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I have several times mentioned Edmund's half-formed impression that there was some very remarkable ceremony connected with the cyclical apparition of the sun before the eyes of its worshipers. He had said, you may recall, that it seemed probable that the religious rites on these rare occasions bore some resemblance to the bacchanalia, or dionysia, of ancient Greece.
Not because of its magnitude alone but because its sequel was the dethronement and suicide of a legitimate Emperor, this struggle presents a shocking aspect to Japanese eyes. It is known in history as the "Jinshin disturbance," so called after the cyclical designation of the year when it occurred. Prince Oama succeeded to the throne and is known in history as the fortieth Sovereign, Temmu.
We have learned that the true meaning of the word law, as applied to Nature, is not decree, but formula of invariable order, immutable as the constitution of ultimate units of matter. Order is not imposed upon Nature. Order is result. Physical science does not confuse these; it never mistakes nor denies specific function, organic progression, cyclical growth.
It was customary, however, to preserve permanently the census of every thirtieth year* for purposes of record, and moreover the census taken in the ninth year of Tenchi's reign was also kept as a reference for personal names. *This was called gohi-seki; i.e., comparative record for a period of five times six years. It was designated the Kogoanen-seki, from the cyclical name of the year.
The only path which leads back beyond the time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the one hand through the reports which have reached us concerning Homer's birthplace: from which we see that, although his name is always associated with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or any other cyclical epic.
This is not the way that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the princesses in the cyclical romances and in the Amadises are wooed by their bridegrooms. This is not the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and who hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before all the world by marriage.
There they remained for a month, and as nothing happened to disturb the peace of the family during the interval no child was hurt, no pig died, no rice basin was broken they were thought to augur only good luck, and to promise well for the alliance of the two families. So Mr. Hsü made out the "Cyclical Characters" of one of his sons, a young man twenty-five years old.
The Chinese believe that it is the Tao, or "Order of the Universe," which affords immunity from evil, and according to whether or no the birth occurred in a beneficent year, dominated by four double cyclical characters, the horoscope is "heavy" or "light."
This transformation was contemporary with the rationalistic criticism which made Homer the magician out to be a possible poet, which vindicated the material and formal traditions of those numerous epics as against the unity of the poet, and gradually removed that heavy load of cyclical epics from Homer's shoulders. So Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is an æsthetic judgment.
'The predominating forms, numerically, of one kind of dust, are also the predominating forms in all the rest, as Ehrenberg observes; and says further: 'Impossible as it is to conceive of all the storms now compared from 1830 to 1847, as having a continuous genetic connection, it is equally impossible also to imagine the masses of dust transported by them, with such a degree of similarity, not to have a genetic connection.... The great geographic extent of the phenomenon of a reddish dust nearly filling the atmosphere, and itself filled with organisms so similar, many of which are characteristic of South America, not only admits of, but demands a more earnest attention to the probable cyclical relations in the upper and lower atmosphere, whereby very great masses of fixed terrestrial matter, earths and metals, and especially flint-earths, chalk, iron, and coal, apparently heterogeneous, and yet related by certain peculiarities, are held swimming in the atmosphere, now like clouds thinly spread by whirlwinds or electricity over a broad space, and now condensed, and, like the dust of the fir-blossoms, falling in showers in every direction.
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