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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




Italy is divided into four by the Apennines, and is mostly
Apennines. Everyone goes there: conquerors, lured by the _dono
fatale,_ and for the sake of the prizes to be gathered; the
conquered, because it is the natural path of escape out of
Central Europe. The way in is easy enough; it is only the way
out that is difficult. The Alps slope up gently on the northern
side; but sharply fall away in grand precipices on the southern.
There, too, they overlook a region that would always tempt
invaders: the great rich plain the Po waters; a land no
refugees could well hope to hold. It has been in turn Cisalpine
Gaul, the Plain of the Lombards, and the main part of Austrian
Italy; this thrice a possession of conquerors from the north.
It is the first of the four divisions.

There never would be safety in it for refugees; you would not
find in it a great diversity of races living apart; conquerors
and conquered would quickly homogenize,--unless the conquerors
had their main seat in, and remained in political union with,
transalpine realms. Refugees would still and always have to move
on, if they desired to keep their freedom. Three ways would be
open to them, and three destinies, according to which way they
chose. They might go down into the long strip of Adriatic
coastland, where there are no natural harbors--and remain
isolated and unimportant between the mountain barrier and the
sea. Those who occupied this _cul de sac_ have played no great
part in history: the isolated never do.--Or they might cross the
Apennines and pour down into the lowlands of Etruria and
Latium, where are rich lands, some harbors, and generally, fine
opportunities for building up a civilization. Draw-backs also,
for a defeated remnant: Etruria is not too far from Lombardy to
tempt adventurers from the north, the vanguard of the conquering
people;--although again, the Apennine barrier might make their
hold on that middle region precarious. They might come there
conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of
the northern empire: they would mix with the conquered, and at
any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break
away. So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown
appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the
Lombard Plain. Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of
West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt
adventurers from the Near East.

But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and
this is the road most of them traveled. Their fate, taking it,
would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by
new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to
lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and
raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven
down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.
Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains:
outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly,
I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from
material things. Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the
special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations.
Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and
dear knows what all:--open your Roman Histories, and in each one
of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see
the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or
south of the Alps;--just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians,
Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.

One more element is to be considered there in the far south. Our
Lucanian and Bruttian and Iapygian refugees,--themselves, or some
of them, naturally the oldest people in Italy, the most original
inhabitants,--would find themselves, when they arrived there,
very much de-civilized; but, because the coast is full of fine
harbors, probably sooner or later in touch with settlers from
abroad. It is a part that would tempt colonists of any cultured
or commercial peoples that might be spreading out from Greece or
the West Asian centers or elsewhere; and so it was Magna Graecia
of old, and a mixing-place of Greek and old Italian blood; and
so, since, has been held by Saracens, Normans, Byzantines, and
Spaniards.

The result of all this diversity of racial elements would be that
Italy could only difficultly attain national unity at any time;
but that once such unity was attained, she would be bound to play
an enormous part. No doubt again and again she has been a center
of empire; it is always your ex-melting-pot that is.

Who were the earliest Italians? The earliest, it least, that we
can guess at?--Once on a time the peninsula was colonized by folk
who sailed in through the Straits of Gibraltar from Ruta and
Daitya, those island fragments of Atlantis; and (says Madame
Blavatsky) you should have found a pocket of these colonists
surviving in Latium, strong enough for the most part to keep the
waves of invaders to the north of them, and the refugees to the
high Apennines. Another relic of them you would have found,
probably, driven down into the far south; and such a relic, I
understand, the Iapygians were.

One more ethnic influence,--an important one. Round about the
year 1000 B.C., all Europe was in dead pralaya, while West Asia
was in high manvantara: under which conditions, as I suggested
just now, such parts as the Lombard Plain and Tuscany might tempt
West Asians of enterprise;--as Spain and Sicily tempted the
Moslems long afterwards. Supposing such a people came in; they
would be, while the West Asian manvantara was in being, much more
cultured and powerful than their Italian neighbors; but the
waning centuries of their manvantara would coincide with the
first and orient portion of the European one; so, as soon as
that should begin to touch Italy, things would begin to equalize
themselves; till at last, as Europe drew towards noon and West
Asia towards evening, these West Asians of Etruria would go the
way of the Spanish Moors. There you have the probable history of
the Etruscans.

