Lives of Alcyone

Alcyone and his father and mother were in close association
with a Brahman family who had a great influence over his life. The
heads of this family were Saturn and his wife Mercury; their sons
were Brihat and Naga, and Neptune, Orpheus and Uranus were
their daughters. The close friendship of this family formed the one
redeeming feature of this life; otherwise, however necessary it may
have been for the evolution of the ego, it is not one that we can find
much pleasure in contemplating. It will be recollected that in the
previous birth Alcyone, though enjoying a wide influence as a
spiritual teacher, used sometimes to yearn for the more active life of
the soldier; probably this incarnation was a direct response to those
desires, given in order to cure the ego once and for all of such
dissatisfaction, by offering him his fill of the ephemeral glory of the
battle-field.
He began with some little enthusiasm for the military life, but
soon sickened of it, and when the reaction set in he would have
been glad to return to that with which eight hundred years before he
had not been fully content. Even when still quite a young man, he
felt that he had had enough of this ceaseless slaughter; he was a
brave and capable man, but he lacked the ruthlessness which is
necessary for the great military leaders; he was too full of sympathy
for the wounded and the suffering, whether they were on his side or
that of his enemies. He expressed something of this to his mother,
but she checked his further confidence by treating his scruples as
effeminate; so he turned to his friends and companions Brihat and
Naga, who, being Brahmans, fully, sympathised with his feelings as
to the usefulness and wickedness of all this organised murder.
Brihat took him to his mother Mercury, who was always affectionate