Men, too, seem prepared to expect such an advent as its necessary time approaches. It is an instinct which tells them that “the darkest hour precedes the dawn.”
In the Christian scriptures the premonitions and birth stories are found largely in the Apocryphal books. Doubtless the copying and substitution from the lives of Christna and Buddha were too plain.
At the death of Jesus the seismic, astral, and cosmic disturbances are graphically described, as befitting the death of a god. “The veil of the temple was rent in twain,” etc.
The simple fact is that mankind feels instinctively in the soul the far-reaching influences at work. The spiritual nature is stirred to its depths, and when he tries to describe what he sees and feels, his emotions, fears, or aspirations being at white heat, his imagination draws from the folklore of other times, races, and religions, to express what he so powerfully, but vaguely senses.
But beyond all this, the time of great religious revivals and social upheavals is likely to coincide with seismic disturbance, tidal waves and the like, owing to the conjunction of planets under the general law of cycles. Man is completely involved with and evolved from the bosom of Nature. His freedom is determined by knowledge and obedience to Law.
From the mystic Hymns of Orpheus, with the legends of Gods, demigods, and heroes, and the personification of the varied powers of man and nature, arose the Greek Pantheon, which, in poetic concept, romantic and dramatic embodiment and expression, as a concise and complete whole, has probably never been equaled by man.
True, every essential element, under a different name and detail, may be found elsewhere, but never equaled in concise and constructive folklore and mythology.
But running underneath all this, like a vein of gold under the mountain, was the philosophy of Plato. Grasping the One from the many, Unity from the fantastic diversity, he came to the individual experience of the human soul and its conscious mastership over the body and the things of sense and time.
Civic pride, patriotism, and heroism, walked side by side with dialectics, and the pantheon of the gods and the achievements of warriors rivaled each other on the stage, as themes for the poetic philosopher and dramatist.
Mythology and folklore here furnished a background from which the philosophy of the mysteries and the real science of life gained a hearing.