C. Supplementary Remarks On Esoteric Geological Chronology…

C. Supplementary Remarks On Esoteric Geological Chronology

It seems possible to calculate the approximate duration at any rate of the geological periods from the combined data of Science and Occultism now before us. Geology is, of course, able to determine one thing with almost certainty—the thickness of the several deposits. Now, it also stands to reason that the time required for the deposition of any stratum on a sea‐ bottom must bear a strict proportion to the thickness of the mass thus formed. Doubtless the rate of the erosion of land, and of the sorting out of matter on to ocean beds, has varied from age to age, and cataclysmic changes of various kinds have broken the “uniformity” of ordinary geological processes. Provided, then, that we have some definite numerical basis on which to work, our task is rendered less difficult than it might at first sight appear. Making due allowance for variations in the rate of deposit, Professor Lefèvre gives us the relative figures which sum up geological time. He does not attempt to calculate the lapse of years since the first bed of the Laurentian rocks was deposited, but postulating that time as x, he presents us with the relative proportions in which the various periods stand to it. Let us premise our estimate by stating that, roughly speaking, the Primordial rocks are 70,000 ft., the Primary 42,000 ft., the Secondary 15,000 ft., the Tertiary 5,000 ft., and the Quaternary some 500 ft. in thickness:

Dividing into a hundred parts the time, whatever its actual length, that has passed since the dawn of life on this earth [lower Laurentian strata], we shall be led to attribute to the Primordial age more than half of the whole duration, say 53.5; to the Primary 32.2; to the Secondary 11.5; to the Tertiary 2.3; to the Quaternary 0.5 or one‐half per cent.(1664)

Now, as it is certain, on Occult data, that the time which has elapsed since the first sedimentary deposits is 320,000,000 years, we are able to construct the following table:

ROUGH APPROXIMATIONS OF LENGTH OF GEOLOGICAL PERIODS IN YEARS.

Primordial (Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian): 171,200,000.

Primary (Devonian, Coal, Permian): 103,040,000.

Secondary (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous): 36,800,000.

Tertiary (Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene): 7,360,000.

Quaternary: 1,600,000.(1665)

Such estimates harmonize with the statements of Esoteric Ethnology in almost every particular. The Tertiary Atlantean part‐cycle, from the “apex of glory” of that Race in the early Eocene to the great Mid‐Miocene cataclysm, would appear to have lasted some three‐and‐a‐half to four million years. If the duration of the Quaternary is not, as seems likely, rather over‐estimated, the sinking of Ruta and Daitya would be Post‐ Tertiary. It is probable that the results here given allow somewhat too long a period to both the Tertiary and Quaternary, as the Third Race goes very far back into the Secondary age. Nevertheless, the figures are most suggestive.

But the argument from geological evidence being in favour of only 100,000,000 years, let us compare our claims and teachings with those of exact Science.

Mr. Edward Clodd,(1666) in referring to M. de Mortillet’s work Matériaux pour l’Histoire de l’Homme, which places man in the Mid‐Miocene period,(1667) remarks that:

It would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolution teaches, and moreover win no support from believers in special creation and the fixity of species, to seek for so highly specialized a mammalian as man at an early stage in the life‐ history of the globe.

To this, one could answer: (a) the doctrine of evolution, as inaugurated by Darwin and developed by later evolutionists, is not only the reverse of infallible, but it is repudiated by several great men of Science, e.g., de Quatrefages, in France, Dr. Weismann, an ex‐evolutionist in Germany, and many others, the ranks of the Anti‐Darwinists growing stronger with every year;(1668) and (b) truth to be worthy of its name, and remain truth and fact, hardly needs to beg for support from any class or sect. For were it to win support from believers in special creation, it would never gain the favour of the evolutionists, and vice versâ. Truth must rest upon its own firm foundation of facts, and take its chance of recognition, when every prejudice in the way is disposed of. Though the question has been already fully considered in its main aspect, it is, nevertheless, advisable to combat every so‐called “scientific” objection as we go along, when making what are regarded as heretical and anti‐ scientific statements.

Let us briefly glance at the divergencies between orthodox and Esoteric Science, on the question of the age of the globe and of man. With the two respective synchronistic tables before him, the reader will be enabled to see at a glance the importance of these divergencies; and to perceive, at the same time, that it is not impossible—nay, it is most likely—that further discoveries in Geology and the finding of fossil remains of man will force Science to confess that it is Esoteric Philosophy which is right after all, or, at any rate, nearer to the truth.

PARALLELISM OF LIFE.

SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES: Science divides the period of the Globe’s history, since the beginning of life on Earth (or the Azoic age), into five main divisions or periods, according to Hæckel.(1669)

ESOTERIC THEORY: Leaving the classification of the geological periods to Western Science, Esoteric Philosophy divides only the Life‐periods on the Globe. In the present Manvantara the actual period is separated into seven Kalpas and seven great human Races. Its first Kalpa, answering to the Primordial Epoch is the age of the Primeval.

SCIENTIFIC: PRIMORDIAL EPOCH: Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian. The Primordial epoch, Science tells us, is by no means devoid of vegetable and animal life. In the Laurentian deposits are found specimens of the Eozoon canadense—a chambered shell. In the Silurian are discovered sea‐weeds (algæ), molluscs, crustacea, and lower marine organisms, also the first trace of fishes. The Primordial epoch shows algæ, molluscs, crustacea, polyps, and marine organisms, etc. Science teaches, therefore, that marine life was present from the very beginnings of time, leaving us, however, to speculate for ourselves as to how life appeared on Earth. If it rejects the biblical “creation” (as we do), why does it not give us another, approximately plausible hypothesis?

ESOTERIC: “PRIMEVAL”(1670): Devas or Divine Men, the “Creators” and Progenitors.(1671) The Esoteric Philosophy agrees with the statement made by Science (see preceding), demurring, however, to one particular. The 300,000,000 years of vegetable life (see “Brâhmanical Chronology”) preceded the “Divine Men,” or Progenitors. Also, no teaching denies that there were traces of life within the Earth, besides the Eozoon canadense, in the Primordial Epoch. Only, whereas the said vegetation belonged to this Round, the zoological relics now found in the Laurentian, Cambrian, and Silurian systems, so called, are the relics of the Third Round. At first astral like the rest, they consolidated and materialized pari passu with the new vegetation.

