The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being
came forth again under another name, the name known to every student
of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic
tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past
of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say,
as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only
a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for
there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such
a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest
of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth
merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done
a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only
as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the
scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun
Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race.
That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper
and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that
those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance
of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely
possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth.
But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was
mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries
I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took
their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the
incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the
Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.
Now I have mentioned those mighty ones of the past because without that
it might seem only a dream when I speak of such possibilities in modern
times as well. I have traced the four latest appearances of Him who is
the “Wisdom-Truth,” the last of the four manifestations before, appearing
to take His last Initiation as the Buddha, He passed away and became the
Son united with the Father, no longer Teacher, no longer Guide of our
humanity. But there is never a break in the great succession; in that
mighty succession of religious Teachers the chair of the Teacher never
remains unfilled; there is ever a wise one to fill it, the wisest who is
living upon earth; and when one lays down the sceptre of the Teacher,
which is the symbol of His rule, another is waiting by the steps of the
Chair of Wisdom to take that seat of Supreme Teacher as His predecessor
passes away from earth. For never is the world left without its Teacher;
never is mankind left orphaned, without the mighty One to guard and save;
as one passes away, His function over, another steps in to fill the seat
and carry on the teaching of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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