And then go back a few more thousand years again, and you would probably find the case again reversed; and Teutons lording it over Celts, and our present conditions restored. It is by suffering these poles of experience, now pride and domination, now humiliation and adversity, that the races of mankind learn. Europe is not a new sort of continent. Man, says one of the Teachers, has been much what he is any time these million years. History has been much what it is now, ebbing and flowing. Knowledge, geographical and other, has receded, and again expanded. Europe has been the seat of empires and civilizations, all Europe, probably, for not so far short of a million years; there has been plenty of time for it to multiply terrible karma— which takes the occasion to expend itself sometimes—as now. I mistrust the theory of recent Aryan in-pourings from Asia. The Huns came in when the Chinese drove them; and the Turks and Mongols have come in since; but there is nothing to show that the Slavs, for example, when they first appear in history, had come in from beyond the Urals and the Caspian. Slavs and Greco- Latins, Teutons and Celts, I think they were probably in Europe any time these many hundreds of thousands of years.

Or rather, I think there were Europeans—Indo-Europeans, Aryans, call them what you will—where they are now at any time during such a period. Because race is a thing that will not bear close investigation. It is a phase; an illusion; a temporary appearance taken on by sections of humanity. There is nothing in it to fight about or get the least hot over. It is a camouflage; there you have the very word for it. What we call Celts and Teutons are simply portions of the one race, humanity, camouflaged up upon their different patterns. So far as flood and ultimate physical heredity are concerned, I doubt there is sixpenny-worth of difference between any two of the lot. "Oi mesilf," said Mr. Dooley, speaking as a good American citizen, "am the thruest and purest Anglo-Saxon that iver came out of Anglo-Saxony." We call ourselves Anglo-Saxons because we speak English (a language more than half Latin); when in reality we are probably Jews, Turks, infidels or heretics, if all were known. What is a Spaniard? A Latin, you answer pat. Yes; he speaks a Latin-derived language; and has certain qualities of temperament which seem to mark him as more akin to the French and Italians, than to those whom we, just as wisely, dub 'Teutonic' or 'Slavic.' But in fact he may have in his veins not a drop of blood that is not Celtic, or not a drop that is not Teutonic, or Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician, or Iberian, or God knows what.

Suppose you have four laya centers in Europe: four Foci through which psychic impulses from the Oversoul pour through into this world. A Mediterranean point, perhaps in Italy; a Teutonic point in Sweden; a Celtic point in Wales-Ireland (formerly a single island, before England rose out of the sea); and a Slavic point, probably in Russia. The moment comes for such and such a 'race' to expand; the Mediterranean, for example. The Italian laya center, Rome, quickens into life. Rome conquers Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the East; becomes Caput Mundi. Countries that shortly before were Celtic in blood, become, through no material change in that blood, Latin; by language, and, as we say, by race. The moment comes for a Teutonic expansion. The laya center in Sweden quickens; there is a Swedish or Gothic invasion of Celtic lands south of the Baltic; the continental Teutons presently are freed. It is the expansion of a spirit, of a psychic something. People that were before Celts (just as Mr. Dooley is an Anglo-Saxon) become somehow Teutons. The language expands, and carries a tradition with it. Head measurements show that neither Southern Germany nor England differs very much towards Teutonicism from the Mediterranean type; yet the one is thoroughly Teutonic, the other Anglo-Saxon. Sometimes the blood may be changed materially; often, I suppose, it is changed to some extent; but the main change takes place in the language and tradition; sometimes in tradition alone. There was a minor Celtic quickening in the twelfth century A. D.; then Wales was in a fervor of national life. She had not the resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest. But her Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain: absolutely installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people his people were fighting; and infused chivalry with a certain uplift and mysticism through-out western Europe. Or again, in the Cinquecento and earlier, the Italian center quickened; and learning and culture flowed up from Italy through France and England; and these countries, with Spain, become the leaders in power and civilization.

England since that Teutonic expansion which made her English was spent, has grown less and less Teutonic, more and more Latin; the Italian impulse of the Renaissance drove her far along that path. In the middle of the eleventh century, her language was purely Teutonic; you could count on the fingers of your hand the words derived from Latin or Celtic. And now? Sixty percent of all English words are Latin. At the beginning of the fifth century, after nearly three hundred years of Roman occupation, one can hardly doubt that Latin was the language of what is now England. Celtic, even then I imagine, was mainly to be heard among the mountains. See how that situation is slowly coming back. And the tendency is all in the same direction. You have taken, indeed, a good few words from Dutch; and some two dozen from German, in all these centuries; but a Latin word has only to knock, to be admitted and made welcome. Teachers of composition must sweat blood and tears for it, alas, to get their pupils to write English and shun Latin. In a thousand years' time, will English be as much a Latin language as French is? Quite likely. The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come pouring in. And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than Englishmen are: they 'locate' at such and such a place, where an English man would just go and live there.

