r regions, as a
record of the opposite positions assumed, by circumpolar constellations,
in performing their nocturnal and annual circuit around Polaris. Employed
as a year sign in the first case, the cross or swastika later became the
symbol of the Four Quarters, of quadruplicate division and of a stable
central power whose rule extended in four directions and controlled the
entire Heaven.

At some remote period of antiquity man developed the idea of social
organization and, in India, ancient Egypt and Babylonia-Assyria, actual
proofs exist that the earliest cities and states were divided into four
quarters, a division involving the distribution of the population into
four tribes under a central chief. Wherever this division was carried out,
it represented an attempt to harmonize human society and the establishment
of the ideal of a religious democracy, founded on principles of law,
order, justice, peace and good will. The pyramid, a primitive form of
which consisted of four stories, and cruciform sacred structures, may be
regarded as monuments commemorating a cosmical and territorial
organization into four parts. The more extended conception of seven
directions in space, consisting of the Above and Below, or Heaven and
Earth, the Four Quarters and the sacred Middle, the synopsis of all, was
also evolved. In the confederations of India and Iran, and Arabia, in the
seven-storied towers of Babylonia, and in the division of the Egyptians
into seven classes, we find the earliest traces of a practical application
of this numerical division.

The ancient historical records of Egypt and Greece reveal that, in the
earliest polities, the population was divided into groups consisting of a
fixed number of individuals, officially represented by chieftains, or
officers of the state, and that, in consequence, a state formed a unit,
constituted according to a mathematical scheme, which was also applied to
the regulation of time. Each officer of the state held office for a fixed
term, in a prescribed order of rotation. The year was divided into a fixed
number of seasons, marked by the positions of a circumpolar constellation,
and this therefore appeared to regulate not only the cycle of time but the
governmental rotation of office and the entire activity of the community.
Starting from a common basis of quadruplicate division in different
countries, a great variety of constitutions of state was independently
invented by statesmen and