Are Giants A Fiction?…

Are Giants A Fiction?

Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill‐digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants,” in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier’s later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape‐theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray “a tendency to revert to the original type,” they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well‐known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were “in the earth in those days” of old, the Bible alone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.

Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who, though believing too piously in the Bible and Noah’s Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men of high stature.(633)

The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a “tall stature” to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily “Noah’s”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.

As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,(634) if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a “sarcophagus of giants” found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty‐two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus.(635) Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class all these men as either fools or liars?

Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.(636) Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work, Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.(637)

In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in the Bible and tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the “mighty ones,” the Rephaim, the spectres or the “phantoms,” the Nephilim, or the “fallen ones” (irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are “all men,” since the Bible calls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two Phantom (Astral) Races, to the “Fallen” Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the “original sin.” “Ye shall be as Gods,” says the Serpent of Genesis to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of false divinities.(638) Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of images, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.(639) It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical “Serpent,” as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological “Fall” of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to them prior to their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that “Adam knew Eve his wife.” We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead‐letter of the Hebrew Bible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.

It was only after his defection from the Neo‐Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that “serpents and giants signify demons.”(640)

We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the Bible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in Genesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah’s Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of the Shoo‐King,(641) we read:

When the Miao‐tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),(642) according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy‐Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang‐ty [a King of the Divine Dynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no more going up and down!(643)

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.

As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and Ethereal Divine Man was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man‐, or hero‐worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which has never died since that period. As the Catechism of the Inner Schools says:

The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin‐men [Kumâra](644)_ four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, __“__He is dead__”__; behold, he is alive __ and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand._(645)

It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the Linga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only after getting married and being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the “Four” is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.

We have now to examine the nature of the “Sons of the Flame” and of “Dark Wisdom,” as well as the pros and cons of the Satanic assumption.

Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls “The Curse after the Fall,”(646) are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the “Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],” and pronounced his “curse,” which “the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because his man [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,” for which Hea expresses the desire that “wisdom and knowledge hostilely may they injure him [man].”(647)

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly‐acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter of Genesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.

But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being upon and in man—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of “creation” on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.

The early Atlanto‐Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic “Fall,” which has transformed the “First‐born” of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the “Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in the Book of Enoch,(648) and in Hermes, in Purânas and Bible are taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:

Sentences such as, “In his [Satan’s] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,” etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super‐human, procreation. Henceforth, “man will beget, not create.”(649) But as, by so doing, he has to use his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.

The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.(650)

This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter of Genesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the pre‐human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—the Pre‐Adamite period. But even Genesis begins its real history (Chap. vi) by the giants of “those days” and the “sons of God” marrying and teaching their wives—the “daughters of men.”

This period is the one described in the Purânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre‐historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole personnel of the Brâhmanas and Purânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre‐human period. All these are the Seed of Humanity, so to speak. It is around these “Sons of God,” the “mind‐born” astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the “Shiva Eye” of the ancient Seers—the “Third Eye” of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground‐work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.

But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi‐divine Beings, self‐imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whom lower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of “walking in the air,” and the “greatest kindness to mortals;” but with no mind—only animal instinct.(651)

(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that “miracle of miracles,” as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro‐Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principle knew at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever‐growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the “principles” had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre‐natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred “monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.

Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by the Sovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. They commanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity in the stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to deal not with men as we are but with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character of magic and sorcery....

And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre‐historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence of facts and showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of “Notes on Aristotle’s Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,” in Mind:

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century, B.C., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to accept fables so easily.

Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those “children of Heaven and Earth,” were indeed marked with a character of sorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so‐ called “animals,” and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross‐breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the “animals,” were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute à priori denial of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new “Incarnate” bred, was called an “animal,” not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from the filling and perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,” remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross‐breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the only human family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles as speaking animals and no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is an inferior race. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded as men at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals “fair to look upon,” as a biped:

Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictly inter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearance on this Earth of the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, “appears to be a primâ facie deduction rather than an absolute law” even now. He shows that:

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare‐rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from “three distinct species of fossil‐ oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos frontosus.”(652) Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

Thus Mr. Darwin’s remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the “missing link” in our Fourth Round geological formations.

We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be the descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere‐to‐be‐found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:

Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant‐Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man’s] sires.

Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l’Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary‐Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.

(d) “Then the Third Eye acted no longer,” says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?

A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

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The Races With The “Third Eye.”

The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull’s‐eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.(653)

It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, human side of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.

But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, that it was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom‐like in their constitution, organism, and shape even, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store‐house, so to speak, of all the seeds of life for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.(654) As Ain Suph is “One, notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”(655) so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.

As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms.(656)

The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.(657)

The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the Divine Man—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of “Esoteric Studies,” the new type, at the beginning of every Round.

As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdom in esse, i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have been the new type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast‐off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant‐kingdom below.(658)

If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the “rings” spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching. Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the “Soul,” for the Zohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that “the real man is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animal Unit, from which the “cast‐off clothes” determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.(659)

Thus, he “created,” for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the Vendîdâd of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and his Ark with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in the Vishnu and other Purânas. Open the Mazdean Vendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,” an Argha or Vehicle.

Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara.(660)

Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply means Man.(661)

Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a window self‐shining within [which is the Soul].(662)

And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:

Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter’s clay.(663)

The Egyptian ram‐headed God makes man of clay on a potter’s wheel, and so in Genesis do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.

When the “Maker of the material world,” Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light “to the Vara which Yima made,” he answers that:

There are uncreated lights and created lights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].(664)

This is a clear reference to the “Land of the Gods” or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the “uncreated lights” which enlighten man within—his “principles.” Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda’s answer which is forthwith followed by the words:

Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite] two are born, a male and female.(665)

The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:

At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....

This is clear, since every “Sun” meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth’s revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?

Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah’s Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:

O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?

Ahura Mazda answered: “It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”(666)

And the note explains:

The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds.(667)

This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind‐Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed Mystery” it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:

In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (the souls and the angels have their place).(668)

Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the “Bird’s Nest” was, with both, Heaven, and is God’s Bosom, in the Zohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is called the Bird’s Nest.”(669)

“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,” and that is the Soul from which the She’kheen‐ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.(670)

The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,

—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.

It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Esoterically. And that “tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.

It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.(671) These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindû Purânas and the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super‐human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes, “three‐eyed” mortals.

It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”

In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill‐regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated ex nihilo so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.(672)

The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three‐eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.

To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic involution proceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution—that the inner senses, innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply a phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:

There were four‐armed human creatures in those early days of the male‐ females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.(673) A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.(674)... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,(675)_ soon disappeared. The double‐faced became the one‐faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the __“__Deva Eye.__”_

Unfortunately not. The “Deva Eye” exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eye is dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the “four‐armed” men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four‐armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.

Such is the mystery of the human eye that some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists. “The eyes in the human embryo grow from within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that “our” earliest vertebrate ancestor was a “transparent” creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a “transparent creature” once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes in the epidermis? If it started inside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester’s extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses “from within without,” from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eye retreated inwards when its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.

The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the “Eye of Shiva,” the Tri‐lochana, or “three‐eyed,” thus receives its justification and raison d’être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection between abnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine quâ non condition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata, reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful “inductive” action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.

All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three‐eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.

It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have a third eye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.(676) The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain’s Anatomy:

It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.

The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.

The two optic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the third ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by the posterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by the peduncles of the pineal gland....

At an early period the optic tracts may be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.

The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.(677)

The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.

It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland the Seat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man. Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that “special” locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion “by the animal spirits(678) which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”

Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of the real processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding cyclic course of this great Law, they would know instead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern “blind‐force” and “mechanical” processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled for physical use at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd “eye” is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median “eye” at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,(679) and Vox populi, vox Dei.

In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one‐eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their “coats of skin,” viz., to evolve, from within without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed(680) later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day, i.e., beneath an opaque skin.(681) Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non‐rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and still is, in man the organ of spiritual sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.

This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000 years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:

We [the Fifth Root‐Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.

Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo‐astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on its descending line. And as we are parallel to it, on the ascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.

[Transcriber’s Note: The graph shows, to the left, “Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.” To the right is “Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain‐intellectuality.” Below is “Meridian of Races.”]

We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub‐ race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of a Root‐Race. Our Race then has, as a Root‐Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub‐races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub‐races.

It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.

It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore‐part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.

It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.

This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, the Shan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255 B.C., they may be found in another work, called the Bamboo Books, and in a third, the ’Rh Ya, whose author was “initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122 B.C.” The Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295 B.C.(682) Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.

Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eye is indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.

The “Eye of Shiva” did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva‐Man of the Third Race had been made the hand‐ maidens of the newly‐awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no Fall. The sin was not in using those newly‐developed powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma(683) would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term “spiritual” instead of “physical” iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the “Master” Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.

As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.

Questions with regard to Karma and Re‐births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly‐born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma‐Nemesis, whose bond‐maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring‐in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle‐point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.

Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.

It is only the knowledge of the constant re‐births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life‐Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the “Gods” themselves—have to pass through the “Circle of Necessity,” rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terrible apparent injustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one’s ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.(684)

Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably “pious” Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that “such is the will of God.”

Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve’s words:

But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?

Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in “original sin,” in one life only on this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell‐fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian(685)—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man’s unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:

Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast involved The pride of human wisdom, to confound The daring scrutiny and prove the faith Of thy presuming creatures!

Truly a robust “faith” is required to believe that it is “presumption” to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to “perplex” him, and to test a “faith” with which that “Power,” moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.

Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and on life‐experience, in Karma‐Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not the wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the ocean’s motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow‐men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever‐ present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,(686) for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.

Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re‐birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. The inner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, the permanent Individuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the “spiritual” Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.

The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root‐Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many “Noahs.”

The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned in Genesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre‐historic “Submerged Continents.” To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.

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The Primeval Manus Of Humanity

Those who are aware that the “Great Flood,” which was connected with the sinking of an entire Continent (save only a few islands) could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago, and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya, or the Fish, Avatâra of Vishnu, may feel perplexed at the apparent discrepancy between the facts stated and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to turn to The Theosophist of July, 1883, for by studying the article therein, on “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” the whole question can be explained to him. It is in the explanation there given, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brâhmans.

For the benefit of those, however, who may not have The Theosophist of that date to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:

Who was Manu, the son of Svâyambhuva? The Secret Doctrine tells us that this Manu was no man, but the representation of the first human races, evolved with the help of the Dhyân Chohans (Devas), at the beginning of the First Round. But we are told in his Laws (i. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa, or “interval from creation to creation”—read rather interval from one minor Pralaya to another(687)—and that “in the present divine age, there have been as yet seven Manus.” Those who know that there are seven Rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now in the Fourth; and who are taught that there are seven Dawns and seven Twilights, or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on, and between, the planets [Globes] there is an “awakening to illusive life,” and an “awakening to real life”; and that, moreover, there are Root‐ Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as Seed‐Manus—the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (or the Shishtas—the surviving fittest(688); a mystery divulged only to those who have passed their third degree in Initiation)—those who have learned all this will be better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the Hindû Sacred Scriptures that, “The first Manu produced six other Manus [seven primary Manus in all], and these produced in their turn each seven other Manus”(689) (Bhrigu, i. 61‐63)—the production of the latter standing in the Occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu—the last one, the Progenitor of our Fourth‐Round Humanity—must be the seventh, since we are on our Fourth Round,(690) and there is a Root‐Manu at Globe A, and a Seed‐Manu at Globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a Root‐Manu (Dhyân Chohan) and closes with a Seed‐Manu, so a Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu appear respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human period on any particular planet [Globe].(691) It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement that a Manvantaric period (Manu‐antara) means, as the term implies, the time between the appearance of two Manus or Dhyân Chohans; and hence a Minor Manvantara is the duration of the seven Races on any particular planet [Globe], and a Major Manvantara is the period of one human Round along the Planetary Chain. Moreover, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 Root‐Races on the seven planets [Globes] during each Round, then every Root‐Race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called “Vaivasvata” and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who in India represents the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah.

But in the Esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our Fifth Race—who saved it from the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth or Atlantean—is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root or Primitive Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root‐Manu.

For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their respective order and in their relation to each Round:

1st Round, 1st (Root) Manu on Planet A—Svâyambhuva. 1st Round, 1st (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Svârochi, or Svârochisha. 2nd Round, 2nd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Auttami. 2nd Round, 2nd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Tâmasa. 3rd Round, 3rd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Raivata. 3rd Round, 3rd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Châkshusha. 4th Round, 4th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Vaivasvata (our Progenitor). 4th Round, 4th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Daksha‐sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Brahma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Dharma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Rudra‐sâvarna. 7th Round, 7th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Rauchya. 7th Round, 7th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Bhautya.

Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root‐Manu of our Fourth Human Wave (the reader must always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who are made to preside over the seven Races of this our planet [Globe]. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and ever‐recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every Root‐Race. And it is this Vaivasvata—the Hindû ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah and other names—who is the allegorical “Man” who rescued our Race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration.(692)

Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu‐antara, lit., “between two Manus”) as 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human, Man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this Earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or Sidereal Flood—a mystery—or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the Racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As these several and quite distinct events are purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Purânas in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader’s mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The “blinds” which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric Philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed, and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.

As Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake, remarked: “the first principle in Hindû religious philosophy is unity in diversity.” If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, it is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same Logos, the celestial as well as the terrestrial Messengers and Permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of activity—conscious during the period of Cosmic Evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic Rest—for the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which “sleepeth not,” nor is it ever awake, for it is Sat or “Be‐ness,” not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great Unseen Logos, who evolves all the other Logoi; the Primeval Manu who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the Manifested Logos.(693) Hence we learn in the Commentaries that while no Dhyân Chohan, not even the highest, can realize completely

The condition of the preceding Cosmic Evolution, ... the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences in all the Cosmic Evolutions throughout Eternity.

This is very plain: the first Manu is called Svâyambhuva, the “Self‐ manifested,” the Son of the Unmanifested Father. The Manus are the Creators of the Creators of our First Race—the Spirit of Mankind—which does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first “Pre‐Adamic” Men on Earth.

Manu declares himself created by Virâj,(694) or Vaishvânara, the Spirit of Humanity,(695) which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic Activity—that Logos or Universal Monad (collective Elohim) which radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity—Progenitors of the numberless Solar Systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated human Monads of Planetary Chains as well as of every being thereon. Svâyambhuva, or Self‐born, is the name of every Cosmic Monad which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a Planetary Chain (of which Chains there are seven in our System). And the radiations of this Centre become again so many Manus Svâyambhuva (a mysterious generic name, meaning far more than appears), each of them becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity.

As to the question of the four distinct Races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in the subject, except the ethereal bodies of the first Races; and this is a matter of legendary, nevertheless very correct, history. The legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindûs have, to this day.

Trying to account for the community of legends held by Chinese, Chaldæans, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, in remote antiquity, and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of Mythical Monsters remarks that:

We must ... not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture ... [as in China], the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay, and how much more ... if ... minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, ... the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes.(696)

How many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from the following Stanza of Commentary Twenty‐two:

During the first seven crores [70,000,000 years] of the Kalpa the Earth and its two Kingdoms [mineral and vegetable], one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi‐ ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore(697) the Mother [Earth] grows opaque, and in the fourteenth(698) the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of Nature [geological changes] last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals.

The last change took place nearly twelve crores [120,000,000] of years ago. But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier.

Thus, if we are to believe Esoteric Teaching, universal geological disturbances and changes have not occurred for the last 120 million years, but the Earth, even before that time, was ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about 18,000,000 years ago, after the first great failure of Nature to create beings alone—i.e., without the help of the divine “Fashioners”—had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three Races.(699) The actual duration of the first two and a half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The history of the Races begins at the separation of the sexes, when the preceding egg‐bearing androgynous Race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this “Destruction” which is allegorically called the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu, or Humanity, remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain.

In the symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for chaotic unsettled Matter—Chaos itself; and Water for the Feminine Principle—the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it:

Ἀρχὴ answers to the Hebrew rasit, or Wisdom ... and [at the same time] to the emblem of the female generative power, the arg or arca, in which the germ of nature [and of mankind] floats or broods on the great abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane [or racial] cycle.

Archê (Ἀρχὴ) or Ark is also the mystic name of the Divine Spirit of Life which broods over Chaos. Now Vishnu is the Divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of Life—the third Person of the Trimûrti—composed of Brahmâ, the Creator, Shiva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu is shown, in the allegory, under the form of a Fish, guiding the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu across the Waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word Fish (as Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, and others have done). Its theological meaning is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus was called the Fish, as were Vishnu and Bacchus; ΙΗΣ, the “Saviour” of Mankind, being but the monogram of the God Bacchus, who was also called ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Fish.(700) Moreover, the Seven Rishis in the Ark symbolized the seven “principles,” which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and thus ceased to be a divine creature.

But to return to the Races; details as to the submersion of the Continent inhabited by the Second Root‐Race are not numerous. The history of the Third, or Lemuria, is given, as is also that of Atlantis, but the others are only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary Age (the Eocene).(701) During this Deluge—an actual geological deluge this time—Vaivasvata Manu is also shown saving mankind, allegorically—in reality, a portion of it, the Fourth Race—just as he saved the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,(702) after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, which was known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.

It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. This is the Cataclysm of which the old records, as in the Book of Enoch, say, “the ends of the Earth got loose”; and upon which have been built the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deucalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect Saved. Tradition, not taking into account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both “Deluges” indifferently. Yet there is a great difference. The Cataclysm which destroyed the huge Continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor—the Fourth Continent—was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest Tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, have remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred Records of the East.

Hence, Modern Science denies the existence of Atlantis. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the change of climate to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are others, such as Sir Henry James and Sir John Lubbock,(703) who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the Astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced—only to accept it later on, whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact?

How far our figures agree, or rather disagree, with Modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Volume, where the Geology and Anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the teachings of Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned by the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which, however, calls Atlantis “Lemuria” whenever it accepts such a submerged Continent. With regard to the pre‐human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even prior to the appearance of the “mindless” First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. We might, however, add that what Science, which recognizes physical man only, has a right to regard as the pre‐human period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean Race, since it is only then that man became the “complete organic being he is now.” And this would make Adamic Man no older than a few millions of years.(704)

The author of the Qabbalah truly remarks that: “Man to‐day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being‐hood of precedent human life,” or lives, rather.

According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam, went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge’boor‐ah, Qai‐yin and Ra’h‐min Seth. These three were divided into ... 70 species, called; the principal roots of the human race.(705)

Said Rabbi Yehudah: “How many garments [of the incorporeal man] are these which are crowned (from the day man was created)?” Said R. El’azar: “The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua’h spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings ...: and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world.”(706)

This relates to the Races, their “garments,” or degree of materiality, and to the three “principles” of man in their three vehicles.

Stanza XI. The Civilization And Destruction Of The Fourth And Fifth Races.

