SECTION VI.

Giants, Civilizations, and Sitbmerged Continents Traced in History.
When statements such as are comprised in the above heading are brought forward, the writer is, of course, expected to furnish historic instead of legendary evidence in support of such claims. Is this possi- ble? Yes; for evidence of such a nature is plentiful, and has simply to be collected and brought together in order to become overwhelmin in the eyes of the unprejudiced.
Once the sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he m find out such evidence for himself. We ^y^ /acts aud show land marks; let the wayfarer follow them. What is adduced here is amply sufficient for I his century.
In a letter to Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies of the "grand old invalid of Ferney" should be attracted to the repre- sentatives of "knowledge and wisdom," the ancient Brahmans. He then adds a curious statement. He says:
But yolir Brflhmans are very young in comparison with their archaic instructors.*
Bailly, who knew nought of the Esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria, believed, nevertheless, unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in several pre-historic and civilized nations which had disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and iradiiions extensively, and he saw that the Arts and Sciences known to those we now call the **ancients," were —
No> the achievements of any of the now or even then existing nations, nor of anj of the historical peoples of Asia . . .
and that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindfis, their undeni- able priority in the early part of their race had to be referred to a people
1
* UU»tk JMf rAtlamiidt, p. i*.
^TYSTfiRIOUS NATION.
7S.5 than were even the
or a race still more aucient and more learned Brdhmaus themselves *
Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist par excellence^ shared Bailly's belief. He thought it quite likely that:
Long before the empires of China aiul India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into tlieir primitive state of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature. t
That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly a "question of historical facts." For. he wrote :
I make great case of ancient traditions preserved through a long series of generations.
It was possible, he thought, that a foreign nation should, aftei instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces behind. When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather archaic, nation should not have left at least some recollection in the human mind, he answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and events. But the history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages of old Egypt had preserved it, and "it is so preserved to this day elsewhere." The priests of Sais said to Solon, according to Plato:
You are unacquainted with that most noble and excellent race of men, who once inhabited your country, from whom you and your whole present state are descended.^ though only a small remnant of this admirable people is now remaining. . . . These writings relate what a prodigious force your city once overcame, when a mighty warlike power, rushing from the Atlantic sea, spread itself with hostile fury over all Europe and Asio.^
The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious national What was this nation? The Secret Doctrine teaches that it was the
I
* Hisioirt d£ V Astronemie AncUnne, pp. 25. tt »eqq.
f Letttes sur FAtlanU'd*. p. 15. This conjecture Is but a half-gucM. There were such "delujrw of barbarians" in the Fifth Racc. With rcgftrd to the Fourth, it was a fiona Jidt deluge of water which swvpt it Bwajr. Neither Voltaire nor Bully, however, knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the Bast.
t Tor o full discussion of the relations between the oU Greeks and Romans, and the Atlantean colonisls, see Fiv^ Years of Theosophy, pp. jDH-346.
\ Timaus, translated by H. Davit, pp. 3X>-3a8.
U The story about Atlantis and all the traditions thereon wrre told, as all know, by Plato in his 7\maus and Cntias. Plato, when a child, had it from his grand-sire Critios. aged ninety, who [u his youth had been told of it by Solon, his father Dropidcs' friend— SoIod, one of the Seven Sages vT Greece. No more reliable source could be found, wc should think.
E-
786
THE SKCRBT DOCTRIKE.
latest seventh sub-race of the Atlantean. already swallowed up in one of the early sub-races of the Aryan stock, one that had been gradualh* spreading over the continent and islands of Europe, as soon as they had begun to emerge from the seas. Descending from the high plateaux of Asia, where the two races had sought refuge in the days of the agony of Atlantis, it had been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly cmerged lands. The immigrant sub-race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that virgin soil; had divided into many family races, which in their turn divided into nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phoenicians, and the Northern stocks, had thus proceeded from that one sub-race. Thousands of years later, other races — the remnants of the Atlanteaus — "yellow and red, brown and black," began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers were defeated, and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries. Some of these lands became islands in course of time, owing to new geo- logical convulsions. Being thus forcibly separated from the continents, the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the Atlantean stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.
Did not the Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with white savage chiefs; and has not the presence of African negro t>-pcs in Europe in the pre-historic ages been now ascertained? It is this presence of a foreign type associated with that of the negro, and also with that of the Mongolian, which is the stumbling-block of Anthro- pology. The individual who lived at an incalculably distant period at La Naulette, in Belgium, is an example. Says an Anthropologist:
The caves on the banks of the Lease, in South-Eastern Belgium, afford evidence of what U, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by the Naulette jaw. Such ouui, however, had amulets of stone, perforated for the purpose of ornament; these are made of a psammite now found in the basin of the Gironde.*
Thus Belgian man was extremely ancient. The man who was antecedent to the great flood of waters — which covered the highlands of Belgium with a deposit of lehm or upland gravel thirty metres above the level of the present rivers — must have combined the characters of the Turanian and the Negro. The Canstadt. or La Naulette, man may have been black, and he had nothing to do with the Aryan type whose remains are contemporary with those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of the Aquitaine bone-caves belong to a far later period of history, and may not be as ancient as the former.
• Sec Dr. Carter BUke'Bpsper "On the Naulette Jaw/* WiiMnp^OTM^^'vt^.Sept^ iBty.
ASSOCIATES OF THK APRS AND THE ANGELS.
787
r
if the statement be objected to on the ground that Science does not deny the presence of man on Earth from an enormous antiquity, though xhat antiquity cannot be determined, since such presence is conditioned by the duration of geological periods, the age of which is not ascer- tained: if it is argued that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period; or again, that there have ever existed giants, three-eyed aud four-armed and four-legged men, andro- gynes, etc. — then the objectors are asked in their turn, '*How do you know? What proof have you besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may be upset any day by new discoveries?" And these future discoveries are sure to prove that, whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthrof>ologists may have been in complexion, he was in no respect apish. The Canstadt man, the Engis man, alike possessed essentially human attributes* People have looked for the missing link at the wrong end of the chain; and the Neanderthal man has long since been dismissed to the "limbo of all hasty blunders.'* Disraeli divided man into the associates of the apes and the angels. Reasons are here given in favour of an **angelic theory" — as Christians would call it, as applicable to at least some of the races of men. At all events, if maa be held to exist only since the Miocene period, even then humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of the Palaeolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they say is mere arbitrary speculative guess-work, invented by them to auswer to» and fit in with, their own fanciful theories.
We speak of events hundreds of thousands of years old, nay, even millions of years old — if man date from the geological periods t — not of any of those events which happened during the few thousand years of the pre-historic margin allowed by timid and ever-cautious history. Yet there are men of Science who are almost of our way of thinking. From the brave confession of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, who says that :
Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it —
* Sec de Qoatrcfagcs and Hamy, Crdnts dex Ratex Humaims.
t HiEcfcers'* man-ape" of the Miocene period i^ Ute dream of a monomaniac, which de Qustrefaf^ [Humati species, pp. 105-113) hos cleverly disposed or It is not clearwhy the world should accept the lucut>ralian« of & ps)>chopbobic Materiali faith of rarioui auinials unknown to Science or Nature, like the Sozuni. for ia&taucc, that amphibian which bu never existed ooTWhere outside UKckel'a inuciiiation^ralhcr than the tndiUons of antiquity.
7S8
THB SECRET DOCTRINE.
dovra to the latest Palseontologists and Anthropologists, the majority of scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. Aprof»$ of Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethno- logical affinities and characteristics of the race which reared those Cyclopean erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a %naX civilization? At Cuelap, for instance, snch are fonnd, consisting —
Of a wall of wrought stones. 3.600 feet long. 560 broad, and 150 fret high. constituting a solid mass with a level sammiL On thia mas was aaocber, 600 feet long. 500 broad, and 150 feet high, making an aggregate height of 30a feec. In it were rooms and cell&.*
A most suggestive fact is the startling ratmblante hetsr^en Ike arcki* iecture of these cohssai buildingi and thai of the arcMai Mr. Fergusson regards the analogies between the mius of **Inca" civilization and the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece, as a coincidence-
The most remarkAble in the history of aichiCectnre. . . . It ts difficnlt to resist the conclosioa that there may be some reUtton between them.
The "relation" is simply explained by the deri\*ation of the stocks who devised these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic coiCinent. The acceptance of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of this and similar problems in almost ever>' branch of Modem Science.
Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by de- claring that:
The truth, so long contested, of the coexistence of man with the great extinct species [clephasprimigenios, rhinoceros tichorrhinus. hyxna spelaea. nrsns ^eiaens, etc], appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by science, t
It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages' opinion. He says:
Man has in all probftbility seen Miocene times t and consequently the entire Pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for believing that his traces will be found farther back still? ... He may then have been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and go back as far as the Secondary period.^
Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto-
* But Bce the mass of eridence collected by Ooant^y to prove the I^mviaA ndoay 1 th« AtUnteaos.
♦ CSMVKCi de Ptt^ord, p. 35
t Tbe iDBndoas author of Atlamiis. the AnU-diiuviam iVorld, Id di«raariii|r th« oricm of v«rii Gcedan and Roman instilatiucu. expresses hi» coovictloa that " the- roots of the iaitttwtkjaa of 4a7 R«ch twck to the Mioceoe ac^." Ay, aad fnrtber jret, aa already ftatciL
I The Mmmmm Spectts. p. ija.
THE OCCULT INTERPRETATION OF THE *' BIBLE.*
789
Aryan tribes began to settle on it when the British Islands* and France were not even in existence. It is well known that "the tongue of the ^g>'ptian Sea," or the Delta of lower Egypt, became firm land very gradually, and followed the highlands of Abyssinia; unlike the latter, which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it was ver>' slowly formed, through long ages, from successive layers of sea-slime and mud, deposited annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the present Nile. Yet even the Delta, as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited for more than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Aryan blood in them than their predecessors, arrived from the East, and conquered it from a people whose very name is lost to posterity except in the Secret Books. It is this natural barrier of slime, whid, sucked in slowly and surely every boat that approached those inhospit able shores, that was, till within a few thousand years B.C., the best safeguard of the later Eg>'ptians, who had managed to reach it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia, led on by Manu VinS in the day of Vishvimitra.t
So evident does the antiquity of man become with every day, that even the Church is preparing for an konmirable surrender and retreat. The learned Abbe Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared that pre-historic Palaeontology and Archaeology- may. without any harm to the Scriptures, discover in the Tertiary beds as many traces as they please of Pre- Adamite man.
Since it disregards all creations anterior to the last deluge but one [that which produced the diluvium, according to the Abbd], Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in the grey diluvium, iu Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the other band, however, geologists are not all agreed on regarding the men who inhabited the globe in these primitive ages as our ancestors.t
The day on which the Church shall find that its only salvation lies in the Occult interpretation of the Bible may not be so far off as some imagine. Already many an Abbe and ecclesiastic has become an ardent Kabalis-t, and as many appear publicly in the arena, breaking a lance with Theosophists and Occultists in support of the metaphysical in-
* As we know Uiem. howrver. For not otily^ does Oeolafnr prove that the British Islands have been four ttmts iubmetsed and rtiUvaUd. but that the straits between Uiem aod Suropc were dry land at a fornier remote epoch.
V Sec, in Isii UnveilrdiS. 037I, what Kullulca Bhatta says.
I Lfs Origitui di la Terre ft de V Homme, p. 454- To this. Professor X. Joty. of Toulouse, who thus quotes the A.bb6 in his Man before from him on this last point" (p. i86>. So do the Occultist* ; for though they cinira a vTiat difference in the physiology and outward appearance of the five Races so far evolved, still Ibey maintain that Uie present btunan speciefl haft descended from one and the »ame primitive stock, evolved froiii the Divine Men— our common ancestors and progenitors.
790
THE SECRET DOCTRINK.
terpretfltion of the Bible. But they commence, unfortunately for them, at the wrong end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon the metaphysical in their Scriptures, to study and master Uut which relates to the purely physical— e.g., its hints on Geology and Ethnology. For such allusions to the septenary constitution of ih* Earth and Man, to the seven Rounds aud Races, abound in the AVi'm in the Old Tesiavtent, and are as visible as the Sun in the heavens to him who reads both symbolically. To what do the laws in chaptw xxiii of Leviticus apply? What is the philosophy of reason for all suci hebdomadal offerings and symbolical calculations as:
Ye shall count . . . from the morrow after the Sabbath . . . that it brought the sheaf of the wave offeriog; seven Sabbaths shall t>e complete. . And ye shall offer witli the bread seven lambs without blemish, etc.*
We shall be contradicted, no doubts when we say that all these "wave" and "peace" offerings were in commemoration of the i«« "Sabbaths" of the Mysteries. These Sabbaths are seven Pralayu between seven Manvantaras. or what we call Rounds; for "Sabbath" is an elastic word, meaning a period of rest of whatever nature, as ex- plained elsewhere. And if this is not sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which adds:
Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fidy da^ [forty-nine, 7x7, stages of activity, aud forty-nine stages of rest, on the sens Globes of the Chain, aud then comes the rest of Sabbath, theylr/'/i offer a new meat offering unto the Lord-t
That is, ye shall make an offering of your flesh or " coats of skin," and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits* This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was aa in- stitution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews via the "Chaldees," who were the "wise men " of a ^ra^/r. not of a nation, a community of great Adepts come from their "Serpent-holes," who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if this interf>retation from Leviticus (full of the disfigured Laws of Manii) is found too far-fetched, then turn to Revelation, Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to the famous chapter xvii, with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading •*Myster>\ Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth," or Roman Catholics glare at the Protes- tants, the Occultists pronounce, in thdr impartiality, that these words have applied from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity — "cere-
* Loc. eii,, 15, x$.