All Roman writers say they came from Lydia by sea; which
statement could only have been a repetition of what the Etruscans
said about themselves. The matter is much in dispute; but most
likely there is no testimony better than the ancient one. Some
authorities are for Lydia; some are for the Rhaetian Alps; some
are for calling the Etruscans 'autochthonous,'--which I hold to
be, like _Mesopotamia,_ a 'blessed word.' Certainly the Gauls
drove them out of Lombardy, and some of them, as refugees, up
into the Rhaetian Alps,--sometime after the European manvantara
began in 870. We cannot read their language, and do not know
enough about it to connect it even with the Turanian Group; but
we know enough to exclude it, perhaps, from every other known
group in the Old World,--certainly from the Aryan. There is
something absolutely un-Aryan (one would say) about their art,
the figures on their tombs. Great finish; no primitivism; but
something queer and grotesque about the faces.... However, you
can get no racial indications from things like that. There is a
state of decadence, that may come to any race,--that has perhaps
in every race cycles of its own for appearing,--when artists go
for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the
Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human:
realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and
drug-victims I suppose always. Denizens of these regions, I take
it, are the models for some of our cubists and futurists. . . . I
seem to see the same kind of influence in these Etruscan faces.
I think we should sense something sinister in a people with
art-conventions like theirs;--and this accords with the popular
view of antiquity, for the Etruscans had not a nice reputation.

The probability appears to be that they became a nation
in their Italian home in the tenth or eleventh century B.C.;
were at first war-like, and spread their power considerably,
holding Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, with Lombardy until the Gauls
dispossessed them, and presently Corsica under a treaty with
Carthage that gave the Carthaginians Sardinia as a _quid pro
quo._ Tuscany, perhaps, would have been the original colony;
when Lombardy was lost, it was the central seat of their power;
there the native population became either quite merged in them,
or remained as plebeians; Umbria and Latium they possessed
and ruled as suzerains. The Tuscan lands are rich, and the
_Rasenna,_ as they called themselves, made money by exporting the
produce of their fields and forests; also crude metals brought
in from the north-west,--for Etruria was the clearing-house for
the trade between Gaul and the lands beyond, and the eastern
Mediterranean. From Egypt, Carthage, and Asia, they imported in
exchange luxuries and objects of art; until in time the old
terror of their name,--as pirates, not unconnected with something
of fame for black magic; one finds it as early as in Hesiod, and
again in the _Medea _of Euripides,--gave place to an equally ill
repute for luxurious living and sensuality. We know that in war
it was a poor thing to put your trust in Etruscan alliances.

According to their own account of it, they were destined to
endure as a distinct people for about nine centuries; which is
probably what they did. Their power was at its height about 600
B.C. As they began to decline, certain small Italian cities that
had been part of their empire broke away and freed themselves;
particularly in Latium, where lived the descendants of those
old-time colonists from Ruta and Daitya,--priding themselves still
on their ancient descent, and holding themselves Patricians or
nobles, with a serf population of conquered Italians to look down
upon. Or, of course, it may have been _vice versa:_ that the
Atlanteans were the older stock, nearer the soil, and Plebeians;
and that the Patricians were later conquerors lured or driven
down from Central Europe.