SCIENTIFIC: PRIMARY: Devonian,(1672) Coal, Permian. “Fern‐forests, sigillaria, coniferæ, fishes, first trace of reptiles.” Thus saith Modern Science.

ESOTERIC: “PRIMARY”: Divine Progenitors (Secondary Groups), and the two and a half Races. The Esoteric Doctrine repeats that which was said above. These are all relics of the preceding Round.(1673)

Once, however, the prototypes are projected out of the Astral Envelope of the Earth, an indefinite amount of modification ensues.

SCIENTIFIC: SECONDARY: Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. This is the age of Reptiles, of the gigantic megalosauri, ichthyosauri, plesiosauri, etc. Science denies the presence of man in this period. But it has still to explain how men came to know of these monsters and describe them before the age of Cuvier! The old annals of China, India, Egypt, and even of Judea are full of them, as demonstrated elsewhere. In this period also appear the first marsupial mammals(1674)—insectivorous, carnivorous, phytophagous; and, as Prof. Owen thinks, a herbiferous hoofed mammal.

Science does not admit the appearance of man before the close of the Tertiary period.(1675) Why? Because man has to be shown younger than the higher mammals. But Esoteric Philosophy teaches us the reverse. And as Science is quite unable to come to anything like an approximate conclusion as to the age of man, or even as to the geological periods, the Occult teaching is, therefore, more logical and reasonable, even if accepted only as a hypothesis.

ESOTERIC: “SECONDARY”: According to every calculation the Third Race had already made its appearance, as during the Triassic there were already a few mammals, and it must have separated before their appearance.

This, then, is the age of the Third Race, in which the origins of the early Fourth may be perhaps also discoverable. We are, however, here left entirely to conjecture, as no definite data are yet given out by the Initiates.

The analogy is but a poor one, still it may be argued that, as the early mammalia and pre‐mammalia are shown in their evolution merging from one kind into a higher one, anatomically, so are the human races in their procreative processes. A parallel might certainly be found between the monotremata, didelphia (or marsupialia) and the placental mammals, divided in their turn into three orders(1676) like the First, Second, and Third Root‐Races of men.(1677) But this would require more space than can be now allotted to the subject.

SCIENTIFIC: TERTIARY(1678): Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene. No man is yet allowed to have lived during this period.

Says Mr. E. Clodd, in Knowledge: “Although the placental mammals and the order of primates to which man is related, appear in Tertiary times, and the climate, tropical in the Eocene age, warm in the Miocene, and temperate in the Pliocene, was favourable to his presence, the proofs of his existence in Europe before the close of the Tertiary epoch ... are not generally accepted here.”

ESOTERIC: “TERTIARY”: The Third Race has now almost utterly disappeared, carried away by the fearful geological cataclysms of the Secondary age, leaving behind it but a few hybrid races.

The Fourth, born millions of years before(1679) the said cataclysm took place, perished during the Miocene period,(1680) when the Fifth (our Âryan Race) had had one million years of independent existence.(1681) How much older it is from its origin—who knows? As the “historical” period began with the Indian Âryans, with their Vedas for their multitudes,(1682) and far earlier in the Esoteric Records, it is useless to establish here any parallels.

Geology has now divided the periods and placed man in the Quaternary.

SCIENTIFIC: QUATERNARY: Palæolithic Man, Neolithic Man, Historical Period.

ESOTERIC: “QUATERNARY”: If the Quaternary period is allowed 1,500,000 years, then only does our Fifth Race belong to it.

Yet—mirabile dictu—while the non‐cannibal Palæolithic man, who must have certainly antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of thousands of years,(1683) is shown to be a remarkable artist, Neolithic man is made out to be almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings notwithstanding.(1684) For see what a learned Geologist, Mr. Charles Gould, tells the reader in his Mythical Monsters:

Palæolithic men were unacquainted with pottery and the art of weaving, and apparently had no domesticated animals or system of cultivation; but the Neolithic lake‐dwellers of Switzerland had looms, pottery, cereals, sheep, horses, etc. Implements of horn, bone, and wood were in common use among both races, but those of the older are frequently distinguished by their being sculptured with great ability, or ornamented with life‐like engravings of the various animals living at the period; whereas there appears to have been a marked absence of any similar artistic ability(1685) on the part of Neolithic man.(1686)

Let us give the reasons for this.

(1) The oldest fossil man, the primitive cave‐men of the old Palæolithic period, and of the Pre‐Glacial period (of whatever length, and however far back), is always the same genus man, and there are no fossil remains proving for him

What the Hipparion and Anchitherium have proved for the genus horse—that is, gradual progressive specialization from a simple ancestral type to more complex existing forms.(1687)

(2) As to the so‐called Palæolithic hatchets:

When placed side by side with the rudest forms of stone hatchets actually used by the Australian and other savages, it is difficult to detect any difference.(1688)

This goes to prove that there have been savages at all times; and the inference would be that there might have been civilized people in those days as well, cultured nations contemporary with those rude savages. We see such a thing in Egypt 7,000 years ago.

(3) An obstacle which is the direct consequence of the two preceding: Man, if no older than the Palæolithic period, could not possibly have had the actual time necessary for his transformation from the “missing link” into what he is known to have been even during that remote geological time, i.e., even a finer specimen of manhood than many of the now existing races.

The above lends itself naturally to the following syllogism: (1) The primitive man (known to Science) was, in some respects, even a finer man of his genus than he is now. (2) The earliest monkey known, the lemur, was less anthropoid than the modern pithecoid species. (3) Conclusion: Even though a missing link were found, the balance of evidence would remain more in favour of the ape being a degenerated man, made dumb by some fortuitous circumstances,(1689) than in favour of the descent of man from a pithecoid ancestor. The theory cuts both ways.

