to go
about it could take hold upon the Buddhic side. That was perhaps
what this Numa Pompilius achieved doing. There would be nothing
extraordinary in it. The same thing may be going on in lots of
little cities today, in pralayic regions: news of the kind does
not emerge. We have a way of dividing time into _ancient and
modern;_ and think the one forever past, the other forever to
endure. It is quite silly. There are plenty of places now where
it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was
pompous 1919.--Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it
happens to be in Europe now?

How much Numa may have given his Romans, who can say? Most of it
may have worn away, before historic times, under the stress of
centuries of summer campaigns. But something he did ingrain into
their being; and it lasted, because not incompatible with the
life they knew. It was the element that kept that life from
complete vulgarity and decay.

You have to strip away all Greekism from your conceptions, before
you can tell what it was. The Greek conquest was the one Rome
did not survive. Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her
out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of
her life. If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and
euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus?
_Not_ the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure.
Who then? Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods? One
shakes one's head in doubt: the Romans did not personalize their
deities like the Greeks. Cato gives the ritual to be used at
cutting down a grove; says he--"This is the proper Roman way to
cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering.
This is the verbal formula: 'Whether thou art a god or a goddess
to whom that grove is sacred,' "--and so on. Their gods were
mostly like that: potentialities in the unseen, with whom good
relations must be kept by strict observance of an elaborate
ritual. There were no stories about them; they did not marry
and have families like the good folk at Olympus.

Which is perhaps a sign of this: that Numa's was a religion, the
teaching of a (minor) Teacher who came long after the Mysteries
had disappeared. Because in the Mysteries, cosmogenesis was
taught through dramas which were symbolic representations of its
events and processes; and out of these dramas grew the stories
about the gods. But when the real spiritual teaching has ce