T /MA, 16.
THE SYMBOLS OP SOUL-KIIJJNO CHURCUIANITT.
791
monial magic" of old, with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce of ritualistic worship. The "mystery" of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul -killing Churchianity and of Superstition.
The beast that . . . was, and is not. . . . and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains [seven Continents and seven Races] on which the woman sitteth —
the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have -covered that symbol "with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs'* who protested and do protest.
And there are seven kings [seven Races]; five are fallen [our Fifth Race included], and one is [the Fi{lh continues], and the other [the Sixth and the Seventh Races] is not yet come; and when he [the Race **king'*] cometb, he must continue a short space.*
There are many such apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find them out for himself.
If the Bible combines with Archaeology and Geology to show that human civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological epochs — why should not the statements of The Surei Doctrine be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific to disbelieve^ with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the famous Thenay flintsf "were carved by the dr>'opithecus monkey"; or, with the Occultist, that the anthropomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically demonstrated, that:
There was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species of mammal identical with species now extant t
— and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are§ — then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch, || is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent Naturalists:
• Op.cit.,%m.
t " Tbr 6int> of Thmny hear unmistakablv trace of the work of human hands." 1G. dc Mortillet, ^omenatUs au Muiie de St. Grtmatn. p. 76.)
: Albert Onudry, Lts EiuMaiHemmis du Monde Animci dans Us Temfis GMcgifMfs, p. no-
1 Speaking of the reindeer hunters of P^rigord. Joly itays that they " were of great height, athleUc, with a strongly built skeleton." lAfan be/ort Metals, p. J53.)
1 "On the fthoretn of the lake of »eaucc." says the Abb launa which cumpletely dlupiienred (aceratherium. tapir, mastodon). With the fluviatile sands of Orl^anois came the anthropomorphous monkey (pUopitbccus antiquust; therefore, later than See ComfiUi ftendua of the "Prehistoric Congreas" of 1*67 at Paris.)
792
THE SKCRKT DOCTRINE.
Thus, in the savage of qnatcmary ages, who bad to fight against the with stone weapous for arms, we find all those craniological characters g( considered as the sign of great intellectual development.*
Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not havt acquired such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if weaic to believe the learned Abbe Bourgeois.
As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found to Europe among fossils is the *'Mentone man*' (6ft. Sin.)* others may yet be excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that:
In a tomb of the Neolithic age ... a skeleton of extraordinary tone vv found in 1807.
It was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.
And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7ft. to even 9ft. and lift, high, this only proves — on the law of atavism, or the reappearance of ancestral features of character — that there wis a time when 9ft. and toft, was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-European race.
But as the subject has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the I^murians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what the modems now know.
The gpreat nation mentioned b}' the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which. as averred, had fought with the Atlantic race, was then, as we sec» assuredly no race of Palaeolithic savages. Nevertheless, even in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and initiates, no one seems to have preser\^ed any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages ; they were themselves descended from an a/icH race. and had settled in Eg}'pt some 4.00,000 years before,! btit their Initiates had preserved all the records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the statues of 341 kings who had
* De Qnalrefagca, 7A^ Human ^tcia, p. lit.
t " In mBkinK- MMuidiiisB In the slimy Boit of Uic >nic Volley, two baked bricks wisre dlscorercd, one mt thtr drpDi of m, llir other nt :t.t yai.N. If wr c&limatr the lhickues5i of the annuiil drpOAit fonani by the river at fi inches a century [more curcful catculalious have shown no more than rrom throe to five per century], we tntut aaaifrn to the first of these bricks an a^e of is.cxx) years, and to the Mnmd that of 14,000 years. Ry tuenn» of analogou« calculations, Bunueister supposes 72.000 year* to ha^v elapsed since the 6r&t appeaj-auce of man upon the soil of Kgypt, and Draper attributes to the Buropcao man who witnessed the Inst kIi^cIbI epoch, an antiquity of mure than 350,000 yearv." \Bhm he/ore AfetaU, p. iSj.) Kgyptinii /odiacs show more than 75.000 years of obscrvatiou I Xoie well ataft that BiuTOciatcr speaks only of the Delta population.
THE AGE OF EGYPT
Teigned over their little Atlan to- Aryan sub-race * If we allow only twenty years as au average figure for the reign of each king, the duration of the Eg>'ptiau Empire has to be pushed back, from thg days of Herodotus, about 17,000 years.
Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquit>' of 20,000 years. More modern Archaeologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years, and generously concede to Thebes, with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests — Initiates— journeying in a north- westerly ditection, by land, via what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phcenician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching Camac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, ^tiil travelling by land, on the north-western promontory of the New Continent.f
What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits? The Archaic Records show the Initiates of the second sub-race of the Ar>'an family moving from one land to the other for the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptacles for the ashes of generations to come. When did this occur? The fact of their crossing from France to Great Britain by land may g^ve an idea of the date when such a journey could have been performed on terra fimia.
It was when :
The level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher than it ie at the present day. The valley of the Somme was not hollowed to the depth it has now attained; Sicily was joiueU to Africa, Barbary to Spain. Carthage, the Pyramids of Kgypt, the palaces of Uxuial and Palenque were not yet in existence, and the bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to undertake their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were yet unborn. What we Icnow with certainty is that European man was contemporaneous with the extinct species of the quater- nary epoch . . . that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alps J and the extension
• See Esoteric Buddhism, p. 66. Fifth KdiUoo.
* Or on whal aiv now W\e Uriti«h bles, which vme not yet detAcbed rrom Uie main continent in those days. "The ancient inhabitant or iHcardy couJd pau into Great Briuin without croaatne the Channel. The BrIUah Isles wrrc unitrd to Caul by an islbmnB which has since been submerged." \Man be/ott Metals, p. 184.)
; HewitneflGCd and remembered it too, as "the final disappearance of the larin;sL continent [of Alluntts] was an event coTnddcnt with the elcvntion of the >lps," a Master writes (see Esoteric Buddhism p. 70). /tar/ pastu, as one portion of the dry land of our hemisphere disappeared, aome land of tbe new continent emersred from the seas. It is on this colossal cataclysra. which lasted daring a periotl of 150,000 yeare, that traditions of all the "deluges" arc built, the Jews constmcting their vcraioti on an event which took place later, on Poscidonis.
794
THE SECRRT DOCTRINE.
of the glaciere» in a word that he lived for thousands of year? before the dawn of the remotest historical tradttioiw. It is even possible that man was the contem- porary of extiucl mammalia of species yet more ancient . . . of the elepbas meridionalis of the sanda of SL Prest, or at the least of the elephas antiqntu; assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius, since their bones are foand in company with carved flints in several English caves, associated with those of the rhinoceros hsemitechus and even of the machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date. M. Ed. Lartet is also of opinion that there is nothing really impossible in the existence of man as early as the Tertiary period.*
If "there is nothing impossible" scientifically, in the idea, and it may be admitted that man was already in existence as early as the Tertiary period, then it is just as well to remind the reader that Mr. Croll puces the beginning of that period 2.500.000 years back; but there was a time when he assigned to it I5»ooo,ooo years.
And if all this may be said of European man, how gpreat is the antiquity of the Lemuro-Atlantean and of the Atlanto-Aryan man? Every educated person who follows the progress of Science, know* how all vestiges of man during the Te^iary period are received. The calumnies that were poured on Desnoyers in 1863, when he announced to the Institute of France that he had made a discovery
In the nndistnrbed Pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartrcs, proving the coexistence of man and the elephas meridionalis —
were equal to the occasion. The later discovery, in 1867, by the Abbe Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was given at the Pre-historic Congress held at Brussels in 1872, proves that the average man of Science will see only that -whuk he wishes to see.^
The modem Archaeologist, though speculating ad infinitum upon the dolmens and their builders, knows, in fact, nothing either of them or of their origin. Yet these weird and often colossal monuments of unhewn stones — which consist generally of four or seven gigantic blocks placed together — are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in groups or rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and variously upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks. People name them "dexnl's altars,** druidic stones, and giant tombs. The stones of Camac in Morbihan, Brittany — nearly a mile in leng^ and numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows
• "The Antiquity of the Huttum Race," in Man before Metals, by M. Joly. p. 184-
* Thesdentific "jury" dUagrcrd, unsual; iiiTiili ili Qiiiiln riii.i 1. 1I1 ITnirilli r. irnri— . Waldmur, Schmtdt. Capctliiil. Hamy, and CartailliBC. saw upon the fliau the trac«« of b work, Steen«tnip. Virchow and Door irftiacd to do so. Still tbc majority, if wr rxcrpt i Sdentiata, ure for Bourgeois.
THB TOMBS OP THE GIANTS.
79S
— are twin sisters of those at Stonehenge. The conical menhir of Loch-maria-ker. in Morbihan, measures twenty yards in length and nearly two yards across. The menhir of Champ Dolent (near St. Malo) rises thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth below. Such dolmens and pre-historic monuments are met with in almost every latitude. They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark I (among the local tumuli from twenty-seven to thirty-five feet in height); in Shetland; in Sweden, where they are called Ganggriftcn (or tombs with corridors); in Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hiinengraben); in Spain, where is the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga; in Africa; in Palestine and Algeria; in Sardinia, with the Nuraghi and Sepoltnre dei Giganti, or tombs of grants; in Malabar; in India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (Giants) and of the RSkshasas, the Men-demons of I^nkS; in Russia and Siberia, where they are known as the Koorgan; in Peru and Bolivia, where they are termed the Chulpas or burial places, etc.
There is no country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are they all connected with serpents and dragons, with alligators and crocodiles? Because remains of "Palxolithic man" were, it is thought, found in some of them, and because, in the funeral mounds of America, bodies of later races were discovered with the usual para- phernalia of bone necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns, etc., they are, therefore, ancient tombs f But surely the two famous mounds — one in the Mis.sissippi valley and the other in Ohio — known respectively as the "Alligator Mound" and the "Great Serpent Mound," were never meant for tombs.* Yet one is told authoritatively that the mounds, and the mound or dolmen builders, are all "Pelasgic" in Europe, ante- cedent to the Incas in America, yet not of "extremely distant times." They are built by "no race of dolmen builders," who never existed save in the earlier archaeological fancy (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp). Finally Virchow's opinion of the giant tombs of Germany is now accepted as an axiom. Says that German Biologist:
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.
* We take the foUowing de«cripUon from a scientific work. "The first of theac aninula [the alligator] designed with coiiiiiderable iikill, is no lena Ihaa J50 ft. long. . . . The interior is formed of a hemp of stones, over which the form has been moulded in fine Rtiffclay. The great serpent ia tcpresentcd with open mouth, in the act of swallowing au egg of which the diameter in too fl. in the Uiickcat part; the body of (he animal is wound in graceful ctirvca and the tail is rolled into a spiral. The entire length of the animal is 1,100 ft. This work is unique , . . and there is nothing on the otd coatiueut which oflers any ;iaalogy to it." Bxc^pt, however, Its symbolism of the Serpent (the Qrde of Time) swallowing the Bgg (Kosmos).
796
THE SECRET DOCTRINR.
And Archxology has but to bow and submit to the decision.*
That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the •* tombs" is no reason for sa>ing that the remains of giants were never in them. Cremaiion was universal till a comparatively recent period — some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we hare shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,t and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Aryan stock, which sub-race — born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions — had become European. Since then, as we have said, il has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occa- sionally found in them ; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants^ or rather the ashes of generations ot giants.
Nor were all such cyclopean stnictures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Caraac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's historj'. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the c>"clo- pean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and — **magi- cians," both good and bad.
It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejecting a prwri the actual existence of grants, has preser\'ed to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly ever^' M>'thology — which after all is Ancient History — the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modem exegesis, that
• Ilmi^hthc better, perhaps, for/uc/hBd wcniorr " spccialials " in Sdcaeeantl fewer "authorities" on uirivenal questions. We have never heard that Humboldt gave authoritative and final deciataos in the matter of polypi, or on the nature of an cxcrciccQce.
T 57.000 years is the dale assig^ocd by Dr. Dowler to the remaina of the human skeleton, fottad buried beneath four ancient forests at New Orleans on the banks of the Misriis.«1ppi river.
t Murray say* of the Mediterranean barbarians that thcj- mnrvellcd at the prowess of the Atlas* teann. "Their physical sttruKth wa* extraordinary [wiloeas indeed their cyclopean buildiugs), tbe earth shaking sometimes under their tread. ^^Tiatevcr they did, was done speedily. . . . Thiey were wine and communicated tlicir windom to men " {Mythology, p. 4).
RACES OF GIANTS.
797
makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the com' bats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Aryan Race. will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Ar>*an theory as expounded by Max Mullen Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or ^sir. the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in histor>' nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively and dc facto side by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.
In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.
If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of grants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain locali- ties **Los Campos de los Gigantes," the *' Fields of Giants," are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occur- rence of Pliocene raised beaches. ''All the giants are not under Mount Ossa." and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries. Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theon* that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modem times.
Not twice ten men the raiffhty bulk could raise. Such men as live in these degenerate days.