Before Latin, Celtic was the language of Britain. Finally, says W.Q. Judge, Sanskrit will become the universal language. That would mean simply that the Fifth Root Race will swing back slowly through all the linguistic changes that it has known in the past, till it reaches its primitive language condition. Then the descendants of Latins, Slavs, Celts, and Teutons will proudly boast their unadulterated Aryan-Sanscrit heredity, and exult over their racial superiority to those barbarous Teutons, Celts, Slavs, and Latins of old, of whom their histories will lie profusely.

II. Homer

When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road for an inrush of important and awakened souls. Having in mind to get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with high poetic genius. Or he had in many past lives so endowed himself; and therefore the Law called him in. This evening I shall work up to him, and try to tell you a few things about him, some of which you may know already, but some of which may be new to you.

What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of activity—the one that preceded this present one—should have begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, of which we know anything, began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony, as the date of its inception. Our present European manvantara began while Frederick II was forcing a road for civilization up from the Moslem countries through Italy; we may take 1240 as a central and convenient date. The first 390 years of it—from 1240 to 1632—saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal; Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in England. That will suggest to us that the Periclean was not the first age of splendor in Europe in that former manvantara; it will suggest how much we may have lost through the loss of all records of cultural effort in northern and western Europe during the four centuries that preceded Pericles. Of course we cannot certainly say that there were such ages of splendor. But we shall see presently that during every century since Pericles—during the whole historical period—there has been an age of splendor somewhere; and that these have followed each other with such regularity, upon such a definite geographical and chronological plan, that unless we accept the outworn conclusion that at a certain time—about 500 B. C.—the nature of man and the laws of nature and history underwent radical change, we shall have to believe that the same thing had been going on—the recurrence of ages of splendor—back into the unknown night of time. And that geographical and chronological plan will show us that such ages were going on in unknown Europe during the period we are speaking of. In the manvantara 2980 to 1480 B.C., did the Western Laya Center play the part in Europe, that the Southern one did in the manvantara 870 B.C. to 630 A.D.? Was the Celtic Empire then, what the roman Empire became in the later time? If so, their history after the pralaya 1480 to 870 may have been akin to that of the Latin, in this present cycle; no longer a united empire, they may have achieved something comparable to the achievements of France, Spain, and Italy in the later Middle Ages. At least we hear the rumblings of their marches and the far shoutings of their aimless victories until within a century or two of the Christian era. Then, what was Italy like in the heyday of the Etruscans, or under the Roman kings? The fall of Tarquin—an Etruscan—was much more epochal, much more disastrous, than Livy guessed. There were more than seven kings of Rome; and their era was longer than from 753 to 716; and Rome—or perhaps the Etruscan state of which it formed a part—was a much greater power then, than for several centuries after their fall. The great works they left are an indication. But only the vaguest traditions of that time came down to Livy. The Celts sacked Rome in 390 B.C., and all the records of the past were lost; years of confusion followed; and a century and a half and more before Roman history began to be written by Ennius in his epic Annales. It was a break in history and blotting out of the past; such as happened in China in 214 B.C., when the ancient literature was burnt. Such things take place under the Law. Race-memory may not go back beyond a certain time; there is a law in Nature that keeps ancient history esoteric. As we go forward, the horizon behind follows us. In the ages of materialism and the low places of racial consciousness, that horizon probably lies near to us; as you see least far on a level plain. But as we draw nearer to esotericism, and attain elevations nearer the spirit, it may recede; as the higher you stand, the farther you see. Not so long ago, the world was but six thousand years old in European estimation. But ever since Theosophy has been making its fight to spiritualize human consciousness, pari passu the horizon of the past has been pushed back by new and new discoveries.

What comes down to us from old Europe between its waking and the age of Pericles? Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red Branch and Fenian cycles. The actual tales as we get them were no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late recensions that we have. What will remain of England in the memory of three or four thousand years hence? Unless this Theosophical Movement shall have lifted human standards to the point where that which has hitherto been esoteric may safely be kept public, this much:—an echo only of what England has produced of eternal truth;—something from Shakespeare; something from Milton; and as much else in prose and poetry from the rest. But all the literature of this and all past ages is and will then still be in being; in the hidden libraries of the Guardians of Esoteric Science, from which they loose fragments and hints on the outer world as the occasion cyclically recurs, and as their wisdom directs.

How do they loose such fragments of old inspiration? It may be by putting some manuscript in the way of discovery; it may be by raising up some man of genius who can read the old records on inner planes, and reproduce in epic or drama something of a long past splendor to kindle the minds of men anew. In that way Greece was kindled. Troy fell, says H. P. Blavatsky, nearly five thousand years ago. Now you will note that a European manvantara began in 2980 B. C.; which is very nearly five thousand years ago. And that this present European manvantara or major cycle was lit up from a West Asian Cycle; from the Moors in Spain; from Egypt through Sicily and Italy; and, in its greatest splendor; when Constantinople fell, and refugees therefrom came to light the Cinquecento in Italy. Now Constantinople is no great way from Troy; and, by tradition, refugees came to Italy from Troy, once. Was it they in part, who lit up that ancient European cycle of from 2980 to 1480 B. C.?