43. The Lemuro‐Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization. The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. 44. Statues, witnesses to the size of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans. 45. Lemuria destroyed by fire, Atlantis by water. The Flood. 46. The destruction of the Fourth Race and of the last antediluvian monster‐animals.

43. THEY(707) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT OF THE FIRES(708) VOMITED, OUT OF THE WHITE STONE(709) OF THE MOUNTAINS AND OF THE BLACK STONE,(710) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM.

At this point, as the history of the first two human races—the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans—proceeds, we have to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively.

Here reference is also made to the divine Dynasties, which were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldæans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their human Kings. These are still believed in by the modern Hindûs, and are enumerated in their sacred books. Of these, however, we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern Geologists are now being driven into admitting the demonstrable existence of submerged continents. But to confess the existence of the continents is quite a different thing from admitting that there were men on them during the early geological periods(711)—ay, men and civilized nations, not Palæolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated Arts and Sciences, and knew Astronomy, Architecture and Mathematics to perfection. The primeval civilization of the Lemurians did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final physiological evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Nevertheless, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub‐race building their first rock‐cities out of stone and lava.(712) One of these great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow strip of sterile ground, and was totally destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the last sub‐races of the Lemurians; and an Occultist, therefore, shows no surprise on learning that the stone relics which were found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are

Very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru,(713)

and also that they are in the Cyclopean style. The first large cities, however, were built in that region of the Continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection on the former, and Karma—its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the Spark projected into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long generations of bestiality.(714) Whereas the Âryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated.(715)

It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements—his brothers, more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them, built cities, and cultivated Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, notwithstanding civilization, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, the “builders” could now obtain their powers only gradually; even those they did obtain being generally used for conquest over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one’s own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking.

“There is no such thing as magic” philosophizes “She”—the author forgetting that “magic” in early days still meant the great Science of Wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought—“though,” she adds, “there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.”(716) But they have become “Secrets” only in our Race, and were public property with the Third.

Gradually, mankind decreased in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save only the Hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—called later the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist.”

Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub‐race. But, as said in the Commentary:

_The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island [the primitive Shveta‐dvîpa] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria’s] Elect, had taken shelter on the Sacred Island [now the __“__fabled__”__ Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert], while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground [__“__cave‐men__”__], when the golden yellow Race [the Fourth] became in its turn __“__black with sin.__”__ From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Shveta‐dvîpa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya [?], east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted.... The Demi‐Gods of the Third had made room for the Semi‐Demons of the Fourth Race. Shveta‐dvîpa,_(717) the White Island, had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dvîpa (Pushkara) and Râkshasas from the seventh climate replaced the Sâdhus and the Ascetics of the Third Age, who had descended to them from other and higher regions....

In their dead letter, the Purânas, in general, read like an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. And if one were to read the first three chapters of Book II of Vishnu Purâna and accept verbatim the geography, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata’s seven sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvîpas (Islands or Continents); and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnîdhra, the King of Jambu‐dvîpa, apportioned Jambu‐dvîpa among his nine sons; and then how Nâbhi, his son, had a hundred sons and apportioned lands to all these in his turn—he would most likely throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the student of Esotericism will understand that, when the Purânas were written, their true meaning was intended to be clear only to the Initiated Brâhmans, and so the compilers wrote these works allegorically and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will, further, explain to the Orientalists—who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, have made and still are making such a mess of it—that the first three chapters purposely confuse the following subjects and events:

I. The series of Kalpas, or Ages, and also of Races, are never taken into account; and events which have happened in one are allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying:

Whenever any contradictions in different Purânas are observed, they are ascribed ... to differences of Kalpas and the like.

II. The several meanings of the words “Manvantara” and “Kalpa” or Age, are withheld, the general signification only being given.

III. In the genealogy of the Kings and the geography of their dominions, the Varshas (countries) and Dvîpas are all regarded as terrestrial regions.

Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is permissible and easy to show that:

(a) The Seven Dvîpas apportioned to Priyavrata’s septenary progeny refer to several localities—first of all to our Planetary Chain. In this Jambu‐ dvîpa alone represents our Globe, while the six others are the (to us) invisible companion Globes of the Chain. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu‐dvîpa “is in the centre of all these”—the so‐called “Insular Continents”—and is surrounded by a sea of salt water (Lavana), whereas Plaksha, Shâlmalia, Kusha, Krauncha, Shâka, and Pushkara, are surrounded severally “by great seas ... of sugar‐cane juice, of wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk,” etc., and such like metaphorical names.(718)

(b) Bhâskara Âchârya, who uses expressions from the books of the Secret Doctrine, in his description of the sidereal position of all these Dvîpas, speaks of: “the sea of milk and the sea of curds,” etc., as meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of Nebulæ; the more so, since he calls “the country to the south of the equator” Bhûr Loka, that to the north Bhuva, Svar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya Lokas; and adds: “These lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits,” i.e., they are various “Paradises.”(719)

(c) That this geographical distribution of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to our Round, or even to our Races—the name of Bhârata‐varsha (India) notwithstanding—is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of Vishnu Purâna, who tells us that:

Bharata [the son of Nâbhi, who gave his name to Bhârata‐varsha or India] ... consigned the kingdom to his son Sumati ... and abandoned his life at ... Shâlagrâma. He was afterwards born again, as a Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics.... Under these princes [Bharata’s descendants] Bhârata‐varsha was divided into nine portions; and their descendants successively held possession of the country for seventy‐one periods of the aggregate of the four ages (or for the reign of a Manu) [representing a Mahâyuga of 4,320,000 years].(720)

But having said so much, Parâshara suddenly explains that:

This was the creation of Svâyambhuva (Manu), by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varâha [i.e., the Boar incarnation, or Avatâra].

Now every Brâhman knows that our Humanity began on this Earth (or Round) only with Vaivasvata Manu. And if the Western reader turns to the sub‐ section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,”(721) he will see that Vaivasvata is the seventh of the fourteen Manus who preside over our Planetary Chain during its Life Cycle; but as every Round has two Manus (a Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu), he is the Root‐Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only incongruity, and speculates that:

The patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas, and [thus] have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods.

It is nothing of the kind; but as Orientalists know nothing of the Secret Teaching, they persist in taking everything literally, and then turn round and abuse the writers for that which they do not comprehend!

These Genealogies embrace a period of three and a half Rounds; they speak of pre‐human periods, and explain the descent into generation of every Manu—the first manifested sparks of the One Unity—and, furthermore, show each of these human Sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first, the Pitaras, the human Ancestors, then by the human Races. No Being can become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human Cycles. Therefore the Shloka says:

Happy are those who are born, even from the [latent] condition of gods, as men, in Bhârata‐varsha; as that is the way to ... final liberation.(722)

In Jambu‐dvîpa Bhârata is considered the best of its divisions, because it is the land of works. In it alone it is that:

The succession of four Yugas, or ages, the Krita, the Tretâ, the Dvâpara, and Kali take place.

When, therefore, Parâshara, on being asked by Maitreya “to give him the descriptions of the Earth,” returns again to the enumeration of the same Dvîpas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Svâyambhuva Manvantara—it is simply a “blind”; yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub‐divisions, islands and continents, some of which were called by the names of celestial Lokas, and by those of other Globes. Hence the confusion.

All these islands and lands are called by the Orientalists “mythical” and “fabulous.”(723) Very true, some are not of this Earth, but they still exist. The White Island and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since Atala was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the Fifth Race to the Land of Sin—Atlantis, in general, not to Plato’s island alone; and since the White Island was (a) the Shveta‐dvîpa of Theogony, and (b) Shâka‐dvîpa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions rather) in its beginnings. This was when it yet had its “seven holy rivers that washed away all sin,” and its “seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue,” as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas—that caste which even the Brâhmans acknowledged as not inferior to their own, and which was the nursery of the first Zarathushtra. The Brâhmans are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on Nârada’s advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun to the temple built by Sâmba the reputed son of Krishna, for in reality the latter had none. In this the Purânas are historical, allegory notwithstanding, and Occultism is stating facts.

The whole story is told in Bhavishya Purâna. It is stated that Sâmba having been cured of leprosy by Sûrya (the Sun), built a temple and dedicated it to the Deity. But when he was looking for pious Brâhmans to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God, Nârada—the virgin Ascetic who is found in every age in the Purânas—advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brâhmans to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Sâmba to Gauramukha (White‐face), the Purohita, or family priest, of Ugrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed Sâmba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Sûrya, to discharge the duty. But as he was ignorant of the place where they lived, Sûrya, the Sun himself, directs Sâmba to Shâka‐dvîpa beyond the salt water. Then Sâmba performs the journey, using Garuda, the Great Bird, the vehicle of Vishnu and Krishna, who transports him to the Magas, etc.(724)

Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Nârada, who is found reborn in every Cycle (or Race), in addition to Garuda—the symbol Esoterically of the Great Cycle—give the key to the allegory; nevertheless the Magas are the Magi of Chaldæa, and their caste and worship were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Shâka‐dvîpa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Shâka‐dvîpa are the forefathers of the fire‐worshipping Parsîs. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing periods of hundreds of thousands of years this time into only a few centuries; in spite of Nârada and Sâmba, they carry the event only to the days of the flight of the Parsîs to Gujerat. This is simply absurd, as this took place only in the eighth century of our era. True, the Magas are credited in the Bhavishya Purâna with still living in Shâka‐dvîpa in the day of Krishna’s “son,” nevertheless the last portion of that Continent—Plato’s “Atlantis”—had perished 6,000 years before. They were Magas “late of” Shâkadvîpa, and in those days lived in Chaldæa. This, again, is an intentional confusion.

