A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

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




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.?

In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come
down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that
ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean
age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were
probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of
the Celtic Age are to us. But Homer caught an echo and preserved
the atmosphere of it. As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the
Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style--which thing is the
impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its
expression;--so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a
sense of style to the later Greeks. It rings majestically through
his lines. His history is perhaps not actual history in any
recognizable shape.

Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest
genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message
through them; perhaps reinvented half of them. Even so Geoffrey
of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that
came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and
Spenser followed him in the _Faery Queen,_ Malory in his book,
and Tennyson in the _Idylls of the King._ Even in that last,
from the one poem _Morte D'Arthur_ we should get a sense of the
old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a
score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the
Idylls. But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser
and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic. How much more
of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek
of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled
with racial uplift.

Where did he live? Oh, Goodness knows! When? Goodness knows
again. (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.) We have
Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years
before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850;
and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as
possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not
Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one? At
such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a
little after; because they have a work of preparation to do;
and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and
aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other
sought to do for Greece. But this is to treat Homer as if he had
been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved'
(a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of
him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a
fiction. Admitted. A school of critics has cleaned poor old
blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on
God's earth--just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up
the Human Soul. But there is another school, who have preserved
for him some shreds at least of identity. Briefly put, you can
'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence--grammar,
microscopic examination of text and forms and so on--that Homer
is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious
of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into
account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave
and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad
does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities
between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally
speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master
made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as we know it, may contain
passages not his; but--_he wrote the Iliad._

What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now
let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.

Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an
interval, another? Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another. The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_ but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend. At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents. The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet. It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.

Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had
been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering
minstrels--Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they
were called--who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic
mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and
unculture. The first three orders were doubtless in existence
long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and
minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of
culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the
professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae
may well have been--as De Quincey suggests--an order specially
trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single
school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer.
We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer--the works,
not the man--into continental Greece; importing them from Crete.
That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle
in Sparta. European continental Greece would in any case
have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture;
because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian
civilization. Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia
Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and
Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them
into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so
awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica,
Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.

Where did Homer live? Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over
the place. We know of the seven cities that claimed to be
his birthplace:

_Smyrna, Chias, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenae
Orbis de patria certat, Homere, Tua._

Of these Smyrna probably has the best chance of it; for he was
Maeonides, the son of Maeon, and Maeon was the son of Meles; and
the Maeon and the Meles are rivers by Smyrna. But De Quincey
makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better
than any other part of the world. Many of the legends he
records; many of the superstitions--to call them that;--many of
the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to
Crete. Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were
very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does
not figure greatly in their legends. But in Crete the friendship
of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses
still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they
do in Homer.

There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he
give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns;
exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times. He mentions the
_Kubizeteres,_ Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown
elsewhere. They perform in couples; and when he mentions them,
it is in the dual number. Preternatural voices are an Homeric
tradition: Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when
Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened.
In Crete such voices are said to be still common: shepherds
carry on conversations at incredible distances--speak to, and are
answered by, men not yet in sight.--Dequincey gives several other
such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very
convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to
the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, _alias_ Homer, must
have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;--say, was brought
up there.

Now Crete is much nearer Egypt than the rest of Greece is; and
may very likely have shared in a measure of Egyptian culture at
the very beginning of the European manvantara, and even before.
Of course, in past cycles it had been a great center of culture
itself; but that was long ago, and I am not speaking of it. In
the tenth century A.D., three hundred years before civilization,
in our own cycle, had made its way from the West Asian Moslem
world into Christendom, Sicily belonged to Egypt and shared in
its refinement--was Moslem and highly civilized, while Europe
was Christian and barbarous; later it became a main channel
through which Europe received enlightenment. May not Crete
have played a like part in ancient times? I mean, is it
not highly probable? May it not have been--as Sicily was
to be--a mainly European country under Egyptian influence,
and a seat of Egyptianized culture?

Let us, then, suppose Homer a Greek, born early in the ninth
century B.C., taken in childhood to Crete, and brought up there
in contact with cultural conditions higher than any that obtained
elsewhere among his own people.

But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep
enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and
culture, to wander forth among the islands singing.--

_En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi
Melpomen,_

says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi,
perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island
in the Cyclades.

He would have had some training, it is likely, as an Aoidos: a
good founding in the old stories which were their stock in trade,
and which all pointed to the past glory of his race. In Crete he
had seen the culture of the Egyptians; in Asia Minor, the
strength and culture of the Lydians; now in his wanderings
through the isles he saw the disunion and rudeness of the Greeks.
But the old traditions told him of a time when Greeks acted
together and were glorious: when they went against, and
overthrew, a great West Asian Power strong and cultured like the
Lydians and Egyptians. Why should not he create again the glory
that once was Greece?

_Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achileos!_

--Goddess, aid me to sing the wrath (and grandeur) of a Greek
hero!--Let the Muses help him, and he will remind his people of
an ancient greatness of their own: of a time when they were
united, and triumphed over these now so much stronger peoples!
So Dante, remembering ancient Rome, evoked out of the past and
future a vision of United Italy; so in the twelfth century a
hundred Welsh bards sand of Arthur.

I think he would have created out of his own imagination
the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans. It
does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition. Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself. Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it, by two conditions: what he saw of the life of
his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of
civilization in Egyptianized Crete. He was consciously picturing
the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more
cultured than his own. Floating legends would tell him much
of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.
Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.
How would he go to work? In this way, I think. The Greeks,
says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not,
as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous. Now what is strength
like, and civilization? Why, I have them before me here to
observe, here in Crete. But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a
Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown
among Greeks.--I do not mean that he consciously set this plan
before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that
he, or anyone, would follow. Civilization would have meant for
him Cretan civilization: the civilization he knew: that part of
the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness. But in his
conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire
to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the
Egyptianized culture he knew. So I think that the conditions of
life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination,
working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and
Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that. He made his people
essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features
drawn from civilized life.

One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances: tales from of
old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to
fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers. The bards
saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the
far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in
trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.
When they wrote of Cai--Sir Kay the Seneschal--that so subtle was
his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall
as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely
celtic element: the tradition of the greatness of, and the
magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set
him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were
simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans. Material culture,
as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.

Lying was traditionally a Greek vice. The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth. Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections. He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul. On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was. Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much
higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that
had been made by that time in general culture. Andromache, in
Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a
Greek, but Egyptian idea.

Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of
the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the
grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down
the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of
the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of
things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and
slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from
the background of his own day. Nor did Shakespeare, trying to
paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan
Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from
the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London
prentices, cobblers and the like. Learned Ben, on the other
hand, contrives in his _Sejanus_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and
sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and
clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson;
never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly. But Shakespeare
rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less
Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the
life, and from the life he saw about him. The deeper you see
into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter;
you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the
externals worry about themselves. Now Homer was a deal more
like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:
he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his
contemporaries. Men in those days, he says, were of huger
stature than they are now. And yet, when his imagination is not
actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero,
real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to
obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to
the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of
Hesiod's dismal picture.

Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his
songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just
now, "in the ancient sacred hymns." As Shakespeare was first an
actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on
his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old
hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker
of new ones. He saw the wretched condition of his people,
contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and
was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as
yoke-fellow with race-pride. You shall see presently how the
intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been
something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression: he had
seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to
fate no quality but cruelty. Impassioned by what we may call
patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for
Greek epic: the story of a Greek contest with and victory over
West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West
Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and
Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth
the hand of the great enemy, fate. In different moods and at
different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a
large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

John Turvill Adams - "The Lost Hunter"

Erskine Childers - "The Framework of Home Rule"

Harold Begbie - "Painted Windows"

Stewart Edward White - "African Camp Fires"