The Crest-Wave of Evolution | Page 3

rouses up
or deposits in these, according to a definite pattern, this nation and that
in its turn, this great age of culture after that one; and that there is
nothing hap-hazard about the configuration of continents and islands,
national boundaries, or racial migrations?
H.P. Blavatsky tells us that the whole past history of the race is known

to the Guardians of the Secret Wisdom; that it is all recorded, nothing
lost; down to the story of every tribe since the Lords of Mind
incarnated. And that these records are in the form of a few symbols; but
symbols which, to those who can interpret or disintegrate them, can
yield the whole story. What if the amount of the burden of history,
which seems so vast to us who know so very little of it, were in reality,
if we could know it all, a thing that would put but slight tax on the
memory; a thing we might carry with us in a few slight formulae, a few
simple symbols? I believe that it is so; and that we may make a
beginning, and go some little way towards guessing what these
formulae are.
As thus: A given race flowered and passed; it had so many centuries of
history before its flowering; it died, and left something behind. Greece,
for example. We may know very little --you and I may know very
little--of the details of Greek history. We cannot, perhaps, remember
the date of Aegospotami, or what happened at Plataea: we may have the
vaguest notion of the import of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Plato. But
still there is a certain color in our conscious perceptions which comes
from Greece: the 'glory that was Greece' means something, is a certain
light within the consciousness, to everyone of us. The Greeks added
something to the wealth of the human spirit, which we all may share in,
and do. An atmosphere is left, which surrounds and adheres to the
many tangible memorials; just as an atmosphere is left by the glories of
the Cinquecento in Italy, with its many tangible memorials.
But indeed, we may go further, and say that an atmosphere is left, and
that we can feel it, by many ages and cultures which have left no
tangible memorials at all; or but few and uninterpretable ones, like the
Celtic. And that each has developed some mood, some indefinable
inward color--which we perceive and inherit. Each different: you
cannot mistake the Chinese or the Celtic color for the Greek; thought it
might be hard to define your perception of either, or of their difference.
It would be hard to say, for instance, that this one was crimson, the
other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects us as crimson
does, that other as blue does. And yet we can see, I think, that by
chasing our impressions to their source, there might be some way of

presenting them in symbolic form. There might be some way of
reducing what we feel from the Greeks, or Chinese, or Celts, into a
word, a sentence; of writing it down even in a single hieroglyph, of
which the elements would be such as should convey to something in us
behind the intellect just the indefinable feeling either of these people
give us.
In the Chinese writing, with all its difficulty, there is something
superior to our alphabets: an element that appeals to the soul directly,
or to the imagination directly, I think. Suppose you found a Chinese
ideogram--of course there is no such a one--to express the forgotten
Celtic culture; and it proved in analysis, to be composed of the signs for
twilight, wind, and pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with
certain other elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul,
would have to supply. In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the
imagination--that great Wizard within us--to rise up and supply us with
quantities of knowledge left unsaid. Indeed, I am but trying to illustrate
an idea, possibilities.... I think there is a power within the human soul
to trace back all growths, the most profuse and complex, to the simple
seed from which they sprung; or, just as a single rose or pansy bloom is
the resultant, the expression, of the interaction and interplay of
innumerable forces--so the innumerable forces whose interaction makes
the history of one race, one culture, could find their ultimate expression
in a symbol as simple as a pansy or rose bloom--color, form and
fragrance. So each national great age would be a flower evolved in the
garden of the eternal; and once evolved, once bloomed, it should never
pass away; the actual blossom withers and falls; but the color, the form,
the fragrance,--these remain in