On the other hand, if the existence of Atlantis be accepted, and the statement be believed that in the Eocene age—

Even in its very first part, the great cycle of the Fourth Race men, the Atlanteans, had already reached its highest point,(1690)

then some of the present difficulties of Science might easily be made to disappear. The rude workmanship of the Palæolithic tools proves nothing against the idea that, side by side with their makers, there lived nations highly civilized. We are told that:

Only a very small portion of the earth’s surface has been explored, and of this a very small portion consists of ancient land surfaces or fresh water formations, where alone we can expect to meet with traces of the higher forms of animal life. And even these have been so imperfectly explored, that where we now meet with thousands and tens of thousands of undoubted human remains lying almost under our feet, it is only within the last thirty years that their existence has even been suspected.(1691)

It is very suggestive also that along with the rude hatchets of the lowest savage, explorers meet with specimens of workmanship of such artistic merit as could hardly be found, or expected, in a modern peasant belonging to any European country—unless in exceptional cases. The “portrait” of the “Reindeer Feeding,” from the Thayngin grotto in Switzerland, and those of the man running, with two horses’ heads sketched close to him—a work of the Reindeer period, i.e., at least 50,000 years ago—are pronounced by Mr. Laing to be not only exceedingly well done, but the former, the “Reindeer Feeding,” is described as one that “would do credit to any modern animal painter”—by no means exaggerated praise, as anyone may see, by glancing at the sketch given below from Mr. Gould’s work. Now, since we have our greatest painters of Europe side by side with the modern Esquimaux, who also have a tendency, like their Palæolithic ancestors of the Reindeer period, the rude and savage human species, to be constantly drawing with the point of their knives sketches of animals, scenes of the chase, etc., why could not the same have happened in those days? Compared with the specimens of Egyptian drawing and sketching—7,000 years ago—the “earliest portraits” of men, horses’ heads, and reindeer, made 50,000 years ago, are certainly superior. Nevertheless, the Egyptians of those periods are known to have been a highly civilized nation, whereas the Palæolithic men are called savages of the lower type. This is a small matter seemingly, yet it is extremely suggestive as showing how every new geological discovery is made to fit in with current theories, instead of fitting the theories to include the discovery. Yes; Mr. Huxley is right in saying, “Time will show.” It will, and it must vindicate Occultism.

Meanwhile, the most uncompromising Materialists are driven by necessity into the most Occult‐like admissions. Strange to say, it is the most materialistic—those of the German school—who, with regard to physical development, come the nearest to the teachings of the Occultists. Thus, Professor Baumgärtner believes that:

The germs for the higher animals could only be the eggs of the lower animals; ... besides the advance of the vegetable and animal world in development, there occurred in that period the formation of new original germs [which formed the basis of new metamorphoses, etc.] ... the first men who proceeded from the germs of animals beneath them, lived first in a larva state.

Just so; in a larva state, we say too, only from no “animal” germ; and that larva was the soulless astral form of the pre‐physical Races. And we believe, as the German professor does, with several other men of Science in Europe now, that the human races—

Have not descended from one pair, but appeared immediately in numerous races.(1692)

Therefore, when we read Force and Matter, and find that Emperor of Materialists, Büchner, repeating after Manu and Hermes, that:

Imperceptibly the plant glides into the animal, the animal into the man(1693)

—we need only add “and man into a spirit,” to complete the kabalistic axiom. The more so, since we read the following admission:

Evolved by spontaneous generation ... that whole rich and multiform organic world ... has developed itself progressively, in the course of endless periods of time, by the aid of natural phenomena.(1694)

The whole difference lies in this: Modern Science places her materialistic theory of primordial germs on Earth, and the last germ of life on this Globe, of man, and everything else, between two voids. Whence the first germ, if both spontaneous generation and the interference of external forces, are absolutely rejected now? Germs of organic life, we are told, by Sir William Thompson, came to our Earth in some meteor. This helps in no way, and only shifts the difficulty from this Earth to the supposed meteor.

These are our agreements and disagreements with Science. About the “endless periods” we are, of course, at one even with materialistic speculation; for we believe in Evolution, though on different lines. Professor Huxley very wisely says:

If any form of the doctrine of progressive development is correct, we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of man.(1695)

But when we are told that this man is a product of the natural forces inherent in Matter—Force, according to modern views, being but a quality of Matter, a “mode of motion,” etc.—and when we find Sir William Thompson repeating in 1885 what was asserted by Büchner and his school thirty years ago, we fear all our reverence for real Science is vanishing into thin air! One can hardly help thinking that Materialism is, in certain cases, a disease. For when men of Science, in the face of magnetic phenomena and the attraction of iron particles through insulating substances, like glass, maintain that the said attraction is due to “molecular motion,” or to the “rotation of the molecules of the magnet,” then, whether the teaching comes from a “credulous” Theosophist innocent of any notion of Physics, or from an eminent man of Science, it is equally ridiculous. The individual who asserts such a theory in the teeth of fact, is only one more proof that: “When people have not a niche in their minds into which to shoot facts, so much the worse for the facts.”

At present the dispute between the spontaneous generationists and their opponents is at rest, having ended in the provisional victory of the latter. But even they are forced to admit, as Büchner did, and Messrs. Tyndall and Huxley still do—that spontaneous generation must have occurred once, under “special thermal conditions.” Virchow refuses even to argue the question; it must have taken place some time in the history of our planet; and there’s an end of it. This seems to look more natural than Sir William Thompson’s hypothesis just quoted, that the germs of organic life fell on our Earth in some meteor; or the other “scientific” hypothesis coupled with the recently adopted belief that there exists no “vital principle” whatever, but only vital phenomena, which can all be traced to the molecular forces of the original protoplasm. But this does not help Science to solve the still greater problem—the origin and the descent of Man, for here is a still worse plaint and lamentation.

While we can trace the skeletons of Eocene mammals through several directions of specialization in succeeding Tertiary times, man presents the phenomenon of an unspecialized skeleton which cannot fairly be connected with any of these lines.(1696)

The secret could be soon told, not only from the Esoteric but even from the standpoint of every religion the world over, without mentioning the Occultists. The “specialized skeleton” is sought for in the wrong place, where it can never be found. Scientists expect to discover it in the physical remains of man, in some pithecoid “missing link,” with a skull larger than that of the ape’s, and with a cranial capacity smaller than in man, instead of looking for that specialization in the super‐physical essence of his inner astral constitution, which can hardly be excavated from any geological strata! Such a tenacious, hopeful clinging to a self‐ degrading theory is the most wonderful feature of the day.

