The Crest-Wave of Evolution | Page 2

same principle was discovered
a thousand times before, and written a thousand times. There is no
platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burst upon the perceptions

of all who have not yet perceived it, as a new and burning truth; and on
the other hand, there is no startling command to purity or compassion,
that has not been given out by Teachers since the world began.--As for
Greece, there was a brilliant flaming up of the Spirit there in the Fourth
and Fifth Centuries B.C.; and its intensity, like the lights of an
approaching automobile, rather obscures what lies beyond. It is the first
of which we have much knowledge; so we think it was the first of all.
But in fact civilization has been traveling its cyclic path all the time, all
these millions of years; and there have been hundreds of ancient great
empires and cultural epochs even in Europe of which we know nothing.
I had intended to begin with Greece; but these unexplored eras of old
Europe are too attractive, and this first lecture must go to them, or some
of them. Not to the antecedents of Greece, in Crete and elsewhere; but
to the undiscovered North; and in particular to the Celtic peoples; who
may serve us as an example by means of which light may be thrown on
the question of racial growth, and on the racial cycles generally.
The Celtic Empire of old Europe affects us like some mysterious
undiscovered planet. We know it was there by its effects on other
peoples. Also, like many other forgotten histories, it has left indications
of its achievement in a certain spirit, an uplift, the breath of an old
traditional grandeur that has come down. But to give any historical
account of it--to get a telescope that will reach and reveal it--we have
not to come to that point yet.
Still, it may be allowed us to experiment with all sorts of glasses. To
penetrate that gloom of ancient Europe may be quite beyond us; but
guessing is permitted. Now the true art of guessing lies in an intuition
for guiding indications. There is something in us that knows things
directly; and it may deign at times to give hints, to direct the researches,
to flash some little light on that part of us which works and is conscious
in this world, and which we call our brain-minds. So although most or
all of what I am going to say would be called by the scientific strictly
empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shall venture; aware that their
Aristotelio-Baconian method quite breaks down when it comes to such
a search into the unknown; and that this guessing, guided by what

seems to be a law, would not, perhaps, have been sneered at by Plato.
Guided by what seems to be a law;--guided, at any rate, by the
knowledge that there are laws; that "God geometrizes," as Plato says:
that which is within flows outward upon a design; that life precipitates
itself through human affairs as it does through the forms of the crystals;
that there is nothing more haphazard about the sequence of empires and
civilizations, than there is about the unfolding of petals of a flower. In
both cases it is the eternal rhythm, the Poetry of the Infinite, that
manifests; our business is to listen so carefully as to hear, and
apprehend the fact that what we hear is a poetry, a vast music, not a
chaotic cacophony: catch the rhythms--perceive that there is a
design--even if it takes us long to discover what the design may be.
You know Plato's idea that the world is a dodecahedron or twelve-sided
figure. Now in Plato's day, much that every schoolboy knows now, was
esoteric--known only to the initiated. So I think Plato would have
known well enough that this physical earth is round; and that what he
meant when he spoke of the dodecahedron, was something else. This,
for example: that on the plane of causes--this outer plane being that of
effects --there are twelve (geographical) centers, aspects, foci, facets, or
what you like to call them: twelve _laya centers,_ as I think the Secret
Doctrine would say: through which the forces from within play on the
world without. You have read, too, in _The Secret Doctrine,_ Professor
Crooke's theory, endorsed by H.P. Blavatsky, as to how the chemical
elements were deposited by a spiral evolutive force, a creative impulse
working outward in the form of a caduceus or lemniscate, or figure '8.'
Now suppose we should discover that just as that force deposited in
space, in its spiral down-working, what Crookes calls the seeds of
potassium, beryllium, boron, and the rest--so such another creative
force, at work on the planes of geographical space and time,