The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet were they the human Asuras and the Râkshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the future Continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the ocean floors. Lemuria, as we have called the Continent of the Third Race, was then a gigantic land.(725) It covered the whole area from the foot of the Himâlayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the Great Desert of Shamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam [? Annam]. From thence, it stretched south across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go south, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; and from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean, beyond Rapa‐nui (Teapy, or Easter Island) which now lies in latitude 26°S., and longitude 110°W.(726) This statement seems to be corroborated by Science—even if only partially. When discussing continental trends, and showing the infra‐Arctic masses trending generally with the meridian, several ancient continents are mentioned, though inferentially. Among such are mentioned the “Mascarene continent,” which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, and another ancient continent which “stretched from Spitzbergen to the Straits of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom.”(727) This corroborates the Occult teaching which says that what are now the polar regions were formerly the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity, and the tomb of the bulk of the Mankind of that region during the Third Race, when the gigantic Continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the Commentary, to a decrease of velocity in the Earth’s rotation:

When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities [the poles] agree with its middle Circle [the equator], when it runs slower and tilts in every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth. The waters flow toward the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle Belt [equatorial lands], while those at the ends are subject to Pralayas by submersion.

And again:

Thus the Wheel [the Earth] is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon, for the breath of its waters [tides]. Toward the close of the age [Kalpa] of a great [Root‐] Race, the Regents of the Moon [the Fathers, or Pitris] begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the Wheel about its Belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the extremities [poles], new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in.

We have only to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very clearly. Scientists—modern Specialists—have ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planet, and have noted the shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically.(728) Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward to the periods of the Earth’s first incrustation.(729) Therefore it seems easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statement. We propose to treat of this at greater length in the Addenda.

Some Theosophists who have understood from a few words in Esoteric Buddhism that “old continents” which have been submerged will reäppear, have asked the question: “What will Atlantis be like when raised?” Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were identically the same lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would, indeed, be barren for ages. But because the Atlantic sea‐bottom is covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming—a new “cretaceous formation” of strata, in fact—that is no reason why, when the time for a new Continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion and upraising of the sea‐bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the surface. The Racial Cataclysms are not a Noah’s Deluge of forty days—a kind of Bombay monsoon.

That the periodical sinking and reäppearance of the mighty Continents, now called Atlantis and Lemuria by modern writers, is no fiction, will be demonstrated in the Section in which all the evidence has been collated together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dvîpas) are mentioned in the Sûrya Siddhânta, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean Astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out to be “reïncarnated” in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these “Sacred Islands” Atlantean—as is done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindû Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Svâyambhuva Manu, to his seven sons—was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these Islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose Continent had been submerged in its turn. When first mentioned by Parâshara in the Vishnu Purâna, the seven refer to an Esoteric Doctrine which is explained further on. In this connection, of all the seven Islands, Jambu‐dvîpa (our Globe) is the only one that is terrestrial. In the Purânas every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that Primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region, which, when the magnolia blossomed where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a Continent. Science speaks of an “ancient continent” which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse‐shoe‐like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring’s Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi‐circle. This Continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains reäppeared again on the face of the oceans. Therefore, though it can be said, without departing from truth, that Atlantis is included in the seven great Insular Continents since the Fourth Race Atlanteans came into possession of some of the Lemurian relics, and settling on the islands, included them among their lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the Cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on this remnant of Lemuria, but only to perish thereon, when it was destroyed in one day by volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain Geographers and Geologists; to the Occultists, however, it is history. What does Science know to the contrary?

Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India.... Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre‐historic ages ... was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the “Brâhmans of Upper India,” stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Shamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America.(730)

This was written from the words of a Master—a rather doubtful authority for the Materialists and Sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather, Ernst Hæckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost verbatim:

It would seem that the region on the earth’s surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the closely related catarrhine apes [!!] took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished], or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean which, lying to the South of the Asia of to‐day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to Upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa.(731)

In the epoch of which we are treating, the Continent of Lemuria had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. Nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe, existed in those days; all of them slumbering as yet on the ocean‐floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the Cis‐Himâlayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond them stretched the “lotus leaves” of Shveta‐dvîpa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Island, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilization of the Third Race. It was a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the ocean‐floor, which raised this small relic of the Archaic Ages—after it had been submerged with the rest—untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of north polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race.

In this we are again corroborated to a degree by Materialistic Science. Hæckel, when speaking of Blumenbach’s brown or Malay race, and the Australians and Papuans, remarks:

There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island‐world, that seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent.(732)

It certainly was “a gigantic and continuous continent,” for, during the Third Race, it stretched east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie. The present Australia was but a portion of it, and in addition to this there are a few surviving islands strewn hither and thither on the face of the Pacific, and a large strip of California, which belonged to it. Funnily enough, Hæckel, in his fantastic Pedigree of Man, considers:

The Australians of to‐day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged [?!], of that second branch of the primitive human race ... that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man’s infancy, and seems to have been the parent of all the other straight‐haired races of men.... The one, woolly‐ haired, migrated in part westwards [i.e., to Africa and eastwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no existence as yet].... The other, straight‐haired, was evolved farther to the North, in Asia, and ... peopled Australia.(733)

As writes a Master:

Behold the relics of that once great nation [Lemuria of the Third Race] in some of the flat‐headed aborigines of your Australia.(734)

But they belong to the last remnants of the seventh sub‐race of the Third. Professor Hæckel must also have dreamt a dream and seen for once a true vision!

It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the ancestors of those, whom we term the most ancient peoples of the world—now called respectively the Âryan Hindûs, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phœnicians on the other. These were governed by the Divine Dynasties, i.e., Kings and Rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from Spheres higher and more celestial than our own Sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is, of course, useless to attempt to force the existence of such Beings on sceptics. Their greatest pride consists in proving their patronymic denomination as Catarrhinides—a fact which they try to demonstrate on the alleged authority of the Coccyx appended to their Os Sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if it were only long enough, they would wag with joy and for ever, in honour of its eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their Ape‐ancestors as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets Theosophists and students of the Occult Sciences right on this point.

If we regard the second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Hæckel’s surmise that “the evolution of the primitive men took place ...in either Southern Asia or ... Lemuria”—Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of the question—is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, just as the evolution of the First Race, from the bodies of the Pitris, took place on seven distinctly separated regions, at the Arctic Pole of the (then) only Earth—so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur. It began in those northern regions, which have just been described as including Behring’s Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi‐tropical even in the Arctic regions and excellently adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The Commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when:

_The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over __ the heads of that portion of the Sweat‐born; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish remained as half‐grown babes_(735) in size and intellect. This was the third Pralaya of the Races.(736)

This means again, that our Globe is subject to seven periodical and entire changes which go pari passu with the Races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial Pralayas, occasioned by the change in the inclination of the Earth’s axis. It is a Law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as Science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic Law. In Occultism this Inexorable Law is referred to as the “Great Adjuster.” Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and also the changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes. In fact, it does not seem at all sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared to deny the axial phenomena altogether, rather than admit the intelligent hand of the Karmic Law which alone can reasonably explain these sudden changes and their accompanying results. It has tried to account for them by various and more or less fantastic speculations; one of which, as de Boucheporn imagined, would be the sudden collision of our Earth with a Comet, thus causing all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding to our Esoteric explanation, since Fohat is as good as any Comet, and, in addition, has universal Intelligence to guide him.

Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu’s Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four such axial disturbances. The old Continents—save the first—were sucked in by the oceans, other lands appeared, and huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the “survival of the fittest” nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones—the failures—were disposed of by being swept off the Earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.

The sub‐races are also subject to the same cleansing process, and the side‐branchlets or family‐races as well. Let any one, well acquainted with astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight and shadows of the Past. Let him observe and take notes of what he knows of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles—especially with the Sidereal Year, which is equal to 25,868 of our solar years.(737) Then, if the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, he will find how the weal and woe of nations are intimately connected with the beginning and close of this Sidereal Cycle. True, the non‐occultist has the disadvantage that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing, through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he may find consolation in the knowledge of, or—if he so prefers—speculation about, the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of—some 16,000 years hence. Our meaning is very clear. Every Sidereal Year the tropics recede from the pole four degrees in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator turns through the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every Astronomer knows, at present the tropic is only twenty‐three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the equator. Hence it has still two and a half degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal Year. This gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years.

After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) as Commentary Thirty‐three tells us:

Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and pigmies [the dwarfed races of the Poles].... Many acquired divine, nay more—unlawful knowledge, and followed willingly the Left Path.

Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods it took to accomplish this fourth destruction who can tell! But we are told that:

44. THEY(738) BUILT GREAT IMAGES NINE YATIS HIGH,(739) THE SIZE OF THEIR BODIES (a). INNER FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS.(740) WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH(741) (b).

(a) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged continent, as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages, are all between twenty and thirty feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all twenty‐seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders.(742) The writer is well aware that the modern Archæologists have decided that “these statues are not very old,” as declared by one of the high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of those arbitrary decisions of Modern Science which does not carry much weight.

We are told that after the destruction of Lemuria by subterranean fires men went on steadily decreasing in stature—a process already commenced after their physical Fall—and that finally, some millions of years later, they decreased to between six and seven feet, and are now, as in the older Asiatic races, dwindling down to nearer five than six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family, such as the Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders, are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo‐Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub‐races, the others to the very latest and most transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow.

(b) How could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindûs is denied by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Âryan Hindûs knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled‐for slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear evidence of facts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs(743) preserve irrefutable proofs of records embracing more than three‐and‐a‐half Sidereal Years—or about 87,000 years—the Hindû calculations cover nearly thirty‐three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad:

These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the [last local] Flood [in Asia], or Age of Horror.

