t to hang together; here also are
discrepant and incompatible parts.

There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed
down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the
Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the
verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so
preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But
I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to
imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me
Homer must have written or dictated them at first. Writing in
Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times. It is
now, anywhere, to illiterates. In Caesar's day, as he tells us,
it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but
the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in
general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me,
certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services
to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the
Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the
first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to
remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost
and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of
writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since
Lemurian days. When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a
poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine
Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he
chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.

Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer? What
can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the
picture I have attempted to make? Very little; yet perhaps
something. I think his historical importance is greater, for us
now, than his literary importance. I doubt you shall find in him
as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the
hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example. I doubt he was
an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious
mind the truths that make men free. Plato did not altogether
approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not
fear to follow. I think the great Master-Poets of the world have
been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they
presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul. I believe
that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; an