79^5
THE SECRET DOCTRIXE.
If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are humau, ihcy indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geolog>% and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.
That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In the/ourna/ of the Anikr> pologUal Institute^ such a race is shown as having existed at PalmxTi and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circla in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserred an ancient Semitic laug^ge quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of tic Bible can never be relied upon, even in their modem revised forou, They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by "giants," and further adding that they were "hairy" men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these "satyrs" — some alive, others "pickled" and "preserved." The word "giants" once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preexisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Dashan. and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousaud years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from ihe chil- dren of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobding-
beiq^^ sinojH
nagians were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle pariod were called the "Great Dragons," and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the "Gods" and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.
»The mystery veiling the origin and the religion, of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modem Synibologist, but Hot to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldaeaus and Indians, though little more. It maybe inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindus do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs — namely under the form of the "Mighty Serpent,'' the emblem of the eternal deity Time — the Hindu Kala. Pliny called them the "Magi of the Gauls and Britons." But they were more than that. The author of Indian Antiquities finds much afiEnity between the Druids and the Brihmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;* others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace — simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented a£Qnities with the exoteric worship of all.
Like the Hindus, the Greeks and Romans — we speak of the Initiates — the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of "worlds," as also in that of seven "creations" (of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall dis- cover it in all. We shall find it among the Ar\'an Hindus and Maz- deans. the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In the Book of God we read :
The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reentered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed* as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.
• But the Magi of Per*im were never Persiant— not evcii Chaldicsins. They came from a far-off' land, the Orientaliata being of opinion that the »aid land wai Media. This may be to, but from what '«rt of Media } To thla we receive no aniwer.
Soo
THE SECRET DOCTRINB.
AAerw&rds we set a new worlfi spring from him, perfect ia all its parts. Animaii arc produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.
And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving destruction or death of all. he teaches us that:
When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern F*ole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. 7>ir a^righUd Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling; to d^cay shall pro- duce at once both life and death, and some kind of rlissoliition shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.*
One might imagine oneself reading the Paurauic account by Pari- shara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter iii of the Second KpislU of Peler, and he will find there the same ideas:
There shall come in the last days scoffers . . . saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they wexr from the beginning of the creation. For this tliey willingly are ignorant of, that by the wonl of Go water and in the water : wliereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now. by the same woid are kept in store, reserved unto fire . . . the heavens being on 6re shall be dis- solved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we . . . look for new heavens and a new earth.t
If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised comiug of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of "Peter." What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.
It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary con- stitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsls who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the Avesta the Earth is considered septempartile and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongrnity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. The Av^s/a speaks of the three thirds of the Earth because the Rig' Veda mcntious'.
THE MAZDEAN VIEW OF THE SEVEN EARTHS.
boi
Three earths, . , to be meant bv this.*
Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said
I
But he is quite mistaken, as are all e::oteric profane translators. The Avesta has not borrowed the idea from the Rig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The '* three strata or layers" do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain — two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the as- cending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth is septenipartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane — it is tripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of the Avesta^ and even by the speculations — most laborious and unsatisfacta! / guess-work — of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three *' zones," if this word is read "planes." As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old — the oldest of all — since the GSthas already speak of the *septerapartite earth." f For:
According to the statements of the later Pars! Scriptures, the seven Kirshvars are io be considered as compteiety disconnected parts of the earth [which they surely are. For] between them there flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one K^rshvar to anolher.J
The "Ocean" is Space, of course, for the latter was called "Waters of Space" before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karsh- var is consistently rendered as Dvipa. and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvipa (Neryosangh. the translator of the Yasna).% But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Pars5 by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundn,' remarks of the former on the "incongruities" of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such "incongruities" and "coincidences" concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvipas— islands, or continents, rather — as met with in the Purdnas, namely:
The Dvjpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvipa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Irfinian view,
• CivtltMation of Ike Eastern franians in AnciiHl Timts, pp. 130, 131.
♦ Biiai bapUiU, Yasna, xxxii. 3.
t C/.. for iDstauce. vol. i. p. 4, of the Pahlavt Translation ; BdA. md. t, j.
I Pootnott by Dirih DnMur Pcshotau Saujiol, B.A., ihc trautUtor of Dr. WUbelm Gciffer's work on Uie CtvilitatioH of the EaiUm Iraniani.
8o2
THE SBCRBT DOCTStiNK.
the Kirshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, tbe^ conceutric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a pecubtr g dividual space, and so tliey group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.*
Now Qaniratha — better Hvaniratha — is not, as believed by Get|y and his translator, "the country inhabited by the Iranian tribes,** oj •'the other names" do not mean "the adjacent territories of foni^i nations in the North, South, West, and East," but sigrnify our Globcor Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which fallows Ac last quoted, namely, that :
Two, Vorubarahti and Voruzarahti. lie in the North; two, Vidadhafsha andTi^ dadhafshu, in the South ; Savahi and Arzabi in the East and West
— is simply the very ^aphic and accurate description of the Chain our Planet, the Earth, represented in the Book of Dzyan (i i) tbtis:
N (North) Vorubarshti 0 9 Voruurshti (North)
(West) Arzahi W
C Savahi (East)
(South) Tradadhafshu
Vidadbafshu (South)
Qaniratha
The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by thoK used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tcaet. Tht "Earth" (our world) is tripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds b situated on three different planes abore our Globe; and it is septem- partite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose lh« Chain. Hence the further meaning given in Vmdiddd (xix- 39); showing that:
Qaniratha alone ia combined with imat, **thia** (earth), while all other varea are combined with the word '*avai" "that" or Moj^— upper earths.
Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the mod comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.
The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Suu in Taurus. when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modem Zoroastrians. And ^ike the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and '}^dxa like the Christians — who do the same to this day, without stis-
'
THE DRUIDICAL BBUKF IN REBIRTH.
pecting the real meaning — they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.* Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:
Where Cere« and Persephone were worshipped witli tlie same rites as in Samo- thrace and this island was Sacred lemat —
where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:
That the same spirit shall animate a newhody. not here, but in a different world — but in a series of reincarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.J
These tenets came to the Fifth Race Aryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, o\ving to the acquisition of super- human powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of histor>', in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.
Julian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it. // was the iasi to produce animals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of in- habitants iu it. gold and silver being found there in g^eat abundance.
Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage —clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea — is too disingennous to be further noticed.
* Dr. Kcoealy, in hb Book of God, quotei Vallauccy, who say* : " t hud uot been a wrck landeU in Iirland from Gibraltar, . . . whcrr I had studied Hebrew and Chnldiiic under Jcwt of varioiu countricH . . . when 1 heard ■ ;>caianL girl say to a txxir standing by her. ' Peach an Maddin Nag * {Behold the morning alar), pointing to the planet Ventu, the Maddina Keg of the Chaldman " (pp.
t /jA. iv.
I There waa a time when the whole world, the toiaUty of mankind, had one religion, and when they were of "one lip." " iUI the rcUgioiu of the eanh were at fint one and emanated from one centre," saya Faber very tmly.
8o4
THR SECRET DOCTRINK-
SOME STATKMENTS ABOUT THE SACRED ISI^NDS AND CO.VTI. NENTS IN THE CLASSICS. EXPLAINED ESOTERICALLY.
All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many othea But as no Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knev; posterity got only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a Moralist Una as a Geographer and Ethnologist or Historian, the Greek Philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million ytm, into one event which he located on one comparatively small i«>ltiid 3,000 stadia long by 2^000 wide (or about 350 miles by 200, whicii ii about the size of Ireland); whereas the priests spoke of Atlantis as t continent vast as *'all Asia and Lybia" put together.* But, howera altered in its general aspect, Plato*s narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.f It was not he who invented it, at any rale, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks in his Odyssey of the Atlantes — who are our Atlanteans — and of their island. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses, thit Atlantes and the Atlantides of Mythology are based upon the AUantcs and the Atlantides of History. Both Sanchuninthon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes ami heroines, howertr much their accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.
In our own day we witness the extraordinary fact that such compan- tively recent personages as Shakspere and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom dc plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful Races — the Lerauriaus and the Atlauteaiis — have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic.
Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes — a people of Western Africa — who
* C'itias, trftnatated by Davis, p. 415.
t Plato's veracity has been so unwarrantably Impeached by even such friendly critics as Jowett, when the story of Atlantis bos been discuaaed, that It seems well to cite the testimoayof 1 specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary cnvillera in a very ridiculous piOAlioo.
" If onr knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in e^trry instaner wherein the people of Kurope accord with the people of America, they were both in accord witb tfce people of Atlantis. ... It will be seen that in every coae where Plato gives us any infonuatioa (■ tbii respect as to Atlantis, we And this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculptuft, navigation, engraving, writing, on established priesthood, the mode of worship, a^ricultarr, and the coDStruction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose Ihut the same correspoadeacr extended down to all the minor details." i Donnelly, .^f/iiN/ti, p. i64> Twenty-fourth Kd.i
THE MEN, "WHOSE SLEEP WAS NEVER DISTURBED BY DREAMS.** 805
gave their name to Mount Atlas; who were vegetarians, and "whose sleep was never disturbed by. dreams"; and who, moreover,
Daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them.
These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas gives the key to this. If the Atianteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atianteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to the other statement — that they daily "cursed the sun" — this again had nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degenera- tion that grew with the Race. It is explained in our Commentaries.
n^ \^the sixth sub-race of the Atianteans^ tised magic incantations even against ike Sun —
failing in which they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the Moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atianteans ol the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the Gods. Thence the same traditions, taking form in the ^M/f, about the ante- diluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, and found also in the BooJk of Enoch.
Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atianteans boasted of possessing the laud in which all the Gods had received their birth; as also of having had Urauus for their first King, he being also the first to teaoh them Astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from antiquity.
The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old Continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and a universal knowledge, and especially a thorough aa/uaintance with the depths of the ocean; for both Continents bore Races instructed by divine Masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reappearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso — the '* watery deep." Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the '*sustainer" of the huge pillars that separate the Heavens from the Earth. He is their
8o6
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"supporter." And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps.* Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and join his brother lapetus in the depths of Tartarus.f Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning:
[Atlas] standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the tinivene, and thus carrying at the same tirae the disc of the earth and t}ie celestial vault— the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere. I
For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their horizons on its "shoulders."
Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grece Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron's translation of the Homeric word c^a by susiinei, as it is not possible to see:
How Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in various localities.
If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a Continent in the West said to support Heaven and Earth at once,§ i.e.^ the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders support the celestial vault — an allusion to the pgantic peaks of the Lemurian and Atlantean Continents — the epithet "supporter" becomes very correct. The term conservator for the Greek word l^^ which Dtcharme. following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as mean- ing (^uXarro-ct and cTTt^icXfiTOA. does not render the same sense.
The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain c running along the terrestrial border or disc. These mountain peal plunged their roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost Continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thu.s, the Lybiaus called Mount Atlas the "Pillar of Heaven," according to Herodotus,|| and Pindar qualified the later j^tna as the "Celestial Pillar."^ Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria. when the African continent had not yet
* Christinnii ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical dcntmctton of contiociit* by ire nnd water; for St. Peter speaks of the Earth "standing out of the water, and in the water, wherefcy the world that then was. 1>eins overfloMred with water, perished, but [is now] re«cr\-eil unio fift** (U. iii. 5>7. Sec Also the Livti of AUkemyitital miasopkeri, p. 4. London, 1813).
♦ Sec Heaiod's TTt&tgony, 507-50Q. and Odysiey, J. 51-55' ) Mimaires de t Acodimie des fntcriptioHS, p. 176.
> JPjKihyXus, Ptomtihtus l-^inctus, 3^1, 429, etc.
II iv. 184.
If /y/A,, i. 10: Decharme, op. cit,, p. 315.
'I'HE HEIHLOOM
807
"betn raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, indepetidcntt belonging to the Continent on which the Third Race was bora, de- veloped and fell,* for Australia is now part of the Eastern Continent. Proud Atlas, according to Esoteric tradition, having sunk one-third of its size into the waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.
This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo-Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told.f So secret was the knowledge of the last island of Atlantis, indeed^-on account of the superhuman powers possessed b)' its inhabitants, the last direct descendants of the Gods or Divine Kings, as it was thought — that to divulge its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as much in his ever-suspected Afcropis^ when he speaks of the Phcenicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.