Meanwhile, there are specimens of engravings made by Palæolithic “savages”: Palæolithic meaning the “earlier Stone‐age” man, one supposed to have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with. Leaving the modern South Sea islander, or even any Asiatic race, aside, we defy any grown‐up schoolboy, or even a European youth, one who has never studied drawing, to execute such an engraving or even a pencil sketch as good. Here we have the true artistic raccourci, and correct lights and shadows without any plane model before the artist, who copied direct from nature, thus exhibiting a knowledge of anatomy and proportion. The artist who engraved this reindeer belonged, we are asked to believe, to the primitive “semi‐animal” savages (contemporaneous with the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros), whom some over‐zealous Evolutionists once sought to picture to us as distinct approximations to the type of their hypothetical “pithecoid man”!

This engraved antler proves as eloquently as any fact can do, that the evolution of the Races has ever proceeded in a series of rises and falls, that man is, perhaps, as old as incrustated Earth, and—if we can call his divine ancestor “man”—is far older still.

Even de Mortillet himself seems to experience a vague distrust of the conclusions of modern Archæologists, when he writes:

The pre‐historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.(1697)

According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the “father” of Geology:

The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs, is based on the theory of progressive development, and it may prove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yet we have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.(1698)

Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!

This concession of Lyell’s reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:

What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root‐Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so‐called heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to‐ day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.(1699)

Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:

“The primeval savage” is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Rather all the evidence looks the other way.(1700)

In his Origin of Nations, he rightly adds:

The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a “golden age” which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.(1701)

How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?

We repeat the question asked in Isis Unveiled:

Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the “coming race” of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was “just emerging from the Stone age”?(1702)

Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock’s Pre‐historic Man, or Evans’ Ancient Stone Implements must be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:

(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!

(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,(1703) whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake‐villages and buildings.

Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this is in Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists’ ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.

The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:

It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....(1704)

—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.

In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre‐ historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl‐ and ox‐headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.(1705)

And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post‐Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois’ flints may serve as a warning(1706)—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:

Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.

Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two‐thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands that reäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since “retreated” and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.

The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent’s Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period of fairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect. Not one implement fit to bear comparison with the finely‐chipped weapons found in the overlying stratum is to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the “Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.

As said by an Anthropologist in Modern Thought:

The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans, should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub‐species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places the Homo afer on the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It has never originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.(1707)

It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be, fossil man in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.

It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop‐guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—

Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, and this even before the era of the earliest historical records.(1708)

This is a statement made by one of England’s great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:

In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth, there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch, possibly on some continents or islands now submerged beneath the ocean.

Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh‐pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe’s axis, and smile at the conversation given in the Book of Enoch between Noah and his “grandfather” Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth’s axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in the Popular Science Review:

If it be necessary to call in extra‐mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.(1709)

The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on “The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,” shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.

Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congeners _in a sub‐tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in __ Devonshire in Miocene times_, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when the present climate of any district is regarded as normal.

When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that “the ‘splendid evergreen’ (Magnolia inglefieldi) ‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’ ” (Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that the time for its solution has not yet arrived.

It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state, “the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period” (Lyell’s Principles, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post‐Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver, “A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North‐West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands’ Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North‐Eastern Asia was united to North‐Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.” (Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art., “The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)

See, however, on these points, “Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”

But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless searchers after the thrice hypothetical “missing link.” Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—

In those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea.(1710)

Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire‐like on man’s mind, the author of The Antiquity of Man would have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston’s work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may not the soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?

This hypothesis is made in relation to evolution not being entirely due to “natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the “Soul,” or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.

“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,” and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.

Man is certainly no special creation. He is the product of Nature’s gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is the “Eternal Pilgrim,” the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute “Unknowable.”

In his Antiquity of Man(1711) Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe:

If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!(1712)

An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel‐Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was made in the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature, not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand that form should be equally endowed with permanency.

And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:

It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape‐like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so‐called “tallies” found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.(1713)

Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree’s Fallacies of Darwinism, we read:

Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore, the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have been enormous also during man’s development from the monkey(1714). The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh‐water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift‐clay, nor the fresh‐water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, as assumed to have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth’s surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean‐bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh‐water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.(1715)

Our Globe being convulsed each time that it reäwakens for a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root‐Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape‐man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into the parent form in the modern anthropoid.

This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, and far more probable, than many “scientific” theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of speech for acceptance in its dead‐letter garb. But the germ‐in‐the‐meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, the present theories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life‐principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effect due to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:

The hypothesis of special creations turns out to be worthless—worthless, by its derivation; worthless, in its intrinsic incoherence; worthless, as absolutely without evidence; worthless, as not supplying an intellectual need; worthless, as not satisfying a moral want. We must, therefore, consider it as counting for nothing in opposition to any other hypothesis respecting the origin of organic beings.(1716)

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Section V. Organic Evolution and Creative Centres

It is argued that Universal Evolution, otherwise the gradual development of species in all the kingdoms of Nature, works by uniform laws. This is admitted, and the law is enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in Modern Science. But we are also told, that it is equally a law that:

Development works from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complicated, by incessant changes, small in themselves, but constantly accumulating in the required direction(1717).

It is from the infinitesimally small that the comparatively gigantic species are produced.

Esoteric Science agrees with this, but adds that this law applies only to what is known to it as the Primary Creation—the evolution of Worlds from Primordial Atoms, and the Pre‐primordial ATOM, at the first differentiation of the former; and that during the period of cyclic evolution in Space and Time, this law is limited and works only in the lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first geological periods, from simple to complex, on the rough material surviving from the relics of the Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity when terrestrial activity recommences.

No more than Science, does the Esoteric Philosophy admit “design” or “special creation.” It rejects every claim to the “miraculous,” and accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of Force (or Spirit) and of Matter, which, starting from the Neutral Centre of Being, develops by its cyclic progress and incessant transformations. The primitive germ from which all vertebrate life has developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the primitive germ from which vegetable and animal life have evolved, there are side laws whose work is determined by the conditions in which the materials to be worked upon are found by them, and of which Science—Physiology and Anthropology especially—seems to be little aware. Its votaries speak of this “primitive germ,” and maintain that it is shown beyond any doubt that:

The design [and the “designer”], if there be any [in the case of man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand especially], must be placed very much farther back, and is, in fact, involved in the primitive germ, from which all vertebrate life certainly, and probably all life, animal or vegetable, have been slowly developed.(1718)

This is as true of the “primitive germ” as it is false that that “germ” is only “very much farther back” than man is; for it is at an immeasurable and inconceivable distance, in Time, though not in Space, from the origin even of our Solar System. As the Hindû philosophy very justly teaches, the “Aniyâmsam Anîyasâm,” can be known only through false notions. It is the “Many” that proceed from the “One”—the living spiritual germs or centres of forces—each in a septenary form, which first generate, and then give the primary impulse to the law of evolution and gradual slow development.

