The Theosophical Forum – November 1939

THE NEW KNOWLEDGE — M. G. Gowsell

A age of dawn. Cock crows to cock from zone to zone across the darkened leagues, thrilling the multitudes that wait in tense unrest. The phoenix of that universal, long-debated lore of olden time is rising on the wing, to take the sovereign morn renewed, redight, refulgent in its pristine power to stir the heart of man. Behold the flickering shafts of light that grow, as man makes effort to attain — to re-attain his lost prestige and favor of the stars. The scroll, invisible to eyes of flesh, wherein the record of his ancient past is writ, unrolls, revealing to the inner eye old glories once achieved and then, alas, forgot. The mind of man knows not of this. But mind is not the man. "Tis but his tool. The man who was and is and evermore shall be is here, at work, wherever he may have been a hundred thousand years ago. Here, now, today, we, onetime denizens of fabled lands from out the silent night of time, recapitulate and body forth once more the bygone things that were on land and sea and almost native to the air. Transition. Dawntide big with promise, transcendentally beyond belief. Marvels, revelations concerning every realm of man's composite being, become the order of the day. No one is surprised. Wherefore should one be? These things return again. They are our own. Swift our strides, say we with pride, yet understanding not. Yet too unaware that this our rapid march is but a summing up, a repetition, a rehearsal and a brief review of what had long since seen the sun. Meanwhile the scroll, that all-recording blueprint of the past and of the soul, continues to unroll. The age of fable and the age of fact are intertwined. Tradition speaks. Step by step we run our recapitulation of a civilization allotted to a time when Titans wrought amid the roar of war on Chaos in her waning prime, wherein the self-same we strove mightily for centuries to then achieve what now may be again in days, because it had been once. Even now, as we proceed apace on outer lines and swiftly win material skill, the reassembled phoenix hovers nigh. Our newborn knowledge of terrestrial worth is but a paltry detail of the plan. The coming knowledge is of Man.



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