ite 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.

Italy then was something like Turkey is now. Dear knows whom you
might chance on, if you watched with anointed eyes . . . in St.
Sophia . . . or among the Sabine hills. Somewhere or other, as I
said just now, reminiscences of the Mysteries would have
survived. I picture an old wise man, one of the guardians of
those traditions, coming down from the mountains, somewhere
between 1500 and 1000 B. C., to the little city on the Tiber;
touching something in the hearts of the people there, and
becoming,--why not?--their king. For I guess that this one was
not so different from a hundred little cities you should have
found strewn over Italy not so long ago. The ground they
covered,--and this is still true,--would not be much larger than
the Academy Garden; their streets but six or seven feet across.
Their people were a tough, stern, robberish set; but with a
side, too, to which saintliness (in a high sense) could make
quick appeal. Intellectual culture they had none; the brain-mind
was the last thing you should look for (in ancient Rome at
least);--and just because it was dormant, one who knew how