United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The new growth affiliated itself to the European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one that was to begin. Persia was in a different position. Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the Parthian empire. One was the rise of the Yueh Chi.

The Chinese Empire was founded some two centuries before the Roman: both composed of heterogeneous elements. Both, after about four centuries, fell; but China, after about four centuries more, came together and was great again. Fifteen hundred years after Ts'in Shi Hwangti had founded China, her manvantara then having ended, and her whole creative cycle run through, she fell to the Mongols.

The secret of the difference is this: the West Asian manvantara, to which the Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the latter, beside the former, had an air of parvenu.

Now anciently a manvantara had begun in Western Asia somewhere about 1890 B.C.; had lasted fifteen centuries, as the wont of them appears to be; and had given place to pralaya about 390; and that, in turn, was due to end in or about 220 A.D. We should, if we had confidence in these cycles, look for what remained of the Crest-Wave in Europe to be wandering flickeringly eastward about this time.

Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of Darius Hystaspes' empire, and, except Egypt, all the old imperial seats of the foregone manvantara, they do not belong to West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European; they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting West from Greece to Italy.

When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning. The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged.

In the old manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired People had wandered far enough from such knowledge; with the accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of intensive civilization.

Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least; India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a thousand years.

But you may say Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires was used by the Law for that purpose which so brilliantly have illumined Europe since. Persia rose in the evening of that West Asian manvantara; the empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria chiefly, had been slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her one, had several periods of glory.

The Celt, old, and intoxicated with the triumphs of a long manvantara, could not repel Roman persistence and order. Rome. too, was rising, or in her prime; had patience, and followed her material plans every inch of the way to success. Where she conquered, she imposed her rule.