And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Âryan historical memory—the Flood which submerged the last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The Floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.

The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic Continent already described. As a Master says:

Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them ... there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?(744)

Not identically the same Continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root‐ Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse‐shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh‐water deposit called the Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river—is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary age. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary‐ age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent—thus corroborating the whole “horse‐shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south‐easterly line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d’Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse‐shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.(745)

The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root‐Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the shifting and re‐shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth‐Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third‐Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid‐Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest Occult authority, that:

Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America.(746)

The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Âryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “myriads of centuries”;(747) and the latter points to the fact that:

Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.(748)

To this Professor R. Owen adds that:

Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes.

And Winchell states that:

At the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books.

This is quite natural if we are to believe the statement of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years which have elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, notwithstanding its tremendous antiquity. The complete records of the growth, development, social and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the Secret Annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the Seven Sciences; and these Sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the Secret Records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints:

1. The Realistic Plane of Thought.

2. The Idealistic.

3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.

The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely mythical element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For it is symbolical, the archaic mode of thought; emblematical, a later though very ancient mode of thought; parabolical or allegorical; hieroglyphical; or again logogrammical, the most difficult method of all; every letter, as in the Chinese language, representing a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the Vedas, the Book of the Dead, or, to a certain degree, in the Bible, is composed of such logograms. No one not initiated into the mystery of the Occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great may be his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say—i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of solar myth and sexual worship—how is it to be expected that the profane scholar should penetrate into the arcana behind the veil? One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead‐letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word‐symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern Mythologists.

Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah, etc.,—all the head‐figures of the World‐Deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological—all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such Deluges are based on events that took place in Nature, and stand as historical records, therefore—whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical—of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.

To speak of a race nine “yatis,” or twenty‐seven feet, high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than, let us say, the story of “Jack the Giant‐Killer,” is a somewhat unusual proceeding. Where are your proofs?—the writer will be asked. In history and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Dânavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Râkshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldæa, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim.(749) Moses speaks of Og, a king whose “bedstead” was nine cubits long (15ft. 4in.) and four wide,(750) and Goliath was “six cubits and a span in height” (or 10ft. 7in.). The only difference found between “revealed scripture” and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., is this: While the Pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that Geology and Archæology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants has to be given up.

Of yet standing witnesses to the submerged Continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archæology claims several such on this Earth, though beyond wondering “what these may be”—it has never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Not to speak of the Easter Island statues already mentioned, to what epoch belong the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian? Archæology, as usual, assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity, and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science.

Teapi, Rapa‐nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the South American coast.... In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four ... and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their activity remains.(751)

But who made the great stone images(752) which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? “No one knows,” says a reviewer.

It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants [a handful of Polynesian savages] arrived.... Their workmanship is of a high order, ... and it is believed that the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America.... Even at the date of Cook’s visit, some of the statues, measuring twenty‐seven feet in height and eight across the shoulders, were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen broad ... all built of hewn stone in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, or the ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru.(753)

“There is no reason to believe that any of the statues have been built up, bit by bit, by scaffolding erected around them,” adds the reviewer very suggestively—without explaining how they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. Two of the best of these colossal images are now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like a man asleep. Their types, though all are long‐headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths, and chins differ greatly in form; their head‐dress, moreover—a kind of flat cap with a piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head—shows that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked, Who made them?—but it is not Archæology nor yet Geology that is likely to answer, even though the latter recognizes in the island a portion of a submerged continent.

But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world?—for Bartholdi’s “Statue of Liberty,” now at New York, is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from Shoo‐King), the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had “troubled the earth”; the Jesuits are right, and the Archæologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins which are discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. “Masses of enormous human bones” were found “in America, near Munte [?]” a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters.(754)

Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal‐warriors of Nadir Shah? Bamian is a small, miserable, half‐ruined town in Central Asia, half‐way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Koh‐i‐baba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian, or Hindu‐Kush, Chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis‐Khan in the thirteenth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their Vihâras. Such Vihâras are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock‐cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. In front of some of these caves five enormous statues—of what is regarded as Buddha—have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, for the famous Chinese traveller Hiouen Thsang speaks of having seen them, when he visited Bamian in the seventh century.

The contention that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 mètres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose legs the largest vessels of those days passed with ease, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second largest statue, which is also cut out in the rock like the first, is only 120 feet or fifteen feet taller than the said “Liberty.”(755) The third statue is only 60 feet high, the two others still smaller, the last being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present Race. The first and largest of the colossi represents a man draped in a kind of “toga”; M. de Nadeylac thinks that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, are undeniable indications that Buddha was meant to be represented. But they really prove nothing. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samâdhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to Esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. As a Shloka says:

The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance.

Gautama Buddha was an Âryan Hindû, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort their ears artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottoes of the Miao‐tse into Vihâras and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore, Hiouen Thsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that “the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue” in his day “dazzled one’s eyes,” but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, which is cut out of the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. In such case, it may be asked, Whom does it represent?

Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust. Three of them standing in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathâgata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments—which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting—are all due to the piety of the monk‐ ascetics, as also are some other minor figures and rock‐cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who, after the submersion of their Continent, sought refuge in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Thus, the five statues are an imperishable record of the Esoteric Teaching as to the gradual evolution of the Races.

The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second—120 feet high—represents the Sweat‐born; and the third—measuring 60 feet—immortalizes the Race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical Race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the statues found on Easter Isle. These were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter.

These are, then, the “Giants” of antiquity, the ante‐ and post‐diluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million years ago rather than between three and four thousand only. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as “grasshoppers” in comparison with the Jews, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years.

In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear in mind the wise words of Montaigne. Saith the great French Philosopher:

It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or truth: which is an ordinarie fault in those who perswade themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort....

But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage to have the bounds and limits of God’s will, and the power of our common mother Nature tied to his sleeve, and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie....

If we term those things monsters or miracles to which our reason cannot attain, how many such doe daily present themselves unto our sight? Let us consider through what cloudes, and how blinde‐folde, we are led to the knowledge of most things that passe our hands; verily we shall finde it is rather custome than science that receiveth the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things, were they newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them as much or more unlikely and incredible than any other.(756)

A fair‐minded scholar, before denying the possibility of our history and records, should search modern history, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is to be found scattered about and buried, even in the British Museum alone. The reader is asked to throw one more glance at the subject‐matter treated of in the Section which follows.

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Cyclopean Ruins And Colossal Stones As Witnesses To Giants

De Mirville, in his enormous works, “Mémoires Adressées aux Académies,” carrying out the task of proving the reality of the Devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of “historical evidence” that, in the days of “miracle,” both pagan and biblical, stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sang. That finally, the “Christ‐stone,” or Christ‐rock, “the spiritual Rock” that followed Israel,(757) “became a Jupiter‐lapis,” swallowed by his father Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.”(758) We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of biblical metaphors simply for the sake of proving the “Satanism” of idols, though a good deal might be said(759) on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence to hand, to show that: (a) had there been no giants to move such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany), or other such Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as Magic, there could never have been so many witnesses to “oracular” and “speaking” stones.

In the Achaica we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid “for worshipping stones.” But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of thinking.”(760) Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same thing—a crime with which Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans, as they do—one may be allowed to believe in what so many great Philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniuses.

The reader is referred to the Académie des Inscriptions, if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of magic and psychic powers. In a poem on “Stones” attributed to Orpheus, these stones are divided into Ophites and Sideritês, the “Serpent‐stone” and “Star‐stone.”

The Ophitês is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has the gift of speech; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound similar to the cry of a child. It is by means of this stone that Helenus foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland.(761)

Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these “bétyles,” call them “animated stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius especially never parted with his Ophitês, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from it, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling.(762) Arnobius, a holy man, who “from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church,” as Christians tell their readers, confesses he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it a question, “which it answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice.” Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan Ophitês, we ask?

The famous stone at Westminster was called liafail, “the speaking stone,” and raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry, in his Monuments Celtiques, says he saw it when it still bore the inscription:(763)

Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem.

Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heræscus, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.”(764)

De Mirville—who seeks to justify the Bible—enquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior‐ gaur or the “dance of giants” (from côr, “dance,” whence chorea, and gaur, “giant”)? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop St. Gildas. But the authors of such works as Voyage dans le Comté de Cornouailles, sur les Traces des Géants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,(765) Carnac, and West Hoadley, give far fuller and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions—true forests of rocks—immense monoliths are found, “some weighing over 500,000 kilograms.” These “hanging stones” of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, or giants. Who then, if not giants, could ever raise such masses—especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley—range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, and though set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, would nevertheless resist the efforts of twenty men should they attempt to displace them.

Now if we say that most of these stones are relics of the last Atlanteans, we shall be answered that all the Geologists claim them to be of a natural origin; that, a rock when “weathering”—i.e., losing flake after flake of its substance under the influence of the weather—assumes this form; that, the “tors” in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this cause. And thus since all Scientists consider the “rocking stones to be of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in layers”—our statement will be justly denied, especially as “we see this process of rock‐modification in progress around us to‐day.” Let us then examine the case.

First read what Geology has to say, and you will then learn that often these gigantic masses are entire strangers in the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those countries and which are only to be found far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke, in speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have been brought over “from immense distances and with prodigious efforts.”(766) Charton speaks of a specimen of such rock from Ireland, which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English Geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin “perhaps even African.”(767)

This is a strange coincidence, for Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular stones to a Sorcerer who brought them from Africa. De Mirville sees in this Sorcerer “an accursed Hamite.”(768) We see in him a dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands—a giant in any and every case.(769) Says Cambry, naively:

Men have nothing to do with it ... for never could human power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has accomplished it all [!!] and Science will demonstrate it some day [!!].(770)

Nevertheless, it was human, though gigantic power, which accomplished it, and no more “Nature” alone than God or Devil.

