sometimes strikes an extreme note which results in making the whole tide of life about her, of which she should be the harmonious center, stormy and discordant. Without the spiritual thread of knowledge how can she act wisely? Yet woman is responsible to a large degree for the unsettled condition that the minds of men are in today, and she always will carry a heavy responsibility, because she is the matrix of humanity.
One of our best-known American cartoonists has pictured the condition of the world, as a large globe held in a woman's hand. Consider what a power for good woman has in her position of motherhood, which must of course embrace wifehood. Words cannot depict all the fine possibilities and capabilities of mother-love. It has been said that great men have great mothers, and if we trace the life and thought of the mother prior to the child's birth, we can invariably find a clue which explains the strength, or weaknesses of the child.
Are not the majority of humanity simply drifting? Men and women growing apart, the seeds of separateness and consequent disintegration being sown, instead of their growing together into the nobler, fuller comradeship which Theosophy encourages.
As Katherine Tingley has said:
We want not only the hearts, but the divine fire, the divine life, and the splendid royal warriorship of men and women. Theosophy is the panacea.
The Screen of Time
BOOK REVIEWS: "Commentary upon the Maya-Tzental
Perez Codex" (William E. Gates) by C. J. Ryan
THE Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University recently published a new Paper (Vol. VI, No. 1) on the subject of Central American hieroglyph writing. The Paper is entitled "Commentary upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex, with a concluding Note upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs." Professor Wm. E. Gates, International Theosophical Headquarters, Point Loma, the author, has been a member of the Theosophical Society for about twenty-five years, beginning the serious study of Theosophy during H. P. Blavatsky's lifetime. Later, an ardent supporter of William Q. Judge, he is now one of the most active workers at Point Loma under the direction of Katherine Tingley. Professor Gates has applied himself largely to the historical and ethnological side of H. P. Blavatsky's teachings, and, by a careful study of her Secret Doctrine and other works, he has been able to bring to the problem of ancient American culture a fund of information and many valuable clues not familiar to the average student of archaeology. Professor F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum, Harvard, in his prefatory note to the Commentary, says:
The Museum is fortunate in adding to its collaborators Mr. William E. Gates, of Point Loma, California, who for more than ten years has been an earnest student of American hieroglyphs. From his life-long studies in linguistics in connexion with his research in "the motifs of civilizations and cultures" he comes well-equipped to take up the difficult and all-absorbing study of American hieroglyphic writing. Mr. Gates has materially advanced this study by his reproduction of the glyphs in type. These type-forms he has used first in his reproduction of the Codex Perez, and now in this Commentary they are used for the first time in printing. This important aid to the study will be highly appreciated by all students of American hieroglyphs, as it will greatly facilitate the presentation of the results of future research.
The Harvard Papers are taken by the principal Universities and learned societies throughout the world. The Commentary on the Perez Codex and the reproduction of it have been printed by the Aryan Press at Point Loma and are fine examples of the highest class of printing.
A PAGE OF THE MAYA-TZENTAL PEREZ CODEX
FROM CENTRAL AMERICA
PEREZ CODEX: PAGE 17
The Perez Codex itself, of which Professor Gates' Commentary treats, and of which he has just issued a new, definitive edition, redrawn, colored as in the original and slightly restored, is a Central American manuscript on specially coated "maguey" paper, of unknown antiquity. It was discovered about fifty years ago in a forgotten chimney corner of the Bibliothèque Impériale, Paris, black with dust and without record of its antecedents. It is but a fragment, but fortunately the twenty-two remaining pages contain several chapters complete. The artistic quality of the work is of a high order; the coloring is most harmonious and the drawing of the hieroglyphs firm and refined. The human figures in the accompanying illustrations are conventionalized in certain grotesque though evidently intentional ways, but they have character and a real dignity, and admirably fit the spaces alloted to them. As an example of decorative art the manuscript must take high rank. It irresistibly reminds one of the best Egyptian Papyri. Professor Gates says:
And when, ... one advances to an appreciation of the work in its bearings as a whole, one has to acknowledge himself facing the production of craftsmen who had the inheritance of not only generations, but ages of training. Such a combination of complete mastery in composition, perfect control of definite and fixed forms, and hand technique, can grow up from barbarism in no few hundred years.... Had we nothing but the Perez Codex and Stela P at Copan, the merits of their execution alone, weighed simply in comparison with observed history elsewhere, would prove that we have to do not with the traces of an ephemeral, but with the remains of a wide-spread, settled race and civilization, worthy to be ranked with or beyond even such as the Roman, in its endurance, development and influence in the world, and the beginnings of whose culture are still totally unknown. As to the Codex before us, we can only imagine what the beauty, especially of the pages we now come to discuss, must have been when the whole was fresh and perfect.
But, alas, no one can yet read the meaning of this and the two other Maya Codices that have escaped the destructive hands of the over-zealous Spanish missionaries who saw nothing in such things but hindrances to the spreading of the "True Faith," yet at the time of the Conquest they could be read easily by the cultured natives, and the language is still spoken! Though it seems almost incredible, there is no living person known who can decipher any of the hieroglyphs on the manuscripts or the hundreds of stone monuments except a few calendar signs and other signs of little consequence. We are indebted to Don Diego Landa, second bishop of Yucatan, for the destruction of all the manuscripts he could find, but it is to him also that we owe some gratitude for preserving the meaning of the hieroglyphs of the days and the months and a few other signs, which he inserted in his book. The little he has given us is not enough to help much; we may have to await the discovery of some "Rosetta Stone" like that which opened the lost secret of the Egyptian sacred writings to Champollion. In Professor Gates' words:
Up to date our knowledge of the meanings of the glyphs is still to all intents and purposes limited to the direct tradition we have through Landa, and the deductions immediately involved in these. We know the day and month signs, the numbers, including 0 and 20, four units of the archaic calendar count (the day, tun, katun and cycle), the cardinal point signs, the negative particle. We have not fully solved the uinal or month sign, which seems to be chuen on the monuments and a cauac, or chuen, in the manuscripts. We are able to identify what must be regarded as metaphysical or esoteric applications of certain glyphs in certain places, such as the face numerals. But every one of these points is either deducible directly by necessary mathematical calculation, or else from the names of certain signs given by Landa in his day and month list, and then found in other combinations, such as yax, kin, etc. That we have as many of the points as we have, and still cannot form from them the key—that we cannot read the glyphs—is a constant wonder; but a fact nevertheless.