At any rate, as their empire diminished, Etruria stood like some
alien civilized Granada in the midst of surrounding medieval
barbarism; for Italy, in 500 B.C., was simply medieval. Up in
the mountains were war-like highlanders: each tribe with its
central stronghold,--like Beneventum in Samnium, which you could
hardly call a city, I suppose: it was rather a place of refuge
for times when refuge was needed, than a group of homes to live
in; in general, the mountains gave enough sense of security, and
you might live normally in your scattered farms.--But down in the
lowlands you needed something more definitely city-like: at once
a group of homes and a common fortress. So Latium and Campania
were strewn with little towns by river and seashore, or hill-top
built with more or less peaceful citadel; each holding the lands
it could watch, or that its citizen armies could turn out quickly
to defend. Each was always at war or in league with most of the
others; but material civilization had not receded so far as
among the mountaineers. The latter raided them perpetually, so
they had to be tough and abstemious and watchful; and then again
they raided the mountaineers to get their own back, (with
reasonable interest); and lastly, lest like Hotspur they should
find such quiet life a plague, and want work, it was always
their prerogative, and generally their pleasure, to go to war
with each other.--A hard, poor life, in which to be and do right
was to keep in fit condition for the raidings and excursions and
alarms; ethics amounted to about that much; art or culture, you
may say, there was none. Their civilization was what we know as
Balkanic, with perpetual Balkanic eruptions, so to speak. Their
conception of life did not admit of the absence of at least one
good summer campaign. Mr. Stobart neatly puts it to this effect:
no man is content to live ambitionless on a bare pittance and the
necessaries; he must see some prospect, some margin, as well;
and for these folk, now that they had freed themselves from the
Etruscans, the necessaries were from their petty agriculture, the
margin was to be looked for in war.

Among these cities was one on the Tiber, about sixteen miles up
from the mouth. It had had a great past under kings of its own,
before the Etruscan conquest; very likely had wielded wide
empire in its day. A tradition of high destiny hung about it,
and was ingrained in the consciousness of its citizens; and I
believe that this is always what remains of ancient greatness
when time, cataclysms, and disasters have wiped all actual
memories thereof away. But now, say in 500 B.C., we are to think
of it as a little peasant community in an age and land where
there was no such wide distinction between peasant and bandit.
It had for its totem, crest, symbol, what you will, very
appropriately, a she-wolf....

Art or culture, I said, there was none;--and yet, too, we might
pride ourselves on certain great possessions to be called
(stretching it a little), _in that line;_ which had been left to
us by our erstwhile Etruscan lords, or executed for us by
Etruscan artists with their tongues in their cheeks and sides
quietly shaking.--Ha, you men of Praeneste! you men of Tibur!
sing small, will you? _We_ have our grand Jupiter on the
Capitoline, resplendent in vermilion paint; what say you to
that? Paid for him, too, (a surmise, this!) with cattle raided
from your fields, my friends!

Everything handsome about us, you see; but not for this must you
accuse us of the levity of culture. We might patronize; we did
not dabble.--One seems to hear from those early ages, echoes of
tones familiar now. Ours is the good old roast beef and common
sense of--I mean, the grand old _gravitas_ of Rome. What! you
must have a Jupiter to worship, mustn't you? No sound as by
Parliament-Established-Religion of Numa Pompilius, Sir, and the
world would go to the dogs! And, of course, vermilion paint. It
wears well, and is a good bloody color with no levity about it;
besides, can be seen a long way off--whereby it serves to keep
you rascals stirred up with jealousy, or should. So: we have our
vermilion Jupiter and think of ourselves very highly indeed.

Yes; but there is a basis for our boasting, too;--which
boasting, after all, is mainly a mental state; we aim to be
taciturn in our speech, and to proclaim our superiority with
sound thumps, rather than like wretched Greeks with poetry and
philosophy and such. We do possess, and love,--at the very least
we aim at,--the thing we call _gravitas;_ and--there are points
to admire in it. The legends are full of revelation; and what
they reveal are the ideals of Rome. Stern discipline; a rigid
sense of duty to the state; unlimited sacrifice of the
individual to it; stoic endurance in the men; strictest
chastity in the women:--there were many and great qualities.
Something had come down from of old, or had been acquired in
adversity: a saving health for this nation. War was the regular
annual business; all the male population of military age took
part in it; and military age did not end too early. It was an
order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the
fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally. There was
discipline, and again and always discipline: _paterfamilias_
king in his household, with power of life and death over his
children. It was a regime that gave little chance for loose
living. A sterile and ugly regime, Nevertheless; and, later,
they fell victims to its shortcomings. Vice, that wrecks every
civilization in its turn, depend upon it had wrecked one here:
that one of which we get faint reminiscences in the stories of
the Roman kings. Then these barren and severe conditions ensued,
and vice was (comparatively speaking) cleaned out.