There are Orientalists and Historians — and they form the majority — who, while feeling quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the Bibie, and some of the events narrated in it, show great disgust at the "immorality" in the Pantheons of India and Greece.^ We may be told that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato, express the same disgpist; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented— "those miserable stories of the poets," as Euripides phrases it.§
* This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Xorthem and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed port of the Coutiaent.
t Had not OioclcUaa burned the EAoteric works of the BgyptiauAin A.D. tc/b, together with their booka on Alcbetny. * ' frtpX )^fitta^ dpryvpav Kai ^vtroC ' * : Oubt 700,000 rolls at Alexandria ; Leo l*auru» 300,000 at CoDstantinoplc (eighth cent.); and the Mahomotedaiu all they coutd lay their sacrilegious hands on— the world mi^t know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birthplace in Atlautia durinfir the Fourth Kace, and had only its renatisanct in Bffypt-
t Professor Max MiJller's I,ectures — On the Phitoiopky 0/ Mythology — are before us. We read his citations of Hcracleitos (460 D.C.), declarinsT that noraer deserved "to be ejected from public assem- blies and floff^ed"; and of Xenophanes " holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitious of Greece," and for ascribing "to the gods whatever is di»graceful and scandalous among men . . . unlawful acts, such as thefl, adultery, and fraud." Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett's translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adolmantas yRefublu) that "the young man [in the state] should not be told Ibot in conunittiog the worst of crimes, he ts far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastL«e his father [as Zeus did with Cronus] . . . in any manner that he likes, and lu thi. e following the example of the first and greatest of the gods. ... In my opinion, these stories are not fit to br rffrratrd.'" To this Prof. Max MnUer obaerves that : " the Greek religion was clearly a national and tradtttanal religion, and, as such, it shar^ both the advantages and difiadrantages 0/ this form 0/ relig^iotn Mitf" ; while the Christian religion la " on historical and, to a great extent, an individnal religion, and it possesses thr advantage of an authorized codex and of a settled system of faith" (p. 2^9). So much the wonte {( H is "historical," for surely Lot'* incident with his daughters would only gain, were it "allegoricaL"
I doc^wK otSc 8vaT^K0( Auyoi, HacuUs Furens, lyfi, Oindorf s Edition,
8o8
THR SECRET DOCTRINE.
But there may have been another reason for this, perhaps. Vo thoft who knew that there was more than one key to Theogoaic SymboUsK. it was a mistake to have expressed it in a langiiage so crude and mb. leading. For if the educated and learned Philosopher could discen the kernel of wisdom under the coarse rind of the fruit, and knew tiu: the latter concealed the greatest laws and truths of psychic and physia nature, as well as the origin of all things — not so with the uninitmd profane. For him the dead-letter was religion; the interprctatioB- sacrilege. And this dead-lelter could neither edify nor make him mm^ perfect, seeing that such an example was given him by his Gods. Be to the Philosopher — especially the Initiate — Hesiod's Theogony is % historical as any history can be. Plato accepts it as such, and gives oat as much of its truths as his pledges permitted.
The fact that the Atlantcs claimed Uranus for their first king, tad that Plato commences his story of Atlantis by the division of the grw Continent by Neptune, the grandson of Uranus, shows that there wwr continents before Atlantis and kings before Uranus. For Neptune,*^- whose lot the great Continent fell, finds on a small island only ooc human couple made of clay — /.r, the first physical human man, whoM origin began with the last sub-races of the Third Root- Race. U a their daughter Clito that the God marries, and it is his eldest son Alltt who receives for his part the mountain and the continent which wtn called by his name.*
Now all the Gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindu Pan- theon and the Rishis, were the septiform personations (i) of tlie Noumena of the Intelligent Powers of Nature; (2) of Cosmic Fortes, (3) of Celestial Bodies; (4) of Gods or DhySn Chohans; (5) of Psychic and Spiritual Powers; (6) of Divine Kings on Earth, or the incanw- tions of the Gods; and C7) of Terrestrial Heroes or Men. The know- ledge how to discern among these seven forms the one that is intended, belonged at all times to the Initiates, whose earliest predecessors bad created this symbolical and allegorical system.
Thus while Uranus, or the Host representing this celestial groap. reigned and ruled over the Second Race and their then Continent; Cronus or Saturn governed the Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptunet and others fought in the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole Earth
t Neptiinr or Powidon i« the TlindQ I or Viihuu, and like thU HlndA God he i» thown crosftinf Uie whole hotixOQ in ikr£t tUps. IiU»-pitfi means alAo the "Maitcrof Uie Watcn."
"THE GREATER GODS OP OLYMPOS."
809
in the day of the Fourth Race. Poseidonis, or the last island of Atlantis — the "third step" of Idas-pati. or Vishnu, in the mystic language of the Secret Books— lasted till about 12,000 years ago.* The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in claiming that it was their country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas, where *'the Gods were born" — i.e., "incarnated." But it was after their fourth incarnation that they became, for the first time, human kings and nilers.
Diodorus speaks of Uranus as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either consciously or otherwise, the Continents; but as we have shown, Plato indirectly corrects the statement. The first astronomical teacher of men was Uranus, because he is one of the seven Dhyan Chohans of that Second Period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara, that of Svarochisha, among the seven sons of the Manu. the presiding Gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis.t the teacher of Astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the names of Brahma. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the Sky, Ouranos), and name him as their first teacher of Astronomy. Uranus gave birth to the Titans of the Third Race, and it is they, personified by Saturu-Cronus, who mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who/e/i inio gaieraiion, when "creation by will was superseded by physical procreation," they needed Uranus no more.
And here a short digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence of the last scholarly production of Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century^ "The Greater Gods of Olympos,*' the ideas of the general public about Greek Mythology have been still further per- verted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as, "the true key to the Homeric concep- tion/* whereas this "key'* is merely a "blind.**
[Poseidon] is indeed essentially of the earth earthy . . . strong and self- assertiug, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive —
but this is because he symbolizes the Spirit of the Fourth Root- Race, the Ru!er of the Seas, that Race which lives above the surface of the seas,J which is composed of the giants, the children of Eury- medon, the race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan, and the one-eyed Cyclops. Though Zeus reign over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules, and who is the true key to the triad of the Cronid
* BaiUy's uscrtion that the 9.ocxk yean mentioned by the ^Tptlan priests do not reprcKot "solar years" is ^ouudieiis. Bailly luiew aolhiDg or OeoloRy and its calculations: otherwise he would faaw iipukcn diiTcrcutly.
-r See Matiyo. PurAna, which places him amoDg the seven Prajipatia of Uie period.
: /Had, xxiv. 79.
8x0
THE SKCRKT DOCTRIKE.
Brothers, and to our human races. Poseidon and Nercus are one; txi former the Ruler or Spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of itsn^ mersion. the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of ^ Ihnyig Race, Nereu^ its Spirit, reincarnated in the subsequent Fifth oc Aryan Race; and this is what the Greek scholar of Hugland has oa yet discovered, or even dimly perceived. And yet he makes maay observations upon the "artfulness" of Homer, who never nmn Nereus, at whose designation we arrive only through the patronroic of the Nereids!
Thus the tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to oonfi» their speculations to the exoteric images of Mythology and to lot sight of their inner meaning; and it is remarkably illustrated in tbc case of Mr. Gladstone, as we have shown. While almost the moK conspicuous figure of our age as a statesman, he is at the same tin? one of the most cultured scholars to whom England has griven binl Grecian literature has been the beloved study of his life, and he bi found time amid the bustle of public affairs to enrich contemporin literature with contributions to Greek scholarship, which will make his name famous through coming generations. At the same time, as te sincere admirer, the present writer cannot but feel a deep regret thil posterity, while acknowledging his profound erudition and splendid culture, will yet, in the greater light which must then shine upon tke whole question of Symbolism and Mytholog\', judge that he has failed to grasp the spirit of the religious system which he has often criticized from the dogmatic Christian standpoint. In that future day it will W perceived that the Esoteric key to the mysteries of the Christian as well as of the Grecian Theogonies and Sciences, is the Secret Doctrine of the pre-historic nations, which, along with others, he has denied. It is that doctrine alone which can trace the kinship of all hasian religious speculations, or even of so-called "revelations," and it is this teaching which infuses the spirit of life into the lay figures on the Mounts of Meru, Olympus, Walhalla, or Sinai. If Mr. Gladstone were a younger man, his admirers might hope that his scholastic studia would be crowned by the discovery of this underlying truth. As it is, he but wastes the golden hours of his declining years in futile disputa- tions with that giant free-thinker, Col. Ingersoll, each fighting with the weapons of exoteric temper, drawn from the arsenals of ignorant Literalism. These two great controversialists are equally blind to the true Esoteric meaning of the texts which they hurl at each other's
THE POWER OP NAMES.
■heads like iron bullets, while the world alone suffers bj' such contro- versies; since the one helps to strengthen the ranks of Materialism, and the other those of blind Sectarianism of the dead-letter. And now we may return once more to our immediate subject.
Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our commentators. The power of names is great, and has been known since the first men were instructed by the Divine Masters. And as Solon had studied it, he translated the "Atlantean'* names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of "Atlantis."
Thus, in the Criiias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself surrounded by mountain chains, and the plain was smooth and level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thou- sand stadia in one direction and two thousand in th« other; they surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, loi feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length *
Now in other places the entire size of the is/and of Poseidonis is given as about the same as that assigned here to the ^^ plain around the city" alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great Continent, and the other to its last remnant — Plato's island.
And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million men ; its navy as 1.200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!
The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters — seven sub-races — whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta. Asterope, Merope, Alcyone, and Celaeno. This ethnologically — as they are credited with having married Gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantidcs have become the seven Pleiades (?). In Occult Science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to Karmic I^aw.
• op. «'/.. p. 4»^-
8l2
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
■
Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingrdom of Saturn or Lemuria, confused with Atlantis several thou- sands of years before our era; and these were the Eg>'plians, the Phoc- nicians (Sanchuniathon), and the old Greeks (Diodorus. after Plato). Rut the oldest civilized country of Asia — India — can likewise be shown to claim the same descent. Sub-races, g^iided by Karmic Law or destiny, repeat unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother-races. As the comparatively fair Brahmans — when invading India with its dark-coloured Dravidians — have come from the North, so the Ar^'an Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The Occult Sciences show that the founders, the respective groups of the seven PrajSpalis, of the Root-Races have all been connected with the Pole Star, In the Commentary we find:
He who understands the age of Dhruva^ who measttres iviU undo'stand the tinus of the Pralayas, the fiftal destiny of PiatioHS, O Lanoo.
Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Astatic nation should locate its great Progenitors and Saints in Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is 70,000 years, however, since the Pole of the Earth pointed to the further end of Ursa Minor^s tail; aud many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the con- stellation of Ursa Major.
The Aryan Race was born and developed in the far North, though after the sinking of the Continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further South into Asia. Hence Prometheus is the son of Asia, and Deucalion, Iiis son, the Greek Noah— he who created men out of the .stones of tuother Earth — is called a northern Scythe, by Lueian.and Prometheus is mtide the brother of Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the snows. f
Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the Gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phoenicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin aud originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physio-
* The equlvmlent of Ihts name \\ i^vru in the ori^ofil.
* Deucalion if uiid lo hRrc brouKlit the worship of Adonis and OsirU into rhdrnida. Now thb worship U that of the Sun, |o«t nnd found again in iu aKtronomical f^ffnificance. ]( Is only al tli> Pole that the Sua dies out fnr siirh a k-ngth of time as nix months, for in Utitudr tA'* it retnoina^vif only for forty day». as In the festival of Osihs. The two worships were born in Ihe north of txmortt. or on that Continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, sad which AtretcbnS up U» the iralar rvgionft. This is well shown by de Gebelin's .4//VX0MM d'Otient, p. la^i. and by Bully; though neither Hercules nor Osiris art soiar mytkt, nrt la one of their sercn aspecU.
I
THS SONS OP CCELUS AND TERRA.
813
logical evolution had been completed* All the "fables" of Greece would be found to be built on historical facts, if that history had only passed to posterity unadulterated by myths. The '* one-eyed" Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Caelus and Terra — three in number, according to Hesiod — were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the "one-eye" referring to the wisdom-eye;! for the two front eyes were fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The allegor>' of Ulysses, whose companions were de- voured while the king of Ithaca himself was saved by putting out the eye of Polyphemus with a fire-brand, is based upon the psycho-physio- logical atrophy of the ''third eye." Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a "Sage" in the sight of the latter, must hai'e been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.J His adventure with the latter — a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssty-^is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of the Third Race to lose their all-penetrating spiritual eye. The other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclopes to avenge the death of his son Asclepius, does not refer to the three sub-races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the "wisdom-eye." The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the South as much as in the North; the latter were confined to the North solely. Thus Apollo — pre- eminently the God of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration, killed them — his shafts representing human passions, fierj' and lethal — and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions.^ Cosraically and astronomically this Hyperborean God is the Sun per- sonified, which during the course of the Sidereal Year — 25,868 years — changes the climates on the Earth's surface, making frigid regions of
• The HypcrboreaiM. now regarded as mythic»I, are described (Hrrod., iv. 33-35; Patuaniua, 1. ji, 33 ; V. 7, 8 : X. 5, 7, 81 Bs the beloved priests and servants of the Gods, and of ApoUo chiefly.
t The Cyclopes are not the only "one*eyed" representatives in tradition. Tlie Arimaspea were a Scythian people, and were also credited with bnt one eye. {Giogra^it Ancieniu, ii. jii.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts.
3 I'lysMft w»>« wrecked on the isle of iCsea, where Circe changed nil his companions into pigs^r thetr vaiuptuousntii ; and aRcr that he was thrown into Ogj'gia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection. Now Calypso was a doughter of AtUs yOdyt., xii.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the lale of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the Ocean ; thus idenltfying It with Atlantis.
\ Hygin., Altron. f^tiqut. U. 15.
Si4
THK SECRET DOCTRINE.
tropical, and vice versa. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr, Gladstone pertinently remarks in his *• Greater Gods of Olympos":
The qualities of Apotlo (jointly with Athend) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which He beyond the limit of the traditions moftt commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology.*
The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo's mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giNnng birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phcebus, etc. She is born in the Hyperi>orean countries, wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle.t Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its Race — geologically.}
When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine — Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of "birds," the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels — then the bright God assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of seership, when he sends the astral double of j^neas to the battle field. § and has the gift of appearing to his seers without being visible to other persons present, || a gift, however, shared by eveiy high Adept.
