Yet they captured it, as I find things, out of the jaws of failure and disaster.  Failure:  that of Pythagoreanism six centuries before;—­disaster:  Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and destruction of the Mysteries there.  Men come from the Masters of the World to work on this plane or on that:  to found an empire perhaps, or to start a spiritual movement.  Augustus came commissioned to the former, not to the latter, work.  Supposing in his time the Gaulish Mysteries had been intact.  We may trust him to have established relations somehow:  he would have had close and friendly relations with the Gaulish hierophants; even if he had conquered the people, he would not have put out their light.  But I imagine he would have found a means to union without conquest.  Then what would have happened?  We have seen that the cyclic impulse did touch Gaul at that time; it made her vastly rich, hugely industrial;—­as Ferero says, the Egypt of the West.  That, and nothing better than that, because she had lost her spiritual center, and might not figure as the world Teacher among nations.  But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism—­which sounds like carrying on Julius’ nefarious work.  He did, I believe;—­but why?  Because Julius had seen to it that the white side of Druidism had perished.  The Druids were magicians; and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained among them,—­at least in Gaul.  So of course Augustus proscribed it.

Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea that she might have been, and should have been, something far higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant.  I think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the kings of night to forestall.  And so, that Augustus lacked that reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.

And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great defeat;—­and this has been the inner history of europe ever since.  This:  raidings from the Godworld:  swift cavalry raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds here on hell’s border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off captives.  Set up no strongholds;—­that is, until our own times; so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established base ‘but here upon this bank and shoal,’ from which the shining squadrons of the Gods might ride.  Such a base was lost when Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be found.  It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say, abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but the membra disjecta of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished age.  With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work, distilling out of them what