So I imagine there would be seven interpretations to these kings, as to all other symbols.  Romulus may represent a Kshattriya, and Numa a Brahmin domination in the early ages of the sub-race.  Actual men, there may yet be mirrored in them the history—­shall we say of the whole sub-race?  Or Root-race?  Or the whole natural order of human evolution?  It is business for imaginative meditation,—­which is creative or truth-finding meditation.  But now let us try, diffidently, to search out the last, the historic, pre-Etruscan Numa.

If you examined the Mohammedan East, now in these days of its mid-pralaya and disruption:  Turkey especially, or Egypt:  you should find constantly the tradition of Men lifted by holiness and wisdom and power above the levels of common humanity:  Unseen Guardians of the race,—­a Great Lodge or Order of them.  In Christendom, in its manvantara, you find no trace of this knowledge; but it may surprise you to know that it is so common among the Moslems, that according to the Turkish popular belief, there is always a White Adept somewhere within the mosque of St. Sophia,—­hidden under a disguise none would be likely to penetrate.  There are hundreds of stories.  The common thought is that representatives of this Lodge, or their disciples, often appear; are not so far away from the world of men; may be teaching, quite obscurely, or dropping casual seeds of the Secret Wisdom, in the next village.  Well; I imagine pralayic conditions may allow benign spiritual influences to be at work, sometimes, nearer the surface of life than in manvantara.  The brain-mind is less universally dominant; there is not the same dense atmosphere of materialism.  You get on the one hand a franker play of the passions, and no curbs imposed either by a sound police system or a national conscience; in pralaya time there is no national conscience, or, I think, national consciousness,—­no feeling of collective entity, of being a nation,—­at all; perhaps no public opinion.  As it is with a man when he sleeps:  the soul is not there; there is nothing in that body that feels then ‘I am I’; nothing (normally) that can control the disordered dreams. . . .  Hence, in the sleeping nation, the massacres, race-wars, mob-murders, and so on; which, we should remember, affect parts, not the whole, of the race.  But on the other hand that very absence of brain-mind rule may imply Buddhic influences at work in quiet places; and one cannot tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . .  Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste a deal less time and sanity in yelling condemnations.