Limiting the teaching strictly to this our Earth, it may be shown that, as the ethereal forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by seven Dhyân‐Chohanic Centres of Force, so there are centres of creative power for every root or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable and animal life. This is, again, no “special creation,” nor is there any “design,” except in the general “ground‐plan” worked out by the Universal Law. But there are certainly “designers,” though these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the ever‐to‐be‐unknown (on our plane) Master Mason—the One Life and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, nor possibility of working on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is sufficiently proved by natural history. In the “creation” of new species, departing sometimes very widely from the parent stock, as in the great variety of the genus Felis—like the lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc.—it is the “designers” who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For it is these terrestrial Spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature—which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.

Were there no such thing as evolutionary cycles, as an eternal spiral progress into Matter with a proportionate obscuration of Spirit (though the two are one) followed by an inverse ascent into Spirit and the defeat of Matter—active and passive by turn—how could we explain the discoveries of Zoology and Geology? How is it that, on the dictum of authoritative Science, one can trace the animal life from the mollusc up to the great sea‐dragon, from the smallest land‐worm up again to the gigantic animals of the Tertiary period; and that the latter were once crossed is shown by the fact of all those species decreasing, dwindling down and becoming dwarfed. If the seeming process of development working from the less to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complex, were a universal law indeed, instead of being a very imperfect generalization of a mere secondary nature in the great cosmic process, and if there were no such cycles as those claimed, then the Mesozoic fauna and flora ought to change places with the latest Neolithic. It is the plesiosauri and the ichthyosauri that we ought to find developing from the present sea‐ and river‐reptiles, instead of these giving place to their dwarfed modern analogies. It is, again, our old friend, the good‐tempered elephant, that would be the fossil antediluvian ancestor, and the mammoth of the Pliocene age who would be in the menagerie; the megalonyx and the gigantic megatherium would be found instead of the lazy sloth in the forests of South America, in which the colossal ferns of the carboniferous periods would take the place of the mosses and the present trees—dwarfs, even the giants of California, in comparison with the Titan‐trees of past geological periods. Surely the organisms of the megasthenian world of the Tertiary and the Mesozoic ages must have been more complex and perfect than those of the microsthenian plants and animals of the present age? The dryopithecus, for instance, is more perfect anatomically, is more fit for a greater development of brain power, than the modern gorilla or gibbon. How is all this, then? Are we to believe that the constitution of all those colossal land‐ and sea‐dragons, of the gigantic flying reptiles, was not far more developed and complex than the anatomy of the lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and even of the whales—in short, of all those animals with which we are acquainted?

Let us admit, however, for argument’s sake, that all those cycles, races, septenary forms of evolution, and the tutti quanti of Esoteric teaching, are no better than a delusion and a snare. Let us agree with Science and say that man—instead of being an imprisoned “spirit,” and his vehicle, the shell or body, a gradually perfected and now complete mechanism for material and terrestrial uses, as claimed by the Occultists—is simply a more developed animal, whose primal form emerged from one and the same primitive germ on this Earth as the flying dragon and the gnat, the whale and the amoeba, the crocodile and the frog, etc. In this case, he must have passed through the identical developments and through the same process of growth as all the other mammals. If man is an animal, and nothing more, a highly intellectual “ex‐brute,” he should at least be allowed to have been a gigantic mammal of his kind, a “meganthropus” in his day. This is exactly what Esoteric Science shows to have taken place in the first three Rounds, and in this, as in most other things, it is more logical and consistent than Modern Science. It classifies the human body with the brute creation, and maintains it in the path of animal evolution, from first to last, while Science leaves man a parentless orphan born of sires unknown, an “unspecialized skeleton” truly! And this mistake is due to a stubborn rejection of the doctrine of cycles.

A. The Origin And Evolution Of The Mammalia: Science And Esoteric Phylogeny.

Having dealt almost exclusively with the question of the origin of man in the foregoing criticism of Western Evolutionism, it may not be amiss to define the position of the Occultists with regard to the differentiation of species. The pre‐human fauna and flora have been already dealt with generally in the Commentary on the Stanzas, and the truth of much of modern biological speculation has been admitted, e.g., the derivation of birds from reptiles, the partial truth of “natural selection,” and the transformation theory generally. It now remains to clear up the mystery of the origin of those first mammalian faunæ which M. de Quatrefages so brilliantly endeavours to prove contemporary with the Homo primigenius of the Secondary Age.

The somewhat complicated problem relating to the “Origin of Species”—more especially of the varied groups of fossil or existing mammalian faunæ—will be rendered less obscure by the aid of a diagram. It will then be apparent to what extent the “factors of organic evolution,” relied upon by Western Biologists,(1719) are to be considered as adequate to meet the facts. The line of demarcation between ethereo‐spiritual, astral and physical evolution must be drawn. Perhaps, if Darwinians deigned to consider the possibility of the second process, they would no longer have to lament the fact that:

We are referred entirely to conjecture and inference for the origin of the mammals!(1720)

At present the admitted chasm between the systems of reproduction of the oviparous vertebrates and mammalia constitutes a hopeless crux to those thinkers who, with the Evolutionists, seek to link all existing organic forms in a continuous line of descent.

Let us take, for instance, the case of the ungulate mammals, since it is said that in no other division do we possess such abundant fossil material. So much progress has been made in this direction, that in some instances the intermediate links between the modern and Eocene ungulates have been unearthed; a notable example being that of the complete proof of the derivation of the present one‐toed horse from the three‐toed anchitherium of the old Tertiary. This standard of comparison between Western Biology and the Eastern Doctrine could not, therefore, be improved upon. The pedigree here utilized, as embodying the views of Scientists in general, is that of Schmidt, based on the exhaustive researches of Rütimeyer. Its approximate accuracy—from the standpoint of evolutionism—leaves little to be desired:

Ungulate Mammals

At this, the midway point of evolution, Science comes to a standstill.

