Читать книгу The Crest-Wave of Evolution - Kenneth Morris - Страница 10

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"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much. He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution' is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea, raising up splendors in one nation after another in order geographically, and with no haphazard about it. Its first and largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in manvantara from 2300 to 850 BC; West Asia, from 1890 to 390; Europe, from 870 BC to 630 AD So in the time of Alexander West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara, had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy; but in its universal aspect—in its strongest force—it had to roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense; it is our Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see; out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very burden of Megasthenes' song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one must admire in him. Though he overthrew the Persians, he never made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race. On the contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he felt in Europeans. The Law made use of his intention, partially, and to the furtherance of its own designs.—His method of treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent than barbarous. He took a short cut to his broad ends, and married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive women very differently. So that it was a kind of enlightenment he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan, and into the Punjab—which, we may note, was but the outskirts of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but let that be. So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought us where we are to spend this evening.

For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even—to use a very vile drudge of a word—'unique' about India. Go else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make some shift to arrange the history. None need boggle really at any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of dynasties back through four or five millennia. But come to India, and alas, where are you? All out of it, chronologically speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of several hundred thousand years. I have no doubt the Puranas are crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to be taken as plain fact; how much as 'blinds'; how much as symbolism—only the Adepts know. The three elements are mingled beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium, Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma. You are in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual, our own savants are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet. They do not choose that their ancient history should be known; so all things are in a hopeless muddle.

One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe; not a country, like France. The population is even more heterogeneous than that of Europe. Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb—at least for many thousands of years—was ever even nominally master of the whole of it. There are two main divisions, widely different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the peninsular part to the south. The former is the land of the Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan—a race called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion, they never quite conquered or supplanted. Well; never is a long day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages of pre-history.

The Aryans came down into India through its one open door—that in the northwest. But when?—Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C., says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to launch a new name for the race: Indogermanic; and to prove Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created. Then others, to dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which at least must have the honor;—it could not be conceded to inferior Asia. All the languages of the group were examined and worried for evidence. Men said, 'By the names of trees we shall run it to earth'; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for some time. Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and find in what territory that tree is indigenous: that will certainly be the place. As thus; I will work out for you a suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:—

Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are potato and tobacco. 'From Greenland's icy mountains to Ceylon's sunny isle, Whereever prospect pleases, And only man is vile.'—you shall nearly always hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day meal by some term akin to potato, and the subtle weed that companions their meditations, by some word like tobacco. Argal, the Aryan race used these two words before their separation; and if the two words, the two plants also. You follow the reasoning?—Now then, seek out the land where these plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find the native seat of the primitive Aryans. And, glory be to Science! they do; both come from Virginia. Virginia, then, is the Aryan Garden of Eden.

Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the race—the Teutons—unacquainted with the word potato. You may argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The French say pomme de terre; but this is evidently only a corruption—potater, pomdeter—twisted at some late period by false analogy into pomme de terre, ('apple of the earth'.) But the Teuton has kartoffel, utterly different; argal again, the Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming. They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word tobacco. Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems, the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes! These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their civilization.—Then presently, after the Teutons had gone, someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes—long enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be as happy as himself? Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon him at last visibly? We shall never know. Or did he call in his neighbors at once and annouce it? Did someone ask: 'What shall we name this God-given thing?'—and did another reply: 'It looks to me like a potato; let's call it that!'? That at least must have been how it came by it name. They received the suggestion with acclamations: and all future out-going expeditions took sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to call it potato to this day. For you must not that being the only food with a name common to all the languages—or almost all—it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of before their separation. Even the words for father, mother, fire, water, and the like, have a greater number of different roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.