Virgil, in the year 40 B.C., being then a pastoral poet imitating Theocritus,—­nothing very serious,—­wrote a strange poem that stands in dignity and depth of purpose far above anything in his model.  This was the Fourth Eclogue of his Bucolics, called the Pollio. In it he invokes the “Sicilian Muse” to inspire him to loftier strains; and proceeds to sing of the coming of a new cycle, the return of a better age, to be ushered in, supposedly, by a ‘child’ born in that year:—­

Ultima Cumaci venit jam carminis aetas; Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo; Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; Jam nora progenies coelo demittitur alto.

This was taken in the Middle Ages as referring to the birth of Jesus; and on the strength of having thus prophesied, Virgil came to be looked on as either a true prophet or a black magician.  Hence his enormous reputation all down the centuries as a master of the secret sciences.  The chemist is the successor to the alchemist; and in Wales we still call a chemist fferyll, which is Virgil Cymricized.  Well; his reputation was not altogether undeserved; he did know much; you can find Karma, Reincarnation, Devachan, Kama-loka—­most of the Theosophical teachings as to the postmortem-prenatal states,—­ taught in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. But as to this Pollio Eclogue:  even in modern textbooks one often sees it asserted that he must have been familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures;—­because in the Book of Isaiah the coming of a Messiah to the Jews is prophesied in terms not very unlike those he used.  To my mind this is far-fetched:  Virgil had Gaul behind him, if you must look for explanations in outside things; and at least in after ages Celtic Messianism was as persistent a doctrine as Jewish.  A survival, of course; in truth the initiated or partly initiated among all ancient peoples knew that avatars come.  Virgil, if he understood as much about Theosophy as he wrote into the Sixth Aeneid, would also have known, from whatever source he learnt it, the truth about cycles and Adept Messengers.

There has been much speculation as to who the child born in the year of Pollio’s consulship, who was to bring in the new order of ages, could have been.  But we may note that in the language of Occultism (and think of Virgil as an Occultist), the ’birth of a child’ had always been a symbolical way of speaking of the inititation of a candidate into the (true) Mysteries.  So that it does not follow by any means that he meant an actual baby born in that year; he may have intended, and probably did intend, some Adept then born into his illumination,—­or that, according to Virgil’s own ideas, might be thought likely soon to be.  One cannot say; he was a very wise man, Virgil.  At least it indicates a feeling,—­perhaps peculiar to himself, perhaps general,—­that the world stood on the brink of a great change in the cycles, and that an Adept Leader might be expected, who should usher the new order in.