The root to which these two families lead back is unknown.(1721)

The Root According to Occultism

Schmidt’s diagram represents the realm explored by Western Evolutionists, the area in which climatic influences, “natural selection,” and all the other physical causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology and Palæontology find their province here in investigating the many physical agencies which so largely contribute, as has been shown by Darwin, Spencer and others, to the “segregation of species.” But even in this domain the sub‐conscious workings of the Dhyân‐Chohanic wisdom are at the root of all the “ceaseless striving towards perfection,” though its influence is vastly modified by those purely material causes which de Quatrefages terms the “milieu” and Spencer the “environment.”

The “midway point of evolution” is that stage where the astral prototypes definitely begin to pass into the physical, and thus become subject to the differentiating agencies now operative around us. Physical causation supervenes immediately on the assumption of the “coats of skin”—i.e., the physiological equipment in general. The forms of men and of other mammals previous to the separation of the sexes(1722) are woven out of astral matter, and possess a structure utterly unlike that of the physical organisms which eat, drink, digest, etc. The known physiological contrivances requisite for these functions were almost entirely evolved subsequently to the incipient physicalization of the seven Root‐Types out of the astral—during the “midway halt” between the two planes of existence. Hardly had the “ground‐plan” of evolution been limned out in these ancestral types, than there supervened the influence of the accessory terrestrial laws, familiar to us, resulting in the whole crop of mammalian species. Æons of slow differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.

The second diagram represents the domain of the purely astral prototypes previous to their descent into gross matter. Astral matter, it must be noted, is fourth‐state matter, having, like our gross matter, its own “protyle.” There are several protyles in Nature, corresponding to the various planes of matter. The two sub‐physical elemental kingdoms, the plane of mind, Manas, or fifth‐state matter, as also that of Buddhi, sixth‐state matter, are each and all evolved from one of the six protyles which constitute the basis of the Object‐Universe. The three “states” so‐ called of our terrestrial matter, known as the “solid,” “liquid,” and “gaseous,” are only, in strict accuracy, sub‐states. As to the former reality of the descent into the physical, which culminated in physiological man and animal, we have a palpable testimony in the fact of the so‐called spiritualistic “materializations.”

In all these instances a complete temporary mergence of the astral into the physical takes place. The evolution of physiological man out of the astral races of the early Lemurian age—the Jurassic age of Geology—is exactly paralleled by the “materialization” of “spirits” (?) in the séance room. In the case of Professor Crookes’ “Katie King,” the presence of a physiological mechanism—heart, lungs, etc.—was indubitably demonstrated!

This, in a way, is the Archetype of Goethe. Listen to his words:

Thus much we should have gained ... all the nine perfect organic beings ... [are] formed according to an archetype which merely fluctuates more or less in its very persistent parts and, moreover, day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of reproduction.

This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the Occult fact of the differentiation of species from the primal astral Root‐Types. Whatever the whole posse comitatus of “natural selection,” etc., may effect, the fundamental unity of structural plan remains practically unaffected by all subsequent modifications. The “unity of type” common, in a sense, to all the animal and human kingdoms, is not, as Spencer and others appear to hold, a proof of the consanguinity of all organic forms, but a witness to the essential unity of the “ground‐plan” Nature has followed in fashioning her creatures.

To sum up the case we may again avail ourselves of a tabulation of the actual factors concerned in the differentiation of species. The stages of the process itself need no further comment here, for they follow the basic principles underlying organic development, and we do not need to enter on the domain of the biological specialist.

FACTORS CONCERNED IN THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE.

Basic astral prototypes pass into the physical, the Dhyân‐Chohanic impulse, constituting Lamarck’s “inherent and necessary” law of development. It lies behind all minor agencies: variation transmitted by Heredity, Natural Selection, Sexual Selection Physiological Selection, Isolation. Correlation of Growth, Adaptation to Environment. (Intelligent as opposed to Mechanical Causation.)

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B. The European Palæolithic Races: Whence, And How Distributed

Is Science opposed to those who maintain that, down to the Quaternary period, the distribution of the human races was widely different from what it is now? Is Science against those who, further, maintain that the fossil men found in Europe‐although they have almost reached a plane of sameness and unity which continues till this day, regarded from the fundamental physiological and anthropological aspects—still differ, sometimes greatly, from the type of the now existing populations? The late M. Littré admits this in an article published by him in the Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1st, 1859) on the Mémoire called Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes (1849). Littré therein states that: (a) in these periods when the mammoths, exhumed in Picardy in company with man‐made hatchets, lived in the latter region, there must have been an eternal spring reigning over all the terrestrial globe;(1723) nature was the contrary of what it is now, and thus is left _an enormous margin for the antiquity of those __“__periods__”_; he then adds (b):

Spring, Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Liège, found in a grotto near Namur, in the mountain of Chauvaux, numerous human bones “of a race quite distinct from ours.”

Skulls exhumed in Austria offer a great analogy with those of negro races in Africa, according to Littré, while others, discovered on the shores of the Danube and the Rhine, resemble the skulls of the Caribs and of the ancient inhabitants of Peru and Chili. Still, the Deluge, whether Biblical or Atlantean, is denied. But further geological discoveries made Gaudry write conclusively:

Our forefathers were positively contemporaneous with the rhinoceros tichorrhinus, the hippopotamus major.

And he added that the soil called diluvial in geology—

Was formed partially at least after man’s apparition on earth.

Upon this, Littré pronounced himself finally. He then showed the necessity, in face of “the resurrection of so many old witnesses,” of rehandling all the origins, all the durations, and added that there was an age hitherto unknown to study—

Either at the dawn of the actual epoch, or, as I believe, at the beginning of the epoch which preceded it.

