If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing.  This was a people far less spiritual than the Egyptians:  a cruel, splendid, luxurious civilization deifying material power.  But you cannot look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too, the motive was religious.  There is an eternity and inexhaustible power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one end:—­to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.—­In the Babylonian sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or leopard-headed—­the ‘divinity that hedges a king’ treated symbolically.  As always in those days, though many veils might hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the raison d’etre, of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty, and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then:  that great Memnon’s head comes from behind the horizon of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.  Go back step by step, from Shakespeare’s

“Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep
no more.”;

to Dante’s

“The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars”;

to Talesin’s

“My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars”;

to Aeschylus’s bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;—­and the next step you come to beyond (in the West)—­the next expression of the Human Soul—­marked with the same kind of feeling—­the same spiritual and divine hauteur—­is, for lack of literary remains, this Egyptian sculpture.  The Grand Manner, the majestic note of Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.

It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture—­and in architecture too—­should have gone on side by side, in Greece, during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but apparently it did. (They had wooden temples, painted in bright reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.) I imagine the explanation to be something like this:  You are to think of an influx of the Human Spirit, proceeding downward from its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization —­the Greek, in this case.  Now poetry, because its medium is less material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of its descent much sooner.  Perhaps music lies higher again; which is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma.  Let me diverge a little, and take a glance round.—­At