A large portion of the Commentary is devoted to a highly technical, detailed and closely-reasoned examination and analysis of the glyphs and illustrations in the Codex, of interest chiefly to specialists, but a considerable space is given to some general conclusions on language which are highly significant to students of Theosophy.
There is one point from which this question of American origins, at least of American place in human society and civilization, can be studied in its broader lines, even with what materials we have. It is that of language in general. From one point of view language is man himself, and it certainly is civilization. Without it man is not man, a Self-expressing and social being.... It is the constant effort of the conscious self to formulate thought. It is the use of the energy of creation, of objectivation, a veritable many-colored rainbow bridge between the inner or higher man and the outer or lower worlds. And it is not only the expression of Man as man, but in its varied forms it is the inevitable and living expression of each man or body of men at any and every point of time. Itself boundless as an ocean, it is in its infinite forms and streams and colors and sounds, the faithful and exact exponent both of the sources and channels by which it has come, and of the banks in which it is held, racial, national or individual.... Every word or form comes to us with the thought-impress of every man or nation that has used or molded it before us. We must take it as it comes, but we give it something of ourselves as we pass it on. If our intellectual and spiritual thought is aflame, whether as nation or individual, we may purify it, energize it, give it power to form and arrange the atoms around it—and we have a new literature, a new and beneficent, creative social vehicle of intercourse, mutual understanding, and human unification....
It is evident that the criterion of the perfectness of any language is not to be found in a comparison of its forms or methods with those of any other, but in its fitness as a vehicle for the expression of deeper life, of the best and greatest that is in those who use it, and above all in its ability to react and stimulate newer and yet greater mental and spiritual activity and expression. The force behind man, demanding expression through him, and him only, into the human life of all, is infinite—of necessity infinite. There is no limit, nor ever has been any limit, to what man may bring down into the dignifying, broadening and enriching of human life and evolution, save in his own ability to comprehend, express, and live it. And the brightness and cleanness of the tools whereby he formulates his thought, as well as the worthiness and fitness of the substance and the forms into which he shapes it for others to see, are the essentials of his craft....
There is one great broad line that divides the nations and civilizations of the earth, past and present, in all their arts of expression. We may call it that of the ideographic as against the literal. It controls the inner form of language and of languages; it manifests in the passage of thought from man to man; it determines whether the writing of the people shall be hieroglyphic or alphabetic; it gives both life and form to the ideals of their art. It is a distinction that was clearly recognized by Wilhelm von Humboldt, when he laid down that the incorporative characteristic essential to all the American languages is the result of the exaltation of the imaginative over the ratiocinative elements of mind.
Ideographic writing directs the mind of the reader by means of a picture or a symbol directly to the idea existing in the mind of the one who uses it; while alphabetic or literal writing is simply the written expression of the sound, and only indirectly expresses the idea.
Passing on from the culture of ancient America with its ideographs, the writer draws attention to the great transition of thought, as indicated by language, that took place in Central Asia probably, the supposed seat of the Aryan beginnings after the destruction of Atlantis and the general break-up of the former civilizations. He says:
I believe ... that coincident with a new and universal world-epoch, as wide in its cultural scope as the difference between the ideographic and literal, there was finally formed a totally new vehicle for the use of human thought, the inflectional, literal, alphabetic. That this vehicle was perfected into some great speech, the direct ancestor of Sanskrit, into the forms of which were concentrated all the old power of the ancient hieroglyphs and their underlying concepts. For Sanskrit, while the oldest is also the mightiest of Aryan grammars; and no one who has studied its forms, or heard its speech from educated native mouths, can call it anything but concentrated spiritual power. That the force which went on the one hand into the Sanskrit forms, was on the other perpetuated on into the special genius of Chinese, in which, as we know it, we have a retarded survival, not of course of outer form so much as of method and essence. And in Tibetan, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, I suspect that we have a derivative, not from either Chinese or Sanskrit as we know them, but by a medial line from a common point.
Many students feel convinced that once we solve the problem of the Maya-Tzental manuscripts and carved inscriptions, which undoubtedly relate to enormous periods of time, we shall have conclusive evidences of the civilization and destruction of Atlantis. Several illuminating quotations from H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine are given by Professor Gates, and in his last paragraph he sums up the results of his long application to the study of ancient American and other languages, in which he has been so notably helped by the teachings of Theosophy, in these words:
And I am convinced that the widest door there is to be opened to this past of the human race, is that of the Maya glyphs. The narrow limitations of our mental horizon as to the greatness and dignity of man, of his past, and of human evolution, were set back widely by Egypt and what she has had to show, and again by the Sanskrit; but the walls are still there, and advances, however rapid, are but gradual. With the reading of America I believe the walls themselves will fall, and a new conception of past history will come.