The types of the skulls found in Europe are of two kinds, as is well known: the orthognathous and the prognathous, or the Caucasian and the Negroid types—such as are now found only among the African and the lower savage tribes. Professor Heer—who argues that the facts of Botany necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis—has shown that the plants of the Neolithic lake‐villagers are mainly of African origin. How did these plants appear in Europe if there were no former point of union between Europe and Africa? How many thousand years ago did the seventeen men live whose skeletons were exhumed in the department of the Haute Garonne, in a squatting posture near the remains of a coal fire, with some amulets and broken crockery around them, and in company with the ursus spelæus, the elephas primigenius, the aurochs (regarded by Cuvier as a distinct species), the megaceros hibernicus—all antediluvian mammals? Certainly they must have lived in a most distant epoch, but not in one which carries us further back than the Quaternary. A much greater antiquity for man has yet to be proved. Dr. James Hunt, the late President of the Anthropological Society, puts it at nine million years. This man of Science, at any rate, makes some approach to our Esoteric computation, if we leave out of the computation the first two semi‐human, ethereal Races, and the early Third Race.

The question, however, arises—who were these Palæolithic men of the European Quaternary epoch? Were they aboriginal, or were they the outcome of some immigration dating back into the unknown past? The latter is the only tenable hypothesis, as all Scientists agree in eliminating Europe from the category of possible “cradles of mankind.” Whence, then, radiated the various successive streams of “primitive” men?

The earliest Palæeolithic men in Europe—about whose origin Ethnology is silent, and whose very characteristics are but imperfectly known, though expatiated on as “ape‐like” by imaginative writers such as Mr. Grant Allen—were of pure Atlantean and “Africo”‐Atlantean stocks.(1724) (It must be borne in mind that by this time the Atlantean Continent itself was a dream of the past.) Europe in the Quaternary epoch was very different from the Europe of to‐day, being then only in process of formation. It was united to Northern Africa—or rather to what is now Northern Africa—by a neck of land running across the present Straits of Gibraltar—Northern Africa thus constituting as it were an extension of the present Spain, while a broad sea filled the great basin of the Sahara. Of the vast Atlantis, the main bulk of which sank in the Miocene, there remained only Ruta and Daitya and a stray island or so. The Atlantean connections of the forefathers(1725) of the Palæolithic cave‐men are evidenced by the upturning of fossil skulls in Europe, reverting closely to the type of the West Indian Carib and ancient Peruvian—a mystery indeed for all those who refuse to sanction the “hypothesis” of a former Atlantic continent to bridge what is now an ocean. What are we also to make of the fact that while de Quatrefages points to that “magnificent race,” the tall Cro‐ Magnon cave‐men, and to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as representatives of one type, Virchow also allies the Basques with the latter in a similar way? Professor Retzius independently proves the relationship of the aboriginal American dolichocephalous tribes and these same Guanches. The several links in the chain of evidence are thus securely joined together. Legions of similar facts could be adduced. As to the African tribes—themselves diverging offshoots of Atlanteans modified by climate and conditions—they crossed into Europe over the peninsula which made the Mediterranean an inland sea. Fine races were many of these European cave‐men, as the Cro‐Magnon, for instance. But, as was to be expected, progress is almost non‐existent through the whole of the vast period allotted by Science to the Chipped‐Stone age.(1726) The cyclic impulse downwards weighs heavily on the stocks thus transplanted—the incubus of the Atlantean Karma is upon them. Finally, Palæolithic man makes room for his successor—and disappears almost entirely from the scene. Professor André Lefèvre asks in this connection:

Has the Polished succeeded the Chipped‐Stone Age by an imperceptible transition, or was it due to an invasion of brachycephalous Kelts? But whether the deterioration produced in the populations of La Vézère was the result of violent crossings, or of a general retreat northwards in the wake of the reindeer, is of little moment to us.

He continues:

Meantime the bed of the ocean has been upheaved, Europe is now fully formed, her flora and fauna are fixed. With the taming of the dog begins the pastoral life. We enter on those polished stone and bronze periods, which succeed each other at irregular intervals, which even overlap one another in the midst of ethnical migrations and fusions, at once more confused and of shorter duration than less advanced and more rudimentary ages. The primitive European populations are interrupted in their special evolution, and without perishing, become absorbed in other races, engulfed, as it were, by the successive waves of migration overflowing from Africa, possibly from a lost Atlantis [? far too late by æons of years] and from prolific Asia. On the one hand came the Iberians, on the other Pelasgians, Ligurians, Sicanians, Etruscans—all forerunners of the great Âryan Invasion [Fifth Race].(1727)

Section VI. Giants, Civilizations, and Submerged Continents Traced in History.

When statements such as are comprised in the above heading are brought forward, the writer is, of course, expected to furnish historical instead of legendary evidence in support of such claims. Is this possible? Yes; for evidence of such a nature is plentiful, and has simply to be collected and brought together in order to become overwhelming in the eyes of the unprejudiced.

Once the sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he may find out such evidence for himself. We give facts and show landmarks; let the wayfarer follow them. What is adduced here is amply sufficient for this century.

In a letter to Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies of the “grand old invalid of Ferney” should be attracted to the representatives of “knowledge and wisdom,” the ancient Brâhmans. He then adds a curious statement. He says:

But your Brâhmans are very young in comparison with their archaic instructors.(1728)

Bailly, who knew nought of the Esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria, believed, nevertheless, unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in several pre‐historic and civilized nations which had disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and traditions extensively, and he saw that the Arts and Sciences known to those we now call the “ancients,” were—

Not the achievements of any of the now or even then existing nations, nor of any of the historical peoples of Asia....

and that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindûs, their undeniable priority in the early part of their race had to be referred to a people or a race still more ancient and more learned than were even the Brâhmans themselves.(1729)

Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist par excellence, shared Bailly’s belief. He thought it quite likely that:

Long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature.(1730)

That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly a “question of historical facts.” For, he wrote:

I make great case of ancient traditions preserved through a long series of generations.