“Science,” having undertaken to demonstrate that even the Mind and Spirit of man are simply the production of “blind forces,” is quite capable of accepting the task, and it may be that she will come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that Nature alone has marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland!

It is true that Cambry recanted later on, when saying:

I believed for a long time in Nature, but I recant, ... for chance is unable to create such marvellous combinations, ... and those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau.

Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author, when speaking of the moving rocks, or “rocking stones” situated on the slope of Golcar (the “Enchanter”) says:

The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to Gods.(771)

In Stonehenge, by Flinders Petrie, it is said that:

Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or “sarsen” stone, locally called “grey wethers.” But some of the stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably the North of Ireland.

To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in 1850 in the Revue Archéologique, are worthy of being quoted:

Every stone is a block whose weight would try the most powerful machines. There are, in a word, scattered throughout the globe, masses, before which the word materials seems to remain inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded, and that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the things themselves. Besides which, these immense rocking stones, called sometimes routers, placed upright on one of their sides as on a point, their equipoise being so perfect that the slightest touch is sufficient to set them in motion ... betray a most positive knowledge of statics. Reciprocal counter‐motion, surfaces, plane, convex and concave, in turn ... all this allies them to Cyclopean monuments, of which it can be said with good reason, repeating De la Vega, that “the demons seem to have worked on them more than men.”(772)

For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, with masses weighing millions of pounds, can be the work of Palæolithic savages, of cave‐men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is not our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place, notwithstanding every effort to keep it elsewhere. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II, a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far larger one and had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytaneum, “whence it ran away several times, and so they were forced to weight it with lead.”(773) Here we have immense stones stated by all antiquity to be “living, moving, speaking, and self‐ perambulating.” They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they were called routers, from the word to “rout,” or “put to flight”; and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones, and sometimes called “mad stones.”(774)

The rocking stone is accepted by Science. But why did it rock? One must be blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and that they were called for this very reason the “stones of truth.”(775)

This is history, the past of prehistoric times warranting the same in later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the Moon and the Serpent, were the more ancient “rocks of destiny” of older nations; and their motion, or rocking, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this ancient reading. Vormius and Olaus Magnus show that it was according to the orders of the oracle, whose voice spoke through “these immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of [ancient] giants,” that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. Says Pliny:

In India and Persia it is she (the Persian Otizoë) whom the Magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns;(776)

and he further describes a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that “a single finger can move it, while the weight of the whole body makes it resist.”(777) Why then should not the rocking stones of Ireland, or those of Brimham, in Yorkshire, have served for the same mode of divination or oracular communications? The hugest of them are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller, such as Brimham Rocks, with revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more ancient lithoi. Had not the Bishops of the Middle Ages destroyed all the plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know more of these.(778) As it is, we know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and magic. É. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in the Antiquités de France (vol. ix), an article showing the Chatampéramba (the “Field of Death,” or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical in situation with the old tombs at Carnac; that is to say, “a prominence and a central tomb.” Bones are found in the tombs, and Mr. Halliwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives calling the tombs the “dwellings of the Râkshasas” or giants. Several stone circles, “considered the work of the Panch Pândava (five Pândus), as all such monuments are in India, where they are to be found in such great numbers,” when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, “were found to contain human bones of a very large size.”(779)

Again, De Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to “great natural geological commotions” (Charton), and “the work of Nature” (Cambry), is now exploded, his remarks are very just:

We advise Science to reflect .... and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends; for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking masses will oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to realize once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity.(780)

This is just what we can never repeat too often, though it may be that the voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediæval Theology in its interpretations of the so‐called Revelation. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape—a transformation requiring millions of years—and yet fears to make Mankind older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of species, natural selection and evolution from the lowest form to the highest, from mollusc to fish, from reptile to bird and mammalian—yet it refuses to man, who is physiologically only a higher mammal and animal, such a transformation of his external form. But if the monstrous Iguanodon of the Wealden may have been the ancestor of the diminutive Iguana of to‐day, why could not the monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man—the link between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this “theory” than in that of refusing to man a spiritual immortal Ego, making of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, as a distinct genus in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific than the present Exact Sciences, they are nevertheless more logical and consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and the natural affinities of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal; but it requires more than the mere interplay between certain material aggregates and their environment, to call to life a fully conscious man, even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two “poor cousins” of the quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Hæckel that (objective) Life on our Globe “is a logical postulate of scientific natural history,” but add that the rejection of a like spiritual involution, from within without, of invisible subjective Spirit‐ Life—Eternal and a Principle in Nature—is more illogical, if possible, than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by “blind forces” inherent in Matter, without any external help.

Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being as follows: first, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named organic protein; then, under the influence of incident forces, these states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind‐pipes and bellows; after which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart’s “Requiem”; this was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad infinitum, its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown.

Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of species, his words apply to our doctrine.

Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations on a preëxisting kind of being.(781)

Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a modification on a preëxistent and prehistorical kind of man, even supposing for argument’s sake that there is nothing within him to last longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is not so! For, when we are told that “organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call artificial evolution”(782)—we answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great Adepts did as much, and, indeed, far more, before the Chemists ever attempted to “build out of dissociated elements complex combinations.” The Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster will have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no Chemist, or Alchemist either, will ever endow such a monster with more than animal instinct, unless indeed he does that with which the “Progenitors” are credited, namely, leave his own Physical Body, and incarnate in the “Empty Form.” But even this would be an artificial, not a natural man, for our “Progenitors” had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become Gods before they became Men.

The above digression—if indeed it is one—is an attempt at justification before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this.

It also gives the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or Theology, and why they prefer any “psychic craze” to the dogmatic assertions of the pair, since neither of them, in its infallibility, has anything better to offer than blind faith. Universal tradition is by far the safer guide in life. And universal tradition shows Primitive Man living for ages together with his Creators and first Instructors—the Elohim—in the World’s “Garden of Eden,” or “Delight.”(783)

45. THE FIRST GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS (A).

46. ALL HOLY SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE ANIMALS, PRODUCED FROM THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (B).

(a) As this subject—the fourth great Deluge on our Globe in this Round—is fully treated in the Sections that follow the last Stanza, to say anything more at present would be a mere anticipation. The seven Great Islands (Dvîpas) belonged to the Continent of Atlantis. The Secret Teachings show that the Deluge overtook the Fourth, Giant Race, not on account of its depravity, or because it had become “black with sin,” but simply because such is the fate of every Continent, which—like everything else under our Sun—is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was when the Fifth Race was in its infancy.

(b) Thus the Giants perished—the Magicians and the Sorcerers, adds the fancy of popular tradition. But “all holy saved,” and alone the “unholy” were “destroyed.” This was due, however, as much to the prevision of the “holy” ones, who had not lost the use of their Third Eye, as to Karma and Natural Law. Speaking of the subsequent Race, our Fifth Humanity, the Commentary says:

_Alone the handful of those Elect, whose Divine Instructors had gone to __ inhabit that Sacred Island—__“__from whence the last Saviour will come__”__—now kept mankind from becoming one‐half the exterminator of the other [as mankind is now_—H. P. B.]. _It [mankind] became divided. Two‐ thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the Earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one‐third remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race—the Divine Incarnates. When the Poles moved [for the fourth time] this did not affect those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like the Lemurians—alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and __“__were seen no more__”__...!_

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Stanza XII. The Fifth Race And Its Divine Instructors

47. The remnants of the first two Races disappear for ever. Groups of the various Atlantean races saved from the Deluge along with the Forefathers of the Fifth. 48. The origins of our present Race, the Fifth. The first Divine Dynasties. 49. The earliest glimmerings in history, now pinned to the allegorical chronology of the Bible, and “universal” history slavishly following it. The nature of the first Instructors and Civilizers of mankind.

47. FEW(784) REMAINED. SOME YELLOW, SOME BROWN AND BLACK, AND SOME RED REMAINED. THE MOON‐COLOURED(785) WERE GONE FOR EVER (A).

48. THE FIFTH(786) PRODUCED FROM THE HOLY STOCK REMAINED; IT WAS RULED OVER BY THE FIRST DIVINE KINGS.

49. ... THE SERPENTS WHO RE‐DESCENDED, WHO MADE PEACE WITH THE FIFTH,(787) WHO TAUGHT AND INSTRUCTED IT (b)....

(a) This Shloka relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with it, but living and ever‐recurring tradition does. History—or what is called history—does not go back further than the fantastic origins of our fifth sub‐race, a “few thousands” of years. It is the sub‐divisions of the first sub‐race of the Fifth Root‐Race which are referred to in the sentence, “Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red remained.” The “moon‐coloured”—i.e., the First and the Second Races—were gone for ever; ay, without leaving any traces whatever—and that, so far back as the third “Deluge” of the Third Lemurian Race, that “Great Dragon,” whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this is the true meaning of the verse in the Commentary which says:

The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom, the Serpents whose holes are now under the Triangular Stones.

Or in other words, “the pyramids, at the four corners of the world.”

