Certainly in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries we see the liberating influence at work in the Renaissance, in the expansion of spiritual vision and the enthusiasm with which Ficino and the Medici circle in Florence welcomed Platonic and Neoplatonic thought. However, the time was not yet ripe for them to effect a marked change in the general thinking. The next hundred years, between the 1770s and 1870s, large cracks in credalism were made with the entry of Oriental philosophy and literature into Europe and America, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform script of the Sumerians, along with the publication of Lyell's and Darwin's revolutionary findings in geology and evolution. By the final quarter of the 19th century, when another impulse toward spirituality was due, the tools were ready to hand. This time it was possible to unite a body of dedicated men and women who would nurture and sustain the spiritual impulse so that it would carry over into and through the Aquarian Age.
Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
It took a person of extraordinary gifts to be able to receive and transmit a vision of cosmic proportion that would restore dignity to humanhood, and show us how to live and how to die in serenity and, above all, how to live in harmony with ourselves and with one another, as individuals and as nations. The message that she brought cut through all strata, cultural, social, religious, and racial. People of any and every circumstance were electrified, ancient memories were stirred, those who had entered the stream of mindfulness in former lives recognized the call and responded. Whether or not they had the schooling to comprehend the words, the message penetrated their very being because of synchrony of response. The keynote of brotherhood had been sounded again, its reverberations gaining strength and momentum with every decade.