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Updated: May 23, 2025
Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades; whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.
Round about the year 1000 B.C., all Europe was in dead pralaya, while West Asia was in high manvantara: under which conditions, as I suggested just now, such parts as the Lombard Plain and Tuscany might tempt West Asians of enterprise; as Spain and Sicily tempted the Moslems long afterwards.
In Greece an old manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta. Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism. Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
There was far less ferment of the Spirit, true; less possibility of progress; but that is merely to say that China was in pralaya, Europe in high manvantara.
Last and greatest of them all was Johannes Scotus Erigena, who died in 882: a very bright particular star, and perhaps the one of the largest magnitude between the Neo-Platonists and the great mystics of later times, who came long after the new manvantara had dawned.
It consists of 4320 times a million years and is divided into fourteen smaller periods called manvantaras each presided over by a superhuman being called Manu . A manvantara contains about seventy-one mahâyugas and each mahâyuga is what men call the four ages of the world . Geography and astronomy show similar precision.
Now that Europe's up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries' time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized. But West Asia, early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia, drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic.
It would not be fair to compare the Age of Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot but see, if we look at both dispassionately and with a decent amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe that the work of the Western Teacher had failed.
Let me interject here the warning that it is no complete scheme that is to be offered; only a few facts that suggest that such a scheme may exist, could we find it. Before Europe awoke to her present cycle of civilization and progress, before the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the Chinese had been in manvantara, very much awake, for about fifteen hundred years.
A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day.
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