(b) This puts clearly what is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the Commentaries; namely, that the Adepts or “Wise” men of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind of pyramidal structure, if not actually under a pyramid. For such “pyramids” existed in the “four corners of the world” and were never the monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though indeed until they were found scattered all over the two Americas, under and above ground, beneath and amidst virgin forests, and also in plain and vale, they were generally supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If true geometrically correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, nevertheless many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular pyramidal and conical “menhirs” in Morbihan, and Brittany generally, many of the Danish “tumuli” and even of the “giant tombs” of Sardinia with their inseparable companions, the “nuraghi,” are so many more or less clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first settlers on the newly‐born continent and isles of Europe, the “some yellow, some brown and black, and some red” races that remained after the submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands, 850,000 years ago—Plato’s Island excepted—and before the arrival of the great Âryan races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East. Those who can hardly accept the placing of the antiquity of the human race so far back as the 57,000 years, the age assigned by Dr. Dowler to the skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi, will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken some day. We may disparage the foolish self‐glorification of the Arcadians who styled themselves “older than the Moon” (προσέληνοι), and of the people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the Sun appeared in Heaven—but not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the Mammoth and Mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic Salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the Mammalians, man is the only one whom Science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames, from the giant Homo Diluvii to the creature between five and six feet that he is now.

But the “Serpents of Wisdom” have preserved their records well, and the history of human evolution is traced in Heaven as it is traced on underground walls. Humanity and the Stars are bound together indissolubly, because of the Intelligences that rule the latter.

Modern Symbologists may scoff at this and call it “fancy,” but as Mr. Staniland Wake writes:

It is unquestionable that the Deluge has [ever] been associated in the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the constellations.(788)

The “Old Dragon” is identical with the “Great Flood,” says Mr. Proctor:

We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples, ... the Dragon would be the uppermost or ruling constellation.... It is singular how closely these constellations ... correspond in sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded respecting the [Biblical] Flood.(789)

The reasons for this singularity, however, have been made abundantly clear in this work. It only shows that there were several Deluges confused in the memories and traditions of the sub‐races of the Fifth Race. The first great Flood was astronomical and cosmical, while several others were terrestrial. And yet our very learned friend Mr. Gerald Massey—an initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still only a self‐initiate—declared and insisted that the Atlantean Submersion and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people, and that Atlantis was no better than an “astronomical allegory.” But the great zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and allegory can hardly interfere with history; moreover, every student of Occultism knows what that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Dr. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of the allegory.

[Its twelve cantos] refer to the annual course of the Sun through the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac; ... [the eleventh canto being] consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and rain, and harmonizes with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac—Aquarius, or the Waterman.(790)

But even this is preceded in the old Records by the pre‐astronomical Cosmic Flood, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above Zodiacal or Noah’s Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the constellation of the Great Dragon, the “Dragons of Wisdom,” or the great Initiates of the Third and Fourth Races, and the floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race or the Atlanteans. When was it? Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of the zodiacal calculations in Egypt, the poles have been thrice inverted.

We will presently return again to this statement. Such symbols as are represented by the Signs of the Zodiac—a fact which offers a handle to Materialists upon which to hang their one‐sided theories and opinions—have too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too important, to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to consider the meaning of the statement, in Shloka 48, concerning the “first Divine Kings,” who are said to have “redescended,” guided and instructed our Fifth Race after the last Deluge! We shall consider this last claim historically in the Sections that follow, but must end with a few more details on the subject of “Serpents.”

The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediæval, and modern works which have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of the weird and suggestive symbol (so often referred to) of the “tempter of man”—in the orthodox light of the Church—can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every available proof, at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been invariably made out by our Theologians and some pious Symbologists to be indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called the “Devil,” and every proof which goes against their theory has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored. The Occultist must, therefore, neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander. And so we propose to divide the subjects involved in these last three Verses into several groups, and to examine them as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine—the bulk of which, however, will be found in Part II, on Symbology.

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Serpents And Dragons Under Different Symbolisms

The name of the Dragon in Chaldæa was not written phonetically, but was represented by two monograms, meaning probably, according to the Orientalists, the “scaly one.” “This description,” very pertinently remarks G. Smith, “of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a serpent, or a fish.” To this we may add that, in one aspect, it applies to Makara, the tenth Zodiacal Sign, the Sanskrit term for a nondescript amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, but really signifying something else. This, then, is a virtual admission that the Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of the Dragon in ancient Chaldæa. It was from Chaldæa that the Hebrews got their symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians, who made of the “scaly one” a living entity and a maleficent power.

A specimen of Dragons, “winged and scaled,” may be seen in the British Museum. In this representation of the events of the Fall, according to the same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a “tree,” and holding out their hands to the “apple,” while at the back of the “tree” is the Dragon‐Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two “Chaldees” ready for Initiation, the Serpent symbolizing the Initiator; while the jealous Gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane clergy. Not much of the literal “biblical event” there, as any Occultist can see!

“The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom,” says the Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures and the “Serpent.”

“The Serpents who redescended, .... who taught and instructed” the Fifth Race. What sane man, in our day, is capable of believing that real serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess—now become almost an axiom with men of Science—that those who in antiquity wrote upon various sacred Dragons and Serpents were either superstitious and credulous people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the Profane.

“Terrible are the Gods when they manifest themselves”—those Gods whom men call Dragons. And Ælianus, treating in his De Naturâ Animalium of these ophidian symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he well understood the nature of these most ancient of symbols. Thus with reference to the above Homeric verse he most pertinently explains:

For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of which it is better [for others?] to remain in ignorance.(791)

The “Dragon” symbol has a septenary meaning, and of these seven meanings, the highest and the lowest may be given. The highest is identical with the “Self‐born,” the Logos, the Hindû Aja. With the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent‐worshippers, he was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.(792) Its seven “Stars” are the seven stars held in the hand of the “Alpha and Omega” in Revelation. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term “Dragon” was applied to the “Wise” men.

This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that, in spite of our boasted civilization, it can hardly escape being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished of Christian dogmas. Such a subject required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.

Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in Heaven originate with St. John, in his Revelation? Emphatically we answer—No. St. John’s “Dragon” is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean Magic.

In order that we may demonstrate this negation, the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects.

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The Sidereal And Cosmic Glyphs

Every Astronomer—not to speak of Occultists and Astrologers—knows that, figuratively speaking, the Astral Light, the Milky Way, and also the Path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the Circles of the Sidereal or Tropical Year, were always called “Serpents” in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the Adepts.

This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”—the Dragon “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” according to the Peratæ Gnostics, the “Good and Perfect Serpent,” the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.

But we ought to discriminate between the various characters of this symbol. Now Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine, and when an Occultist reads in the Vendîdâd complaints uttered against the “Serpent,” whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, and at the same time mental and psychic consumption—he knows that the Serpent alluded to is the North Pole, and also the Pole of the Heavens.(793) These two axes produce the seasons according to their angle of inclination to each other. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô “by the good river Dâitya” had disappeared, and “the Âryan Magi had to emigrate to Sogdiana”—say the exoteric accounts. But the Esoteric Teaching states that the pole had passed from the equator, and that the “Land of Bliss” of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo‐Âryans of the post‐ diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognize the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood, and conversed with the pure “Yazatas” or celestial Spirits of the Elements, whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein:

The Vendîdâd seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara‐Korum chain.(794)

The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who, for a wonder, once wrote the truth, symbolized Kosmos by a large fiery circle, with a serpent with a hawk’s head lying across its diameter.

Here we see the pole of the earth within the plane of the ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac, in 25,000 [odd] years, must have “redden’d with the solar blaze”; and each sign must have been vertical to the polar region.(795)

Meru, the Abode of the Gods, as explained before, was placed in the North Pole, while Pâtâla, the Nether Region, was supposed to lie towards the South. As each symbol in Esoteric Philosophy has seven keys, Meru and Pâtâla have, geographically, one significance and represent localities, while, astronomically, they have another, and mean the “two poles”; the latter meaning led to their being often rendered in exoteric sectarianism as the “Mountain” and the “Pit,” or Heaven and Hell. If we for the present hold only to the astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the Ancients knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern Astronomers. They had reasons, and good ones, for naming one the “Mountain” and the other the “Pit.” As the author just quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same. “Heli‐on is the Sun in his highest,” Heli‐os or Eli‐os meaning the “most high,” and Acheron is 32 degrees above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded the southern pole, the first astronomers called the Pit, while observing, toward the northern pole, that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared above the horizon—they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of the Gods, these were said to ascend and descend periodically; by which (astronomically) the Zodiacal Gods were meant, the passing of the original north pole of the Earth to the south pole of the Heaven.

In that age at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the north pole to the north horizon; crossing the eight coils of the serpent [eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years], which would seem like an imaginary ladder with eight staves reaching from the earth up to the pole, i.e., the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, i.e., the Signs of the Zodiac, ascended and descended. [Jacob’s ladder and the Angels] .... It is more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder.(796)

This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from Occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific and especially theological character. As said, the Christian Trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning. This it was which made Rutilius say of those who euhemerized it: “Judæa gens, radix stultorum.”

But the profane, and especially Christian fanatics who are ever in search of scientific corroboration for their dead‐letter texts, persist in seeing in the Celestial Pole the true Serpent of Genesis, Satan, the enemy of mankind; whereas it is really—a cosmic metaphor. When the Gods are said to forsake the Earth, it means not only the Gods, the Protectors and Instructors, but also the minor Gods—the Regents of the Zodiacal Signs. The former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed Mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as well as in the Hindû Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura Mazda, the “Lord of Wisdom,” is the synthesis of the Amshaspands, or Amesha Spentas, the “Immortal Benefactors,”(797) the “Word,” or the Logos, and its six highest aspects in Mazdeanism. These “Immortal Benefactors” are described in Zamyad Yasht as:

The Amesha Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great, helpful ... imperishable and pure ... which are all seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike ... which are the creators and destroyers of the creatures of Ahura Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers.

