From the mystic Hymns of Orpheus, with the legends of Gods, demigods, and heroes, and the personification of the varied powers of man and nature, arose the Greek Pantheon, which, in poetic concept, romantic and dramatic embodiment and expression, as a concise and complete whole, has probably never been equaled by man. True, every essential element, under a different name and detail, may be found elsewhere, but never equaled in concise and constructive folklore and mythology. But running underneath all this, like a vein of gold under the mountain, was the philosophy of Plato. Grasping the _One_ from the many, Unity from the fantastic diversity, he came to the individual experience of the human soul and its conscious mastership over the body and the things of sense and time. Civic pride, patriotism, and heroism, walked side by side with dialectics, and the pantheon of the gods and the achievements of warriors rivaled each other on the stage, as themes for the poetic philosopher and dramatist. Mythology and folklore here furnished a background from which the philosophy of the mysteries and the real science of life gained a hearing. Plato and Pythagoras generalized, and with many reservations represented that which they had been taught in the mysteries of Egypt. Greece, with its triumphs in literature, in the drama and in art, and all its magnificent civilization, knew no Avatar. Jacolliot, in his "Bible in India," has shown conclusively that not only the whole Greek pantheon, its folklore and mythology, and even its civil code were adopted from the Laws of Manu and the far older Aryan civilization, including even the names of heroes. The fame of Greece rests upon its _Genius fo Construction_ in Art and Architecture and the Drama, and upon the open door it gave to Philosophy. There was no dominant priesthood to close the door of progress. It utilized all the past and built and beautified the present. It bequeathed no creed nor dogma to the future, and yet its civilization was transcendent and is immortal. It had its canons of Art and of Architecture. These it demonstrated by constructive work. It illustrated, explained and exemplified, but it did not argue nor dogmatize. The world for two thousand years has been "going back to Greece" and trying to explain how it all happened, just as we have been trying to explain Goethe's "Faust." Genius is transcendent and immortal. With the decline of Greece there arose the Genius of the Tiber, Imperial Rome, and the Caesars. Rome created an _Avatar_ out of the "Babe of Bethlehem." Having enthroned Jehovah, it proceeded to deify Jesus, and then by substitution to take the place of both. Imperial Rome, the "Scarlet Mother of the Tiber," assumed the government and dictatorship of the world. Imperial, dogmatic, relentless, the arbiter of the fate of humanity on earth and beyond.