What were the inner sources of this people's strength? What
light from the Spirit shone among them? Of the Sacred Mysteries,
what could subsist in such a community?--Well; the Mysteries
had, by this time, as we have seen, very far declined. Pythagoras
had made his effort in this very Italy; he died in the first
year of the fifth century soon after the expulsion of the
kings, according to the received chronology;--in reality,
long before there is dependable history of Rome at all. There
had been an Italian Golden Age, when Saturn reigned and the
Mysteries ruled human life. There were reminiscences of a long
past splendor; and an atmosphere about them, I think, more
mellow and peace-lipped than anything in Hesiod or Homer. I
suppose that from some calmer, firmer, and more benignant Roman
Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower
and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin
stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya;
that an echo lingered,--at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,--
or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains. Certainly
nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to
suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other
nations had their rights. Yet there was something to make life
sweeter than it might have been.

They said that of old there had been a King in Rome who was a
Messenger of the Gods and link between earth and heaven; and
that it was he had founded their religion. Was Numa Pompilius, a
real person?--By no means, says modern criticism. I will quote
you Mr. Stobart:--

"The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names
which have been fitted by rationalizing historians, presumably
Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Tomulus is simply
the patron hero of Rome called by her name. Numa, the second,
whose name suggests _numen,_ was the blameless Sabine who
originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete
biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon."

--He calls attention, too, to the fact that Tarquin the Proud is
made a typical Greek Tyrant, and is said to have been driven out
of Rome in 510,--the very year in which that other typical Greek
Tyrant, Hippias, was driven out of Athens;--so that on the whole
it is not a view for easy unthinking rejection. But Madame
Blavatsky left a good maxim on these matters: that tradition
will tell you more truth than what goes for history will; and
she is quite positive that there is much more truth in the tales
about the kings than in what comes down about the early Republic.
Only you must interpret the traditions; you must understand
them. Let us go about, and see if we can arrive at something.

Before the influx of the Crest-Wave began, Rome was a very petty
provincial affair, without any place at all in the great sweep of
world-story. Her annals are about as important as those of the
Samnium of old, of which we know nothing; or those, say, of
Andorra now, about which we care less. Our school histories
commonly end at the Battle of Acium; which is the place where
Roman history becomes universal and important: a point wisely
made and strongly insisted on by Mr. Stobart. I shows how
thoroughly we lack any true sense of what history is and is for.
We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions
of the Human Spirit is obscured. There were lots of politics in
Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make
for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness
whose effects are felt yet. Rome played at politics: old-time
conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race
Plebians: till the two were merged into one and she grew tired
of the game. She played at war until her little raidings and
conquests had carried her out of the sphere of provincial
politics, and she stood on the brink of the great world. Then
the influx of important souls began; she entered into history,
presently threw up politics forever, and performed, so far as it
was in her to do so, her mission in the world. What does History
care for the election results in some village in Montenegro? Or
for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits
of Terentilius Harsa?

Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we
may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its
fulness. But we must see the forest, and not lose sight and
sense of it while botanizing over individual trees. We must
forget the interminable details of wars and politics that amount
to nothing; that so we may apprehend the form, features, color,
of this aspect of humanity.