The King of the Hyperboreans was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the North Wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe — the Atlantean Race — the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and
• M'ruUfnth CtntMty. July. 1887.
♦ Oiod. Sic, ii. 307-
: To moke a difference between Lemurin antl AUantis, the aacient wHten referred to th« Utter ■• the Northern or Kypcrborfan Atlanti*, nnd to the former an the Southern. Thus Apollodorus says {Mythology, Book ii) : "The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in LybU; they ore in the Hyperborean AUautis." The Greeks uaturallxed all the God* Lhey borrowed and made IlcUena of thetn, and the modema lielped theni. Thus also the Mytbologliits haw tried to make of Eridanus the river Po. In Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death bia listers dropped hot tcan which fell into Sridonus nnd were changed Into amtier! Now unfrer is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying' heal to the frosen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, asd being hurled down tuta theEridanus, Xf, au allegory* referring directly to Ihechangea of climate in thoar distant times when, from a frigid xone, the polar landa had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the Sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Bridonos by Jupiter's thunderbolt, is on allusion to the second change that took place in tfao«e regions when, once more, the land where " the magnolia blossomed " became the desolate forbidding land of the &rthcai north and eteroal ice. This allegory covers then the events of two Pralayas ; and if well uadentood ought to tie a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.
\ /Had, xvii. 43i*4SJ-
11 /h:^., 3M-336.
I
THE CHILDREN OP NIOBE.
their seven branches* allegorizes the histor>' of the two Continents. The wrath of the *'Sous of God." or of "Will and Yoga," at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great ;t and the destruction of the children of Niobe by the children of Latona — Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astro- nomically, whose influence causes changes in the Earth's axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms — is thus very dear.J The fable abont the never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain — Atlantis covered with water — is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades, or Atlantides, the grand-daughter of Atlas there - fore,§ because she represents the last generations of the doomed Continent.
A true remark, that of Bailly. which says that Atlantis had an enor- mous influence on antiquity. He adds:
If these mythical names are mere allegories, then all that they have of truth comes &om Atlantis: if the fable is a real tradition — however altered — then the ancient history is wholly their history. ||
* Stc ApoUodoruB for this number.
f Sec "The Sods of God and the Sacred Isluid."
t Sq occult ttud mystic is one of the aspcctfl of latona that ahe la made to txlppear even in Jirveiaium {xii], as the wooum clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child " cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered." A ffreat red Drai^n stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man>ch!ld who wait to rule nil nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God— the Sun. The woman Bed to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the Earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood ; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who kept the commandments of God. iScc xii. i. 17.) Anyone who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recogniae the identity of the two vcmious. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun. for the man-child of Revelation, "who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron" is surely not the meek "Son of God," Jesus, but the phy&lcal Sun, "who rules sll nations": the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Ijemurino* from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast deve- loping into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona "to bring forth "—the Sun to appear. "She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where .-the can bring forth," until Neptune, the Ocean, in pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos— the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the Ocean— on which Latona finds refuge, and where the bright God Dellus is bom, the G^d, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and front of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona- Lemuri a is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns— with an iron rod, truly, stiicc Herodotus makes the Atlantes cunt his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the se\'en keysf in the just cited chapter of Revelation. Latona became a powerful Goddess Indeed, and saw her son receive worship Seven. He is bom on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times round Dclos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre— the seven rays of the Sua and the seven forces of Naiore. But this is only in the aslronomicaL meomng, whereas the above ii purclr geological,
1 See Ond, Afetam^phoui. vi.
\ Ltttrei sur I'Atlamtide, p. 137.
8i6
THE SECRST DOCTRINB.
So much so, that all ancient writings — prose and poetry — are full the reminiscenccii of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical Races, though the Third and the Fourth in number in the evolution of Fourth Round Humanity on our Globe, Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the Age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot, they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet.* Such were the giants of the first physical Races.
The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna^ ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the '^Sons of God," or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge to rid the Earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zarathushtra as one of the "Sons of God.'* It says:
Thon, O Zarathushtra, didst make all demons [Sorcerers], who before roamed the world in human forma, conceal themselves in the earth [helped them to submersion].
The Lemurians, and also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes — the "Sons of Night*' or Darkness, and the "Sons of the Sun" or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and "tried to wrench the Lord of Light" from their better-favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the Ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months* duration in the polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the North where the year was divided into a day and night each of six months' duration, for Pliny distinctly says so.f They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mseotis — between 45* and 50' latitude. Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scsrthians — which nation stopped near the Tanais, after having crossed Asia.
These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense foresU, and under a ien^brotts sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there iat^ nighis and days divide tht year.X
Bctfod, Opem ei Dm, 143.
t HuL Abt.. iv. II.
1 Marim*>
THE '* ISLAND OF THE DIVINE KINGS.'
Sir
As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor:
Sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves.*
Even the writers of the Zohar knew this fact, as it is written:
In the Book of Hammannunah. the Old [or the Ancient], we learn . . . there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have tlie day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries iu which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants, t
The island of Delos, the Asteria of Greek Mythology, was never in Greece, for this country, in that day, was not yet in e'xistence. not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a countr>^ or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Sicuius place it iu the Northern Seas. One calls it Basilea, or *' Royal" ;i the other, Pliny, names it Osencta,§ a word which, according to Rudbeck,|| had
A significance in the northern languages, equivalent Co the Island of the Divine Kings or God- kings —
or again the "Royal Island of the Gods," because the Gods were bom there, i.e.^ the Divine Dynasties of the Kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let Geographers and Geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiold on his "Vega" voyage in the Arctic regions.^ The Secret Books inform us that the climate has chariged in those regions more than ojice^ since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a Paradise before they became Hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks, and the cold Realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the Goddess-Queen of the countr>' of the dead/' holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim." Yet it was the birthplace of Apollo, who was the brightest of Gods, in Heaven — astronomically — as he was the most enlightened of the Divine Kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out iu the Iliad, wherein Apollo is said to have
• Op.cil.,
f Isaac Mycr's Qabdaiah, p. 139,
t Dk>d.. U. »5.
I Ofi. cit., xxjtvii. 1.
II Vol. i. pp. 46a-4t»4.
^ The»c iblands were "found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gignutic boues of elephonLs, matamoths, rhinoceroses,*' clc. If there was no man on Earth at that period "how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the hu^e antedilurionit.'"— aaka a Master in a letter. {SsoUric Bnddhism, p. 67.) The reply is fiveD above in the text.
Si8
THE SBCRST DOCTRIXE.
appeared four times in his own form (as the God of the Foil
and six times in human form,* i.^r., as connected with the
Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.
It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries — which hare now become uninhabitable — as well as the name given to ** man " both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the tgnonnt Church Fathers for inventing a Hell, which they have transformed inlo a burning instead of a freezing localitv-t
It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspcs, nor even the Scs'ths — known to and com- municating with the Greeks — who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name, it is averred, came from pclagus^ the "great sea." Noah's Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the stor>' is based upon the same archaic tradition of men or rather of nations — who were saved during the cataclysms, in ''■n****,. arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldam Xisuthrus, the HindCi Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peinin — the ''Bdored of the Gods/' who rescued him from the flood in a canoe — or Ae Swedish Belgamer, for whom the Gods did the same in the Xonb, m all identical as personages. But their legends have all spnxng ham the catastrophe which involved both the Continent and the Island of Atlantis.
The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievcncBCi in sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. Bat it is neither by the ^'oice of God amid thonder and lightning oo ^f**— * Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone; but simply through tradition via Pagan sources. It was not smdr tke PentateuJk that Diodortis was repeating when he wrote abooi tk Titans — the giants bom of Heaven and Earth* or. rather, bom of the
op, ax^ ir. tnttm.
Ag«Od prootf* tkmt aQ Oe Godk.
■in tte cndle of f^ytieml asm, 1km la
to ttia day aaa^ Ike nonteni tribes M
«tea sB Ike iirtiBM wtn oi -omc Wp,'
^l,stiK. 0«re McA word i» aw
T*e f iiiilMii I ■ caM thA lmiij to t>» Jgy ■■■» \
Cbe Xae of^ C^vAc. j«4fc or Ike SkraM
WHO WERK THE NEPHIUM?
8i^
Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scrip- tures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans» a race which descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birthplace of the first giants. The Commentaries on the Sacred Books explain that the said region was the far North, the Polar Lands now, the Pre-Lemurian earliest Continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitz- bergcn» Sweden, Norway, etc.
But who were the Nephilira of Genesis (vi. 4)? There were Palaeo- lithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in tlie Book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies, these Nephilim with hairy men or satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race, and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlautean Race. What is the meaning of Poseidon's amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric Records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of those Lemuro-Atlautean Races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, "monsters," as the Stanzas have it.
Now Mytholog>*, built upon Hesiod's Tkcogony^ which is but a poetized record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Cronus for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with a hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in M^^hology every personage almost is a God or Demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect,* and that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, ele> ments, nations, races and sub-races, the Esoteric Commentary will
• Thus, for instance. Cyges U n hundred -armed and fifly-hraded moDster, > Dctni-god in one caw, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king^ of the country, in another version. The same U found in tbc Indian Pantheon, where Kiahls and the Sotu of BrahmA are nbom aa mortala.
S30
THK SECRET DOCTRINK.
become comprehensible. It saj's that the three giants are three pol lands which have changed fonn several times, at each new cataclysm. or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole Globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet. though the whole face of the Earth was transformed thereby each time, the con- formation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and pen- insulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called the "Etemal or Perpetual Land/* and the Antarctic the "Kver-living" and the "Concealed"; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reappear in turn, into and above the Great Waters.
From the first appearance of the great Continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants have been imprisoned in their circle by Cronus. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon — or Neptune — hence by the seas, which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal dark- ness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad makes it Tartarus.* When the Gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus — the deity of the Fourth Race — the Father of the Gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants that they might help him to conquer the Gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its tum.f The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cata- clysm; and, remaining impressed ou the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Rakshasas of Lankil and the Bh^rateans. the meUc of the Atlanteaus and Ar>-ans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds, or Peris, became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the Angels of God and the Angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, and one of the latest
• op. ett„ via. 13.
f TTie conUnenla periah In turn by fire and water: cither throu);h eartltquokes and volcanic crap- Itons. or Iiy Kinkingr and the great dUpla cement of waters. Our ctnitlncnl* bflve to perish by tbe former cat«tct>-smal process. The incr^iont earthquakes of ihc pa«t years may be a womiiic.
MNTHOLOGY BUItT ON HISTORY.
821
issues of the Arj'an stock, took upon themselves to overturn the reli- gious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking humanity with the belief in the exist- ence of Satan.
But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar — as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire— that Hesiod's Thcogony is based upon historical facts,* it becomes easier for the Occult Teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from Mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modem learning in this Addendum.
Such symbols as are found in all the exoteric creeds are so many landmarks of pre-historic truths. The sunny, happy laud, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then Hyperborean and Saturnine;! thus showing the Golden Age and Reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many-sided in its character indeed — climatically, ethnologically and morally. For the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling-places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations, and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaxnug for a while the Greek interpretations, we may seek for some more cor- roborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.
* Sec Dechsrmc'B Myikologie dg /« Grice Antique.
t- Denis, the O«offrapher, tells us that the great itea north or Asia was called gladal, or Saturnine {v. 35). Orpheua \v. 107?) and Pliny (iv. 16) corrobonile the statement byshovrinfr that It was it« ffiant inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by iclliag; us that all the cnntinentx were formed from North to South ; and that aa the sudden change of climate dwarfed the race that had been bom on it, arresting its growth, so. several desrrees southward, vartoun conditions had always produced the tallest men in ercry new humanity, or race. We ace it to this day. The tallest men now found arc those in Northern countries, while the smallest arc Southern Asiatics, Uindfis, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall tiikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans. Norwejfiaoti, Russiana. Northern German*, Scotchmen, and Kniflish, with the inhabitants of Central India and the sTcrage European on the continent. Thua also the Giants of AlUmtis, and hence the Titans of Hesiod. are all Northerners*
oECTION YIL
Scientific and Geological Proofs of the
Existence of Several Submerged
Continents.
It may not be amiss — for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of a lost Miocene Atlantis into an "antiquated myth** — to append a few- scientific admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely indifferent to such questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit that, in any case, a cautious agnosticism as to geological problems con- cerning the remote past is far more philosophical than a priori denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient data.
Meanwhile two very interesting instances, that have been lately met with, may be pointed out as "confirming" certain passages in the letter of a Master, published in Esoteric Buddhism. The eminence of the authorities will not be questioned (we italicize the corresponding passages) :
Extract from Esoteric Buddhism, p. 7a Extract from a Lecture by W. PengeUy^
F.R.S.. F.G.S.

The sinking of Atlantis (the group of Was there, as some have believed, an continents and isles) began during the Atlantis — a continent or archipelago of Miocene period .... and it culminated large islands occupying the area of the
first in the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincidefU wiik the dei'aiion of the Aips, and second with that of the last of the fair islands men- tioned by Plato.
