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, 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.