Here is a mighty river: the practical uses of mankind are mainly
concerned with it as far up as it may be navigable; or at most,
as far up as it may be turning mills and watering the fields of
agriculture. There may be regions beyond when poets and
mythologists may bring great treasures for the Human Spirit; but
do you do well to treat such treasures as plug material for
exchange and barter? They call for another kind of treatment.
The sober science of history may be said to start where the
nations become navigable, and begin to affect the world. You can
sail your ships up the river Rome to about the beginning of the
third century B.C., when she began to ermerge from Italian
provincialism and to have relations with foreign peoples:
Pyrrhus came over to fight her in 280. What is told of the
century before may be true or not; as a general picture it is
probably true enough, and only as a general picture does it
matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here
is pouting through the gorges, or shallowly meandering the meads.
It is watering Farmer Balbus's fields; Grazier Ahenobarbus's
cows drink at it; idle Dolabell angles in its quiet reaches:
there are bloody tribal affrays yearly at its fords. It is
important, certainly, to Babbus and Dolabella, and the men slain
in the forays;--but to us others--.

And then at 390 there are falls and dangerous rapids; you will
get no ships beyond these. The Gauls poured down and swept away
everything: the records were burnt; and Rome, such as it was,
had to be re-founded. Here is a main break with the past;
something like Ts'in Shi Hwangti's Book-burning; and it serves
to make doubly uncertain all that went before. Go further now,
and you must take to the wild unmapped hills. There are no
fields beyond this; the kine keep to the lush lowland meadows;
rod and line must be left behind,--and angler too, unles he is
prepared for stiff climbing, and no marketable recompense. Nor
yet, perhaps, for some time, much in things unmarketable: I will
not say there is any great beauty of scenery in these rather
stubborn and arid hills.

As to the fourth century, then (or from 280 to 390)--we need not
care much which of Ahenobarbus's cows was brindled, or which had
the crumpled horn, or which broke off the coltsfoot bloom with
lazy ruthless hoof. As to the fifth,--we need not try to row the
quinqueremes of history beyond that Gaulish waterfall. We need
not bother with the weight Dolabella claims for the trout he says
he caught up there: that trout has been cooked and eaten these
twenty-three hundred years. Away beyond, in the high mountains,
there may be pools haunted by the nymphs; you cannot sail up to
them, that is certain; but there may be ways round.....

Here, still in the foot-hills, is a pool that does look, if not
_nymphatic,_ at least a little fishy, as they say; the story
of Rome's dealings with Lars Porsenna. It even looks as if
something historical might be caught in it. The Roman historians
have been obviously camouflaging: they do not want you to
examine this too closely. Remember that all these things came
down by memory, among a people exceedingly proud, and that had
been used to rely on records,--which records had been burnt by
the Gauls. Turn to your English History, and you shall probably
look in vain in it for any reference to the Battle of Patay; you
shall certainly find Agincourt noised and trumpted _ad lib._ Now
battles are never decisive; they never make history; the very
best of them might just as well not have been fought. But at
Patay the forces which made it inevitable France should be a
nation struck down into the physical plane and made themselves
manifest: as far as that plane is concerned, the centuries of
French history flow from the battlefield of Patay. But what made
trumpery Agincourt was only the fierce will of a cruel, ambitious
fighting king; and what flowed from it was a few decades of war
and misery. That by way of illustration how history is envisaged
and taught: depend upon it, by every people; it is not peculiar
to this one or that.--Well then, the fish we are at liberty to
catch in this particular Roman pool is a period during which Rome
was part of the Etruscan Empire.

The fact is generally accepted, I believe; and is, of course,
the proposition we started from. How long the period was, we
cannot say. The Tarquins were from Tarquinii in Etruria;
perhaps a line of Etruscan governors. The gentleman from Clusium
who swore by the Nine Gods was either a king who brought back a
rebellious Rome to temporary submission, or the last Etruscan
monarch in whose empire it was included. But here is the point:
whether fifty or five hundred years long--and perhaps more likely
the former than the latter--this period of foreign rule was long
enough to make a big break in the national tradition, and to
throw all preceding events out of perspective.

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