North Atlantic? There is, perhaps* no- thing itnphilosophical in the hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, *' The Alps have acquired 4,000 and even in some fi/aces more than 10,000 feet of their present atti- tude since the commencement of the Eocene epoch" (Lyeirs Principles, p. 256, 2ad Ed.> — a Post-Miocene depression might have
GEOLOGY CORROBORATES OCCULTISM.
823
carried th^ hypoihelical Athntis inio almost abysmal dfplhs.^
Extract from Esoteric Buddhism^ pp. 64, Ertract from an article in the Popular
65.
Lemuria

should no more be
Science Review^ \. 18, by Professor See- mann. Ph.D., F.L.S., V..P..\.S.
(2-)
It would be premature to say. because
confounded with the Atlautis Continent no evidence has vet been adduced, thai
than Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned with their high civili-
men may ttot have existed in the Eocene age, especially as it can be shown that
zationsand "gods'*; yet between the two a race of men, the lowest we know of, co* catastrophes a period of about 700,000 exists with that remnant of tfie Eocene year^ elapsed, I^muria 6ourishing and Jiara zvhich still survives on the continent ending her career just about that lapse of and islands of Australia, time before the early part of the Eocene
Ertract from The Pedigree of Man, p^ Sx.
Haeckel. who fully accepts the reality
age, since its Race was the Third. Behold
the relics of that once great nation in some
of the flat-headed adorigines of your A us- of a former Lemuria, also regards the
tralia. Australians as direct descendants of the
Lemutians. "Persistent forms of both [his LemuriauJ stems are in all probability still sur^-iving, of the former in the Papu- ans and Hottentots, of the latter in the Australians and in one division of the Malays.
With regard to a former ci\'ilization, of which a portion of these degraded Australians are the last survi\4ng offshoot, the opinion of Gerland is strongly suggestive. Commenting upon the religion and mythology of the tribes, he writes:
The statement that Australian civilization {}] indicates a higher grade, is nowhere more clearly proved than here [in the province of religion] where everything resounds like the expiring voices of a previous and richer age. . . . The idea that the Australians have no trace of religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated. t
■ Having already griven several instances of the va^ancfl of Science, it is delightful to find auclt agreement In thia particular case. Read in connection with the scientific admission (dted elsewhere) of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods, the following pa highly instructive: "We are not yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent epoch at which our northern hcmiitphcrc was ca%-crrd with glaciers. According to Mr. Wnllncc, this epoch may have occurred no more than seventy thousand yc.irs ago, while others would assign to it an antiquity of at least two hundred thousand years, and there are yet others whourge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion that a million of years is barely enough to ha^-e produced the changes which have taken place since that event." [Fiske. Cosmic Pkilasophy. i. 304. Ed. ifl74-) Prof. Leftvre, again, gives us as his estimate one hundred thousand years. Clearly, then, if Modem Science is unable to estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era as the Cladal Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of Race-Pcriod
t Cited tn Schmidt's Doctrine 0/ Desctni and D.t.'T»'ittiam, pp. 300, 301.
824
THE SECRET DOCTRINE,
As to Hasckel's view of the relationship between the Australians and the Malays, as two branches of a common stock, he is in error when he classes the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a mixed stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlauteau sub-races with the seventh sub-race of the Third Root-Race, Like the Hottentots, they are of indirect lycmuro-Atlautean descent. It is a most suggestive fact — to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma — that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting iu among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the Globe, among those races, whose "time is up'* — among just those stocks, be it remarked, which Esoteric Philosophy regards as the senile repre- sentatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses per- petrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. Even the Materialist Lefevresays:
Nothing can save those that have run their course. It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle. . . . The peoples thai have been relatively most spared, those who have de/ertded t/iemselves vtosi valiantly, Mawaiians or Afaories, have been no less decimated than the tribes tnassacred or tainted by Eutvpean intrusion,*
True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed, an instance of the operation of Cyclic I^aw. difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the "destined cycle" and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their "appointed hour'*? The answer that it is due to a ** mental dispropor- tion" between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive^ since it does not explain the sudden "checks to fertility" which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians. for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize, with Occultists, that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lef evre remarks :
The time is drawing near when there will remain nothing bat three great hnznan types.
The time is before the Sixth Root- Race dawns; the three types are
* I^i(QS0phy HUttrrical and Criiicai, p. 508.
TRADITION AS TRUE AS HISTORY.
825
the white (Aryan, Fifth Root-Race), the yellow, and the African negro — with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eski- mos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc. — all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root-Race runs through a gamut of seven sub- races with seven branchlets. etc., will understand the "why." The tide-wave of incarnating Egos has rolled past them to harvest experi- ence in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity. . Some extraordinary' and unexplained statistics as to race extinction are given by de Quatrefages.* No sclu- tiou, except on Occult lines, is able to account for these.
But we have digressed from our direct .subject. Let us hear now what Professor Huxley has to say on the subject of former Atlantic and Pacific Continents.
He writes in Nature:
There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or geological evidence at present accessible, 10 render untenable the hypothesis that an area of the Mid- Attaniic or Pacific sea-bed as bij^ as Emvpe^ should have been upheaved as high as Mont Blanc, and have subsided again any time since the Palceozoic epoch, if there were any grounds for entertaining iUt
That is to say, then, that there is notliing to militate against positive evidence of the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postu- lates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Berthold Seemann assures us in the Popular Science Review that:
The facts which botanists Ii.ire accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of several large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present floras of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental connection between South-Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and America were con- nected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests upon a solid historical basis. . . . Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river-banks (fromAsia generally^, neither exclusively from the South nur from the East. The West also furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a later period, was to facilitate communication between the two
* Hmman Species, pp. 4»B, et ugq.
t Art., "The Pint Volume of the PuhtieaUoiis of the 'ChaUenfer.
" p. 9, Nor. 4th. i88a
*rHE SECRBT DOCTRINE.
continents in such a remarkable manner. At tbat time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just [?] just rising above the ocean.*
And in another number of the same reviewf Mr. W. Duppa Crotch, M.A., F.L.S., in an article entitled "The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations," alludes to the same subject:
Is it probable that land could have existed where now the broad Atlantic roUsP All tradition says so: old Egyptian records speak of Atlantis, as Strabo and others have told us. The Sahara itself is the sand of an ancient sea, and the shells which are found upon its surface prove that, no longer ago than the Miocene period, a sea rolled over what is now desert. The voyage of the "Challenger** has proved the existence of three long ridges^ in the Atlantic Ocean,^ one extending for more than three thousand miles, and lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account for the marvellous similarity of the fauua of the Atlantic islands.II . , ,
The submerged continent of Lemuria, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is con- sidered to aSbrd an explanation of many difficulties in the distribution of organic life, and, I think, the existence of a Miocene Atlantis will be found to have a strong elucidative bearing ou subjects of greater interest [truly sol] than the migration of the lemming. At all events, if it "in be shown that land existed in former ages where the North .\tlantic now lolls, not only is a motive found for these apparently suicidal migrations, but also a strong collateral proof that what we call instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial inheritance of previooslj acquired experience.
At certain periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and perish. Coming, as they do. from all parts of Norway, the powerful instinct which .sur\'ives throughout ages as an inheritance from their progenitors impels them to seek a continent, once existing but now submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a watery grave.
In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace's Island
* op. nV., Art., "Australia and Ciuripe romierly otie Continent" iv. 19, 25). ITadonbtedly « fact, and a confirmation of the Esoteric concrpiion or I,eniuria, which odsinally not only rmfaraccd grvat am$ in the Indian and Pacific Ocrans. but projected round South Africa into the North Atlantic It» AUandc portion snbtequeotly became the ^olo^cal basis of the future home of the Fourth Race AUantcKna.
f /bid., i. 143.
; C/., the published reporU of the "Challcaccr" expedition; also Donnelly's AttatUi-i, p. 46A and pp. 46-56, Chap., "The TcsUmony of the Sea."
I Even the cautious I^fi^vre tijieaks of the cuatence of Tertiary men on " upheaTcd lands, island* and continents then floutishingr. but since submerged beneath the waters." and elsewhere Lntroduce«. a "poMibte Atlantis" to explain ethnolofrical facts. C/.. his Pkitosophy Historical and Crtticai^ pp, 478 snd 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with rare intuition that " modem civiltiatiou is Atlantean . . . the inventive faculty of the present ape is tAking up the great delegated work of creation where AUantis left it thousands uf yearn ago" (Atlamtts, p. 177. Twenty-fourth Ed.). He alao rvfera the origin of culture to the Miocene limes. II is, however, to be sought for in the teachings given to the Third Race men by their Divine Rulers— at a vastly earber period,
II An equally "curious" similarity may be traced between some of the West Indian and WCtt AlHc&n fauna.
ATLANTIS, NECESSARY TO ETHKOLOGY,
827
j^iy^ — a work de%'oted largely to the question of the distribution of animals, etc. — Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes:
By a process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of diflFerent kinds, he arrives at Uie conclusion that the distribulion of life upon the land as we now sec it has been accomplished without the aid of important changes in the relative positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we must believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa. New Zealand and /istralia, Europe and America, have been united at some period not remote geologiLoUy^ and that seas to the depth of i.ooo fathoms have been bridged over; but wc must treat as "utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command *' [! \\ the sup- position that temperate Europe and temperate America, Australia, and South America, have ever been connected, except by way of the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, and that lands now separated by seas of more than i.ooo fathoms depth have ever been united.
Mr. Wallace, it must be admitted, has succeeded in explaining the chief features of existing lifedi.stribution, without bridging the Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the Poles, yet I cannot llclp thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more easily explained by admitting the former existence of the connection between the coast of Chili and Polynesia* and Great Britain and Florida, shadowed by the sub-marine banks which stretch between them. Nothing is urged that renders these more direct connections impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why the floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The route by which [according to the Anti-Atlantean and Ircmurian hypotheses of Wallace] the floras of South America and Australia are supposed to have mingled, is beset by almost iu- surniou 11 table obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of sub- tropical American plants in our Eocenes necessitates a connection more to the South than the present t.ooo fathom line. Forces are unceasingly acting, and there is no reason why an elevating force once set in aciion in the centre of an ocean should cease to aci until a continent is formed. They have acted and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent geological time, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits repeatedly that sea-beds have been elevated r.ooo fathoms, and islands have risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to suppose that the upheaving forces are limited in power, is, it seems to me, to again quote from Island Life^ "utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command." t
The "father" of English Geology — Sir Charles Lyell — was a uni- fomiitarian in his views of continental formation. We find him saying :
Professors Unger {Die Versunkene Insel Atlantis) and Heer {FUmi Tertiaria HeU velia) have advocated on botanical grounds the former existence of an Atlantic Continatt during some pari, of the tertiary period^ as affording the only plausible
* The Padfic portion of the giant Lnnutiaa Conttnent christened by Dr. Carter Blake, the Aathro- pologiiil, "PncificuB." t "Subsidence and Elrvation," Geological Magawimt, pp. a^i. 345, June, tS8t.
828
THB SKCRKT DOCTRINE.
explanation that can be imagined of the analogy between the Miocene flora of Central Europe, and the existing flora of Eastern America. Professor Oliver, on the other hand, after showing how many of the American types found fossil Burope are common to Japan, inclines to the theory, first advanced by Dr. Gray, that the migration of species, to which the community of types in the Eastern States of North America, anrl the Miocene flora of Europe is due, t place when there was an overland communication from America to Eastern between the fiftieth and sixtieth parallels of latitude, or south of Behriug's Straits, following the direction of the Aleutian islands. By this course they may ha made their way, at any epoch, Miocene. Pliocene, or Postpliocene. antecedentlv the Glacial epoch, to Amoorland, on the Bast coast of Northern Asia.*
The unnecessary difficulties and complications here incurred in order to avoid the hypothesis of an Atlantic Continent, are really too appa- rent to escape notice. If the botanical evidences stood alone^ scepticism would be partially reasonable; but in this case all branches of Science converge to one point. Science has made blunders, and has exposed itself to greater errors than it would be exposed to by the admission of our two now invisible Continents. It has denied even the undeni- able, from the days of the Mathematician Laplace down to our own. and that only a few years ago.f We have Professor Huxley's authority for saying that there is no a priori improbability whatever against possible evidences supporting the belief But now that the positive evidence is brought fonvard, will that eminent Scientist admit the corollary?
Touching on the problem in another place Sir Charles Lyell tells us
Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, wc gather much infonuatioa from writers of the Grecian secU, who Iwrrowed almost all their tenets from Egj*pt, and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of the world [continental, not cosmic, catastrophes]. We learn from Plutarch that this was the theme of one of the hynuis of Orpheus, so celebrated in the fabulous ages of Greece. It was brought by him from the banks of the Nile: and we even find in his verses, as in the Indian systems, a definite period assigned for the dura- tion of every successive worUl. The returns of great catastrophes were determined by the period of the Annus Magnus, or great year, a cycle composed of the revolu- tions of the sun, moon, aud planets, and terminating when these return together
'■4
• Antiquity of Man, p. 497.
* Wbcn Howard read, before the Royal Sodety of X«ondon. a paper on the first wrious murches thai were made on ihc aerolites, the Gcaevo Naturalist Pictet. who wn« present, communicated, on bU return to Paris, the fact^ reported to the French Acnderay of Science*. But he was forthwith in- temipted by LapUce, the jfreat AstroDomcr. who cried : " Stop t wt haw had enaufih of such /it^U*. and know oil olmut tliein." thus mnkins Pictet ferl vrry small. OIobular-«hapcd lightninrs or thundcfbolts have \iccn admitted by Science only iincc Ara^ demonstrated llicir existence. Sayt.^ de Kochat [Forces J^'on-eUfinits. p. 4): "Kwryone remembers Dr. Bonillnnd'fc raisAdventurc «t Academy of Medicine when be bad declared Kdisou's phuuagraph "^a trick o/uen/eito^uism* /"
PAXLS OK HBR HEAD.
to the same sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to have set out.