These few lines are sufficient to indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspands, our Dhyân Chohans or the “Serpents of Wisdom.” They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians—the Star‐ Yazatas of the Zoroastrians—or again the seven Planets (including the Sun) of every religion.(798) The epithet, “the shining, having efficacious eyes,” proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the Divine Powers of Ahura Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the “Builders,” the “Watchers,” the Pitris, or Fathers, and the first Preceptors of Mankind.

When mortals have become sufficiently spiritualized, there will be no more need of forcing them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men will know then, that there never yet was a great World‐reformer whose name has passed into our generation, who (a) was not a direct emanation of the Logos (under whatever name known to us) i.e., an essential incarnation of one of the “Seven,” of the “Divine Spirit who is sevenfold”; and (b) who had not appeared before, in past Cycles. They will recognize, then, the cause which produces certain riddles of the ages, in both history and chronology; the reason, for instance, why it is impossible for them to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the Dabistan; why the numbers and individualities of the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up; why Krishna and Buddha speak of themselves as reïncarnations, Krishna identifying himself with the Rishi Nârâyana, and Gautama giving a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being “the very supreme Brahmâ,” is yet called Anshânshâvatâra—“a part of a part” only of the Supreme on Earth; finally, why Osiris is a Great God, and at the same time a “Prince on Earth,” who reäppears in Thoth Hermes; and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognized, kabalistically, in Joshua, the son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The Esoteric Doctrine explains all this by saying that each of these, as also many others, had first appeared on Earth as one of the Seven Powers of the Logos, individualized as a God or Angel (Messenger); then, mixed with Matter, they had reäppeared in turn as great Sages and Instructors who “taught” the Fifth Race, after having instructed the two preceding Races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of Mankind, and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had become truly only the “parts of a part” on Earth, though de facto the One Supreme in Nature.

This is the metaphysics of Theogony. Now every “Power” among the Seven, once he is individualized, has in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules over it;(799) hence the many meanings in every symbol. These, unless interpreted according to the Esoteric methods, generally lead to inextricable confusion.

Does the Western Kabalist, who is generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist, require a proof? Let him open Éliphas Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie,(800) and carefully examine his “Grand Symbole Kabbalistique” from the Zohar. He will find there, in the engraving, a development of the “interlaced triangles,” a white man above and a black woman below reversed, the legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and protruding behind the shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on each side. Éliphas Lévi makes of this symbol, God and Nature; or God, “Light,” mirrored inversely in Nature and Matter, “Darkness.” Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as emblematical cosmogony goes. Neither has he invented the symbol, nor have the Kabalists. The two figures in white and black stone have existed in the temples of Egypt from time immemorial, agreeably to tradition, and historically‐ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them. Therefore the symbol must have been in existence for nearly 2,500 years. This, at the very least, for Cambyses, who was a son of Cyrus the Great, succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two Kabiri personifying the opposite poles. Herodotus(801) tells posterity that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he burst into an inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought to be a man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate “the passing of the original north pole of the earth to the south pole of the heaven,” as perceived by Mackey.(802) But they also represented the poles inverted, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, which each time resulted in the displacement of the oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and vice versâ. These Kabirim were the “Deluge” Gods.

This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same Gods, and classes of Gods. Faber, at the beginning of this century, showed the identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei, Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes,(803) Titans, and Aletæ with the Kabiri. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis, and our Dhyân Chohans who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri‐Titans were seven Great Gods, cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected with at‐al‐as, the “divine sun,” and with tit, the “deluge.” But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe‐inspiring Great Gods—the Dioscuri,(804) the deities surrounded with the darkness of Occult Nature—become the Idei Dactyli, or Ideic “Fingers,” with the Adept‐healers by metals. The true etymology of the name Lares, now signifying “Ghosts,” must be sought in the Etruscan word lars, “conductor,” “leader.” Sanchuniathon translates the word Aletæ as “fire worshippers,” and Faber believes it to be derived from al‐orit, the “God of fire.” Both are right, for in both cases it is a reference to the Sun, the “highest” God, toward whom the Planetary Gods “gravitate” (astronomically and allegorically), and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber’s etymology, that “Lar is a contraction of El‐Ar, the solar deity,”(805) is not very correct. They are the Lares, the Conductors and Leaders of men. As Aletæ, they were the seven Planets—astronomically; and as Lares, the Regents of these Planets, our Protectors and Rulers—mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic worship, and also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, whose attributes and dual capacities were denoted by the names of the temples to which they respectively belonged, and also by those of their priests. They all belonged, however, to the septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyân Chohans. The Sabæans, who worshipped the “Regents of the Seven Planets” just as the Hindûs worship their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes (Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the Planetary Gods. Seth and Enos were borrowed from the Sabæans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but the truth about them can still be discovered even in Genesis.(806) Seth is the “Progenitor” of those early men of the Third Race in whom the Planetary Angels had incarnated; he was himself a Dhyân Chohan and belonged to the informing Gods, and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch), or Hermes, was said to be his son—Enos being a generic name for all the early “Seers” (Enoïchion). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabaism, and that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idrus (Hermes or Enoch);(807) that thither Sabæans proceeded on pilgrimage, and chanted prayers seven times a day, turning to the North (Mount Meru, Kaph, Olympus, etc.).(808) Abd Allatif also tells us some curious things about the Sabæans and their books. So also does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote 200 years later. While the latter maintains “that each pyramid was consecrated to a star” (a Star Regent rather), Abd Allatif assures us that he had read in ancient Sabæan books that “one pyramid was the tomb of Agathodæmon and the other of Hermes”:(809)

Agathodæmon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes was his son,

adds Mr. Staniland Wake in The Great Pyramid.(810)

Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples the Kabiri were the Great Cosmic Gods—the Seven and the Forty‐nine Sacred Fires—in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, and therefore, to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were three and four, or seven—the male and female principles—the crux ansata. This division shows why some classical writers held that they were only three, while others named four. And these were Axieros (in his female aspect Demeter); Axiokersa (Persephone);(811) Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kasmilos (Hermes—not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus,(812) but “he of the sacred legend,” which was explained only during the Samothracian Mysteries). This identification, which is due, according to the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius,(813) to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is really no identification at all, as names alone do not reveal much.(814) Others again have maintained, being equally right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. These two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial pole, and the pole of the heavens, astronomically; and also the physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus, Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read esoterically for the understanding of the allegory. The parts played in the event by the Fire, Water, Earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how the “Father of the Gods” and the “merry God of Wine” were also made to personify the two terrestrial poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In Astronomy, the poles are indeed the “heavenly measure”; and so are the Kabiri‐Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri‐Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the “invention of Fire”(815) and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias(816) shows that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus.

But the fact that, astronomically, the Titan‐Kabirim were also the Generators and Regulators of the Seasons, and, cosmically, the great Volcanic Energies—the Gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works—does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed Humanity with intellect and reason. They are preëminently in every Theogony—especially in the Hindû—the Sacred Divine Fires, Three, Seven, or Forty‐nine, according as the allegory demands it. Their very names prove it, for they are the Agni‐putra, or Sons of the Fire, in India, and the Genii of the Fire under numerous names in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name kabeiros meaning “the powerful through fire,” from the Greek καίω “to burn.” The Semitic word kabirim contains the idea of “the powerful, the mighty, and the great,” answering to the Greek μεγάλοι, δυνατοί, but these are later epithets. These Gods were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phœnicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with Fire, their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to the Chthonian Divinities, and therefore has Christianity made of them Infernal Gods.

They are truly “the great, beneficent and powerful Gods,” as Cassius Hermone calls them.(817) At Thebes, Core and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary,(818) and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter its holy precincts.(819) But we must not, at the same time, lose sight of the fact that the title of Kabiri was generic; that the Kabiri, the mighty Gods as well as mortals, were of both sexes, and also terrestrial, celestial and cosmic; that while, in their later capacity of rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon—as it is now regarded—was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the Rulers of Mankind, when, incarnated as Kings of the “Divine Dynasties,” they gave the first impulse to civilization, and directed the mind with which they had endued men, to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To these Kabiri or Titans is ascribed the invention of letters (the Deva‐nâgari, or alphabet and language of the Gods), of laws and legislature, of architecture, as also of the various modes of magic, so‐called, and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those Demi‐gods and Heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers—too zealous for plain truth—would force posterity to see only Pagan copies of one sole prototype, named Noah—all are generic names.

It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed the great boon of agriculture, by producing corn or wheat. What Isis‐Osiris, the once living Kabiria, did in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class.

That serpents were ever emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by the Caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the God of Wisdom, with Hermes, and so on. The two serpents, entwined round the rod, are phallic symbols of Jupiter and other Gods who transformed themselves into snakes for purposes of seducing Goddesses—only in the unclean fancies of profane Symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the Adept, and of his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury, in his psychopompic character, conducting and guiding the souls of the dead to Hades with his Caduceus and even raising them to life with it, is a simple and very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret Wisdom: black and white Magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding the Soul after death, and displaying the power of calling to life that which is dead—a very deep metaphor if one but thinks over its meaning. All the peoples of antiquity, with one exception, reverenced this symbol; the exception being the Christians, who chose to forget the “brazen serpent” of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and prudence of the “serpent” by Jesus himself, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate successors of the “Serpents” or Initiates, who ruled the early races of the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor’s throne is the “Dragon’s Seat,” and his dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the Dragon. The aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the Dragon is a human, albeit divine, Being. Speaking of the “Yellow Dragon,” the chief of the others, the Twan‐ying‐t’u says:

His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable ... he does not go in company and does not live in herds [he is an ascetic].... He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree [Karma]; at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains [invisible].

And Lü‐lan asserts that Confucius said:

The Dragon feeds in the pure (water) [of Wisdom] and disports in the clear (water) [of Life].(820)

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