. . . We learn particularly from the Titmcus of Plato that the Egyptians be- lieved the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges. The sect of Stoics adopted luosl fully the system of cala±(truphes destined at certain in- tervals to destroy the world. These, they taught, were of two kinds — the cata- clysm, or destruction by deluge, which sweeps away the whole human race, and annihilates all the animal and vegetable productions of nature, and the ecpyrosis^ or conflagration, which destroys the globe itself [submarine volcanoes]. From the Egyptians they derived the doctrine of the gradual debasement of man from a state of innocence [nascent simplicity of the first sub-races of each Root-Race]. Towards the termination of each era the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of men [degeneracy into magical practices and gross auimality of the Atlanteans], and a shock of the elements, or a deluge, overwhelmed them; after which calamity, Astraja again descended on the earth to renew the golden age [dawn of a new Root- Race]. •
Astraea. the Goddess of Jtistice, is the last of the deities to forsake the Earth, when the Gods are said to abandon it and to be taken up again into heaven by Jupiter. But, no sooner does Zeus carry from Earth Ganymedes — the object of lust, personified — than the Father of the Gods throws down Astraea on the Earth again, on which she falls upon her head. Astraea is Virgo, the constellation of the Zodiac. Astrono- mically it has a very plain significance, and one which gives the key ta the occult meaning. But it is inseparable from Leo, the sign that pre- cedes it, and from the Pleiades and their sisters, the Hyades, of which Aldebaran is the brilliant leader. All these are connected with the periodical renovations of the Earth, with regard to its continents — even Ganymedes, who in astronomy is Aquarius. It has already been shown that while the South Pole is the "Pit" (or the infernal regions figuratively and cosmologically), the North Pole is geographically the First Continent; while astronomically and metaphorically the Celestial Pole, with its Pole Star in Heaven» is Meru, or the Seat of Brahma, the Throne of Jupiter, etc. For in the age when the Gods forsook the Earth and were said to ascend into Heaven, the ecliptic had become parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac appeared to descend from the North Pole to the north horizon. Aldebaran was in conjunc- tion then with the Sun, as it was 40,000 years ago. at the great festival in commemoration of that Annus Magnus, of which Plutarch spoke. Since that Year — 40,000 years ago — there has been a retrograde motion of the equator, and about 31,000 years ago Albebaran was in conjunction with the vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even
principles of Geology, i. 9, lo.
830
THK SKCRBT DOCTRINB.
in Christian Mysticism, is too well known to need repetition. The famous Orphic Hymn on the great periodical cataclysm divulges the whole Esotericism of the event. Pluto, in the Pit, carries off Eurydice, bitten by the Polar Serpent. Then Leo, the Lion, is vanquished. Now. when the Lion is "in the Pit," or below the South Pole, then Virgo, as the next sign, follows him, and when her head, down to the waist, is below the southern horizon — she is inverted. On the other hand, the Hyades are the rain or Deluge constellations; and Aldebaran — he who follows, or succeeds the daughters of Atlas, or the Pleiades — looks down from the eye of Taurus. It is from this point of the ecliptic that the calculations of the new cycle were commenced. The student has to remember also, that when Ganymedes — Aquarius — is raised to heaven — or above the horizon of the North Pole — Virgo or Astrsea, who is Venus-Lucifer, descends head downwards below the horizon of the South Pole, or Uie Pit; which Pit, or the Pole, is also the Great Dragon. or the Flood. Let the student exercise his intuition by placing these facts together; no more can be said. Lyell remarks:
The connection between the doctrine of successive catastrophes and repeated deteriorations in the niond character of the human race, is more intimate and natural than might at Hrst be imagined. For, in a rude state of society, all great calamities are regarded by tlie people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man. ... In like manner in the account jjiven to Solon by the Egyptian priests of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity oftht inhabitants,*
True; but was it not owing to tlie fact that all Esoteric truths were given out to the public by the Initiates of the temples under the guise of aUegories^ "Jupiter," is merely the personification of that immutable Cyclic lyaw, which arrests the downward tendency of each Root-Race after attaining the zenith of its glory. t We must admit allegorical teaching, unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske*s singularly dogmatic opinion that a myth :
t The Cyclic Law of Race-BvoluUon is mcMit unwelcome to Scicatiats. It is snffideat to mentioti the fact of ■' primeval dvilixation " to ercile Uie fren«y of Uorwiniana ; it being obvious that the furtber cuUure a»d science is pushed bock, the more precarious becomes the basU of the apc-anc«stor Lfarory. But as JacolUot says: " Whatcrcr there may be in these traditions [submerged continents, etc.). and whatever may have been the place where a civilixatioo more aadeat than that of Rome, of Cre En^it. and of India, was developed, it is certain that this dvilizatloti did exist, and it ia highi ' portant for sdcnce to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they be." Ktltsioire d^s I'u ■, . Ui PrupUi €t Ui Contintnu Dtzparus, p. 15.) l>onnelly has proved the fact from the clearest prcmun, but the BvolntiooiaU will not Listen. A Miocene dviUialion upseU the "universal Stone age" Lhevrrv. nnd that of a contmuous ascent of man from anitualisio. And yet Egypt, at least, run* counter to current hypolheaes. There is no Stone age viniblc there, but a more glorious culture is apparent ikc iurther back we arc enabled to carry our retroapect.
INGENIOUS EXPLANATIONS.
831
Is an explanation by tbe uncivilized mind, of some natural phenomenon: not an allegory, not an esoteric s>'mboI. for the ingenuity is wasted [! !] which strives to detect in myths the remnants of a refiued primeval science — ^but an explanation. Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means of allegorj* [how does Mr. Fiske know?], nor were they such sorry pedants as to talk, in riddles when plain language would serve their purpose.*
We venture to say the language of the initiated few was far more "plain," and their Science- Philosophy far more comprehensive and satisfying alike to the physical and spirihial wants of man, than even the terminology and system elaborated by Mr. Fiske's master — Herbert Spencer. What, however, is Sir Charles LyelVs "explanation" of the "myth"? Certainly, he in no way countenances the idea of its "as- tronomical" origin, as asserted by some writers.
The two interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyeirs solution is as follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal changes from the absence (?) of any reliable historical data on the point, as well as from a strong bias to the uniformitarian conceptions of geologic, changes,! he attempts to trace the Atlantis "tradition" to the following sources :
(1) Barbarous tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God^ who is assumed in this way to punish immoral races,
(2) Hence the commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.
(3) The primary source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia —a continent subject to violent earthquakes. Exaggerated accounts would thus be handed down the ages.
(4) Egypt, being herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not inconsiderable geologic knowledge on these cataclysmal traditions.
• HfyfiAs and AfyiA-Afakeri,p, ai.
t violent miaor cataclysms and coloual earthquftk*9 lire recorded in the annals of motit natioiia— if not of all. Slevation and subsidence of continenU is always in progrc**. The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 tu 15 fetrt and settled down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British Islands have been four times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raiaed ag^ain and peopled. The Alps, UtmAtayas and CordiUcroa were all the result of depoailiona drifted on to ftea ba«in of a Mitjcene aea. Within the last five or six tbousaiid ycani the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway^bave ruen from aoo to 6do feet; in Scotland there ore rained beaclies with outlying stacks and skerries surmountinjr the shore nowrrodc*! by the hunffry wave. Tbe North of Europe is still rising from the sea. and South America prcaenLs the phenomenon of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length.nuw ata hei|rlit varying from too to 1,300 feet above theaea-level. On the other baud, tbe coast o( Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that the Greeulander will not build by tbe shore. All these phenomena arc certain. Wliy Uien may not a gradual change have given place to a violent cataclysm in remote epochs— such cataclysms occurring on a minor scale even now, t^,, the oase of Sunda Island with tbe destnictioo of &o,ooo Malays i
S32 THE SECRET DOCTRIXE.
An ingenious "explanation," as all such are! But pro\Hng a nepm- tive is proverbially a difficult task. Students of Esoteric Science, who know what the resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such laboured hypothesis. Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always able to furnish a reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch of Science, seem to necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic changes on the surface of our planet, the impartial critic who is not a specialist, will recognize the immense difficulty of explain- ing away the cumulative evidences — namely, the archaeological, ethno- logical, geological, traditional, botanical, and even biological — in fevonr of former continents now submergeii. When each science is fighting for its own hand, the cumulative force of the evidence is almost invariably lost sight of.
In the Tkeosophist wc wrote:
We have as evideucc the most ancient traditions of varions and wide-separated peoples— I e}^nd» in India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Snmatra, Java, and all the principal i^^les of Polynesia, as well as llic legends of both Americas. Amo^g savages, and in the traditions of the richest literature in the world— the Sanskrit literature of India— there is an agreement in saying, that* ages ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological upheaval was en- gulfed by the sea* [Lemuria] And it is our firm belief . . . that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since the memory of man, never bad nor could have any intercourse with, or even a kuowledge of each otlier, have yet a tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea; that there were in the world but two inunense continents, one inhabited by yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of the Gods, and to punisli them for their incessant quarrelling^ swallowed Ihcm up. Notwithstanding the geographical fact that New Zealand, and Sandwich and Haster Islands, are at a distance from each other of bctweeo 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that according to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate islands* for instance, the Marqucsan. Society, Fiji. Tahitian, Samoan. and other islands, could, since they became islands, ignorant as their people were of the compass, have communicated with each other before the arrival of Euro- peans; yet they one and all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward the West, on the Asian side. Moreover with very small differences, they all speak dialects evidently of the same language, and understand each other with little difficulty, liave the same religious beliefs and superstitions, and pretty much the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered earlier
* PcTT the opinions of JacolUot. after tong traveU through the Polyucsian Islands, and hts proo&of a fomKT ^real geological caudysm in the PadAc Ocean, mc his Histoift dts Vilrgti; tm }^pl*» «t Us ConUtunU Duparms. p. 308.
tt«CKEL FOR ONCB IS RIGHT.
than a century ago, and tbe Pacific Ocean itself was unknown to Europe until the days of Columbus, and these islanders have never ceased repeating the same old traditions since the Europeans &rst set foot on their shores, it seems to us a logical inference that our theory is nearer to the truth than any other. Chance would have to change its name and meaning, were all this due but to chance alone.*
Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the hypothesis of a former
Lemuria, declares:
A great scries oC animal-geographical facts is explicable only on the hypothesis of the former existence of a Southern Continent of which the Australian mainland is a remnant. . . . [The distribution of species] points to the vanished land of the south, where perhaps the home of the progenitors of the Maki of Madagasear may also be looked for.t
Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago, arrives at the following conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand :
The inference that we must draw from these focts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo do essentially form a part of a former Australian or Pacific Continent, although some of them may never have been actually joined to it. This continent must have been broken up not only before the Western Islands were separated from Asia, but probably Iwfore the extreme south-eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent fonnation.t
According to Hseckel:
Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race; but T^muria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and .sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. (
In one sense Hceckel is right as to Lemuria — the "cradle of the human race." That Continent was the home of the first physical human stock — the later Third-Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite diflferent. Hasckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.
Professor Riitimeyer, the eminent Palaeontologist, asks:
Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant-eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and Australia must be the remains— need this conjecture raise difficulties at
* Aug^ist, i8Sa
t Doctrine of Dtseeni and Darwinism, pp. 136, 337. Qf. aldd hi« len^hy arpunentfl am the subjec^ PP'3i-»35- t Op. cU., i. M, 13, Ed. 1869. I Ptdigru of Man, p. 73.
^34
THB SBCRBT DOCTRINE.
a moment when, from tlieir fossil remains, Heer restores to our sight the ancient forests of Smith's Sound and Spitzbergen?*
Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundatuental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists — the reality of Atlantis. I^muria is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessar>-. With regard, however, to the former, it is found that:
(i) The Miocene florae of Europe have their most numerous and striking analogues in the florse of the United States. In the forests of Virginia and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip-trees, evergreen oaks, plane trees, etc., which correspond with European Tertiary* flora, term for terra. How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory* of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed "explanation" to the effect that the transi- tion was by way of Asia and the Aleutian Islands is a mere uncalled- for theory, obviously upset by the fact that a large number of these florae only appear East of the Rocky Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a Trans-Pacific migration. They are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.
(2) Skulls exhtuned on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a striking similarity to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littre). Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear repre- sentations of undoubted negro heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is nofw N.W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.
(3) According to Farrar the '^isolated language" of the Basques has no affinities with the other languages of Europe,! but with:
The aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent [America] and tho«e aloue.J
Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.
Palaeolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a
• Cited in Schmidt'^ Doctrinf of Descmt and Dartvinixm, p. »j8.
t For further facU a&to the- isolation of the HAtKiticti in Buropc and their cthnolo^eal rrUttons, wv Joly, Man bt/iyre Meiah, p. .^i(>. B. Davitt is dispoeed to concede, from no examination of the aknt^ of the Guancbea of the Canary Islands and modem Boaqucs, that twth belong to n race prop9 to those ancitml islands, of which the Canaries are the rematnjJ This is n step in advance indeed. Dc IJuatrefagcs and Hamy also both ajwign the Cro-Magnon men of South France and the Guanche* to vrnflyfte—tk proposition which involves a certain corollary which both these writers may not cacct* father.
] Famiii€s 0/ speech
FINAt AND IRRBFUTABtK SVIDKNC^.
«35
pure Atlantean. as we have previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a much later date than this, but their affinities, as here shown, go far to prove the original extraction of their remote ancestors. The **mysterious" affinity between their tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India will be understood by those who have followed our out- line of continental formations and shifliugs.
(4) Stones have been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured symbols similar to those found on the shore of Lake Superior. Ber- thollet was induced by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of the early men of the Canary Islands and America.*
The Guanches of the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the Atlanteans. This fact will account for the great stature evidenced by their old skeletons, as well as by those of their European congeners, the Cro-Magnon Palaeolithic men.
(5) Any experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along the Canary Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of volcanic and rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every side by that vast waterv' space. Frequent questions of this kind led finally to the expedition of the famous Leopold von Buch, which took place in the first quarter of the present century. Some Geologists maintained that the volcanic islands had been raised right from the bottom of the ocean, the depth of which in the imme- diate vicinity of the island varies from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these groups — including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verde— the remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united Africa with America. The latter men of Science supported their hypothesis by a mass of evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient "myths." Hoary "super- stitions," such as the fairy-like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden of the Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them mythoi connected with the Peak of TeneriflFe, did not go far with sceptical Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species, showing either a previous connection between America and the re- maining groups of the islands — the hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the Old World by the waves was too absurd to stand long — found more serious consideration. But it is only quite lately, and after Donnelly's book had been published several years, that the theory has had a greater chance than ever of becoming an
* C/., Benjamin, The AUantU /stands, p. 13a.
836 THB SECRET DOCTRTNR.
accepted fact. Fossils found oa the Easlern Coast of South Amcria have now been proved to belong to the Jurassic formations, and art nearly identical with the Jurassic fossils of WesUm Europe and Norihcn Africa. The geological structure of both coasts is also almost identical; the resemblance between the smaller marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of the South American, the Western African, aad the South European coasts, is also very great. All such facts art bound to bring Naturalists to the conclusion that there has been, 10 distant pre-historic ages, a continent which extended from the coast of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands and North Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.
(6) The great resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South America, North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and admits of no explanation, unless the ocean is bridged with an Atlantis, But why, also, is there so marked a similaritr between the fauna of the (now) isolated Atlantic islands? Why did the specimens of Brazilian fauna dredged up by Sir C. W>-rillc Thompson resemble those of Western Europe? Why does a resem- blance exist between many of the West African and West Indian animal groups? Again:
When the animals and plants of the Old and New World are compared, one can- not but be struck with their identity: all, or nearly all. belong to the same geners, while many, even of the species, are common to both continenta . . . indScatiBg
that they radiated from a common centre [Atlantis].*
The horse, according to Science, originated in America. At least, a large proportion of the once "missing links*' connecting^ it with inferior forms have been exhumed from American strata. How did the horse penetrate into Europe and Asia, if no land communication bridged the oceanic interspaces? Or if it is asserted that the horse originated in the Old World, how did such forms as the hipparion, etc., get into America in the first instance on the migration hypothesis?
Again:
Bnffbn had . . . remarked the repetition of the African in the American fauna, how, for example, the llama is a juvenescent and feeble copy of the camel.
and how the puma of the New represents the lion of the Old World. t
(7) The following quotation runs with No. 2, but its significance is such and the writer cited is so authoritative, that it deserves a place to itself:
* MVfMn'luilfrA'flrfar, Jan., 187a.
t Schialdt, Doctn'm* nfDnexmt am4 DarwmiMm, p. ta^.
ENOUGH HAS NOW BEKN SAID.
With regard to the primitive doUchocepbalffi of America, I entertain a hypothesis still more Irold, namely, that ihey are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canar>- Istands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks, Coptf. which Latham comprises under the name of Eg5*ptian-Atiantid*E, We find onu' and the same form of skull in the Canarj' Islands, in front of the African coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The colour of the skin on both sides of the Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a reddish -bro wit. *
If, then, Basques and Cro-Ma^on Cave- Men are of the same race as the Canarese Guanches, it follows that the former are also allied to the aborigines of America. This is the conclusion necessitated by the independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de Quatrefages. The Atlantean affinities of these three types become patent.
(8) The sea-soundings undertaken by H.M-S. "Challenger" and the "Dolphin," have established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in length, projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the Atlantic, extends from a point near the British Islands southwards, curving round near Cape de Verde, and running in a south-easterly direction along the West African coast. This elevation averages some 9,000 feet in height, and rises above the waves at the Azores, Ascension, and other places. In the ocean depths around the neighbourhood of the former the ribs of a once massive piece of laud have been discovered. f
The inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface could never have been produced in accordance ^vith any known laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation ; but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water-level. {
It is most probable that necks of land formerly existed knitting Atlantis to South America, somewhere above the mouth of the Amazon, to Africa near Cape de Verde, while a similar point of juncture with Spain is not unlikely, as contended for by Donnelly. § Whether the latter existed or not, is of no consequence, in view of the fact that what is now N.W. Africa was — before the elevation of the Sahara and the rupture of the Gibraltar connection — an extension of Spain. Consequently no difficulty can be raised as to how the migra- tion of the European fauna, etc., took place.
Enough has now been said from the purely scientific standpoint, and it is needless, in view of the manner in which the subject has already
* Profcftsor Retzius. SmitAjom'am Repori. 1634. p. *66.
+ See the invcstig^atlons of United States »hip " Dolphin " and otben.
t ScumhfU Awiencam,}\x\y aath, 1877.
i Sec bi« chart, AUanttz, p. 46, though he deals with only a fragment of the rtal ContiBeilt.
iM THE SECRBT I>OCTRI?m.
been developed on the lines of Esoteric Knowledge, to swell the mass of testimouy further. In conclusion, the words of one of the most intuitive writers of the day may be cited as admirably illustrative of the opinions of the Occultist, who awaits in patience the dawn of the coming day :
We are but beginning to nnderstuhi the past; one hundred years ago the world knew nothing of I\>n]peii or Hcrcolanenm; nothing of the lingnal tie that binds together the Indo-Enropean nations: nothing of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow-headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvelloos civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan. Mesdco. and Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is adrsmcing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its iuscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the bnman race^ and all the great problems which nov perplex the thiuken of to-day.'
And now to conclude.
We have concerned ourself with the ancient records of the nations* with the doctrine of chronological and psychic cycles, of which these records are the tangible proof; and with many other subjects, which may, at first sight, seem out of place in this Volume. But they are necessary in truth. In dealing with the secret annals and traditions of so many nations, whose very origins have never been ascertained oa more secure grounds than inferential suppositious, in giving out the beliefs and philosophy of more than pre-historic races, it is not quite as easy to deal with the subject matter as it would be if only the philosophy and evolution of one special race, were concerned. The Secret Doctrine was the common property of the countless millions of men bom under various climates, in times with which history refuses to deal, and to which Esoteric Teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geolog)- and Anthropology. The birth and evolu- tion of the Sacred Science of the Past are lost in the very night of Time, and that even which is historic — z.^., that which is found scattered hither and thither throughout ancient classical literature — is, in almost every case, attributed by modern criticism to lack of obser\'ation in the ancient writers, or to superstition born out of the ignorance of antiquity. It is, therefore, impossible to treat this subject as one would the ordinary
HBA.R BOTH SIDES.
evolution of an art or science in some well-known historical nation. It is only by bringing before the reader an abundance of proofs all tending to show that in every age, under every condition of civilization and knowledge, the educated classes of ever>- nation made themselves the more or less faithful echoes of one identical system and its funda- mental traditions — that he can be made to see that so many streams of the same water must have had a common source from which they started. What was this source? If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fail to leave their impress behind them. It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every Religion and Philosophy, that we can, by cliecking them as we go along and com- paring them, trace out Gnally the body that produced them. There must be truth and fact in that which every people of antiquity accepted and made the foundation of its religious and its faith. Moreover, as Haliburton said: Hear one side, and you will be in the dark ; hear both sides, and all will be clear.
The public has hitherto had access to, and has heard but one side, or rather the one-sided views of two diametrically opposed classes of men, whose pHma facie propositions or respective premises differ widely, but whose final conclusions are the same — the men of Science and Theolog)'. And now our readers have an opportunity of hearing the other, and so of learning the defendants' justification and the nature of our arguments.
If the public is to be left to its old opinions — namely, on one side, that Occultism, Magic, the legends of old etc., are all the outcome of ignorance and superstition ; and on the other, that everything outside the orthodox groove is the work of the devil — what will be the result? In other words, had no theosophical and mystic literature obtained a hearing for the last few years, the present work would have had but a poor chance of impartial consideration. It would have been proclaimed — and by many will still be proclaimed— a fairy tale woven out of abstruse problems, poised in, and based on the air; built of soap- bubbles, bursting at the slightest touch of serious reflection, with no loundation to stand upon. Even the ancient "superstitious and credu- lous" classical writers have uo word of reference to it in clear and unmistakable terms, and the symbols themselves fail to yield a hint of the existence of such a system. Such would be the verdict of all. But w^hen it becomes undeniably proven that the claim of the modem
84o
THE SECRET DOCTRTNE.
Asiatic nations to a Secret Science and an Esoteric History of the world is based on fact; that though hitherto unkno^vn to the masses and a veiled mystery even to the learned — because they have never had the key to a right understanding of the abundant hints thrown out by the ancient classics — it is still no fair>' tale, bnt an actuality; then the present work will become but the pioneer of many more such books. The statement that hitherto even the keys discovered by some great scholars have proved too rusty for use, and that they are but the siknt witnesses that there do exist mysteries behind the veil which are unreachable without a new key, is borne out by too many proofs to be easily dismissed. An instance may be given as an illustration out of the history of Freemasonry.
In his Afa^onncrie OccuKe, Ragon, an illustrious and learned Belgian Mason, rightly or wrongly reproaches the English Masons with having^ materialized and dishonoured Masonr\', once based upon the Ancient Mysteries, by adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the crafl, the name of "Free Masonry" and "Free Masons." The mis- take is due, he says, to those who connect Masonry with the building of Solomon's Temple. He derides the idea, and says:
The Freuchman knew well, when he adopted the title of Freemason, that it mas
no question of building the smallest wall, but that, initiated into the Mysteries veiled under the name of Freemasonry, which could only be the continuation or the renovation of the ancient Mysteries, he was to become a "Mason" after the manner of Apollo or Amphion. And do not we know that the ancient initiated poets, when speaking of the foundation of a city, meant thereby the establishment of a doctrine? Thus Neptune, God of reasoning, and Apollo, God of hidden things, presented themselves as masons before Ivaomedon. Priam's father, to help him to ^^ build the city of Troy — that is to say, to establish the Trojan religion.* ^H
Such veiled sentences with double meaning abound in ancient ^\ classical writers. Therefore, if an attempt had been made to show that, for instance, Laomedon was the founder of a branch of Archaic Mysteries, in which the earth-bound material soul, the Fourth Prin- ciple, was personified in Menelaus' faithless wife, the fair Helen, and if Ragon had not come to corroborate what we asserted, we might have been told that no classical author speaks of it, and that Homer shows Laomedon building a ciiyy not founding an Esoteric Worship or Mys- teries. Who are those left now, save a few Initiates, who understand the language and correct meaning of such symbolical terms?
But though we have pointed to many a misconceived symbol bearing
t
***
842
THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
first of which only is the consecutive, though very fragmentary, history of the Cosmogony and the Evolution of Man on this Globe. In treat- ing of Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show that no religion, from the very earliest, has ever been based entirely on fiction, that none was the object of special revelation, and that it is dogma alone which has ever been killing primeval truth; finally, that no human-bom doctrine, no creed, how- ever sanctified by custom and antiquity, can compare in sacredness with the religion of Nature. The Key of Wisdom that unlocks the massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost sanctuaries can be found hidden in her bosom only ; and that bosom is in the countries pointed to by the great seer of the past centurj', Emanuel Swedenborg. There lies the Heart of Nature, that shrine whence issued the early races of primeval humanity, and which is the cradle of physical man.
Thus far have proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of the archaic, earliest Races, contained in their hitherto secret scrip- tural Records. But our explanations are by no means complete, nor do they pretend to give out the full text, or to have been read by the help of more than three or four keys out of the sevenfold bunch of Esoteric interpretation ; and even this has only been partially accom- plished. The work is too gigantic for any one person to undertake, far more to accomplish. Our main concern has been simply to prepare the soil. This, we trust we have done. These two Volumes only consti- tute the work of a pioneer who has forced his way into the well-nigh impenetrable jungle of the virgin forests of the Land of the Occult. A commenceuient has been made in felling and uprooting the deadly upas trees of superstition, prejudice, ancj conceited ignorance, so that these two Volumes should form for the student a fitting prelude for other works. Until the rubbish of tlie ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these pages are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely depends upon the reception with which Volumes I and II shall meet at the hands of Theosophists and Mystics, whether the last Volume will ever be published.
Satvat nAsti paro duarmah.
THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.
End op Voi.ume 11^
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CECIL H. GREEN LIBRARY
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