It was possible, he thought, that a foreign nation should, after instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces behind. When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather archaic, nation should not have left at least some recollection in the human mind, he answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and events. But the history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages of old Egypt had preserved it, and “it is so preserved to this day elsewhere.” The priests of Saïs said to Solon, according to Plato:

You are unacquainted with that most noble and excellent race of men, who once inhabited your country, from whom you and your whole present state are descended,(1731) though only a small remnant of this admirable people is now remaining.... These writings relate what a prodigious force your city once overcame, when a mighty warlike power, rushing from the Atlantic sea, spread itself with hostile fury over all Europe and Asia.(1732)

The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious nation.(1733)

What was this nation? The Secret Doctrine teaches that it was the latest seventh sub‐race of the Atlantean, already swallowed up in one of the early sub‐races of the Âryan stock, one that had been gradually spreading over the continent and islands of Europe, as soon as they had begun to emerge from the seas. Descending from the high plateaux of Asia, where the two races had sought refuge in the days of the agony of Atlantis, it had been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly emerged lands. The immigrant sub‐race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that virgin soil; had divided into many family races, which in their turn divided into nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phœnicians, and the Northern stocks, had thus proceeded from that one sub‐race. Thousands of years later, other races—the remnants of the Atlanteans—“yellow and red, brown and black,” began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers were defeated, and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries. Some of these lands became islands in course of time, owing to new geological convulsions. Being thus forcibly separated from the continents, the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the Atlantean stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.

Did not the Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with white savage chiefs; and has not the presence of African negro types in Europe in the pre‐historic ages been now ascertained? It is this presence of a foreign type associated with that of the negro, and also with that of the Mongolian, which is the stumbling‐block of Anthropology. The individual who lived at an incalculably distant period at La Naulette, in Belgium, is an example. Says an Anthropologist:

The caves on the banks of the Lesse, in South‐Eastern Belgium, afford evidence of what is, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by the Naulette jaw. Such man, however, had amulets of stone, perforated for the purpose of ornament; these are made of a psammite now found in the basin of the Gironde.(1734)

Thus Belgian man was extremely ancient. The man who was antecedent to the great flood of waters—which covered the highlands of Belgium with a deposit of lehm or upland gravel thirty metres above the level of the present rivers—must have combined the characters of the Turanian and the Negro. The Canstadt, or La Naulette, man may have been black, and he had nothing to do with the Âryan type whose remains are contemporary with those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of the Aquitaine bone‐caves belong to a far later period of history, and may not be as ancient as the former.

If the statement be objected to on the ground that Science does not deny the presence of man on Earth from an enormous antiquity, though that antiquity cannot be determined, since such presence is conditioned by the duration of geological periods, the age of which is not ascertained; if it is argued that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period; or again, that there have ever existed giants, three‐eyed and four‐armed and four‐legged men, androgynes, etc.—then the objectors are asked in their turn, “How do you know? What proof have you besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may be upset any day by new discoveries?” And these future discoveries are sure to prove that, whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthropologists may have been in complexion, he was in no respect apish. The Canstadt man, the Engis man, alike possessed essentially human attributes.(1735) People have looked for the missing link at the wrong end of the chain; and the Neanderthal man has long since been dismissed to the “limbo of all hasty blunders.” Disraeli divided man into the associates of the apes and the angels. Reasons are here given in favour of an “angelic theory”—as Christians would call it, as applicable to at least some of the races of men. At all events, if man be held to exist only since the Miocene period, even then humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of the Palæolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they say is mere arbitrary speculative guess‐work, invented by them to answer to, and fit in with, their own fanciful theories.

We speak of events hundreds of thousands of years old, nay, even millions of years old—if man date from the geological periods(1736)—not of any of those events which happened during the few thousand years of the pre‐ historic margin allowed by timid and ever‐cautious history. Yet there are men of Science who are almost of our way of thinking. From the brave confession of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who says that:

Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it—

down to the latest Palæontologists and Anthropologists, the majority of scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. Àpropos of Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethnological affinities and characteristics of the race which reared those Cyclopean erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a great civilization? At Cuelap, for instance, such are found, consisting—

Of a wall of wrought stones, 3,600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150 feet high, constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this mass was another, 600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 feet high, making an aggregate height of 300 feet. In it were rooms and cells.(1737)

A most suggestive fact is the startling resemblance between the architecture of these colossal buildings and that of the archaic European nations. Mr. Fergusson regards the analogies between the ruins of “Inca” civilization and the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece, as a coincidence—

The most remarkable in the history of architecture.... It is difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between them.

The “relation” is simply explained by the derivation of the stocks who devised these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic continent. The acceptance of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of this and similar problems in almost every branch of Modern Science.

Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by declaring that:

The truth, so long contested, of the coëxistence of man with the great extinct species [elephas primigenius, rhinoceros tichorrhinus, hyæna spelæa, ursus spelæus, etc.], appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by science.(1738)

It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages’ opinion. He says:

Man has in all probability seen Miocene times(1739) and consequently the entire Pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for believing that his traces will be found further back still?... He may then have been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and go back as far as the Secondary period.(1740)

Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto‐Âryan tribes began to settle on it when the British Islands(1741) and France were not even in existence. It is well known that “the tongue of the Ægyptian Sea,” or the Delta of lower Egypt, became firm land very gradually, and followed the highlands of Abyssinia; unlike the latter, which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it was very slowly formed, through long ages, from successive layers of sea‐slime and mud, deposited annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the present Nile. Yet even the Delta, as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited for more than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Âryan blood in them than their predecessors, arrived from the East, and conquered it from a people whose very name is lost to posterity, except in the Secret Books. It is this natural barrier of slime, which sucked in slowly and surely every boat that approached those inhospitable shores, that was, till within a few thousand years B.C., the best safeguard of the later Egyptians, who had managed to reach it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia, led on by Manu Vînâ in the day of Vishvâmitra.(1742)

So evident does the antiquity of man become with every day, that even the Church is preparing for an honourable surrender and retreat. The learned Abbé Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared that pre‐historic Palæontology and Archæology may, without any harm to the Scriptures, discover in the Tertiary beds as many traces as they please of Pre‐Adamite man.

Since it disregards all creations anterior to the last deluge but one [that which produced the diluvium, according to the Abbé], Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in the grey diluvium, in Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the other hand, however, geologists are not all agreed on regarding the men who inhabited the globe in these primitive ages as our ancestors.(1743)

The day on which the Church shall find that its only salvation lies in the Occult interpretation of the Bible may not be so far off as some imagine. Already many an Abbé and ecclesiastic has become an ardent Kabalist, and as many appear publicly in the arena, breaking a lance with Theosophists and Occultists in support of the metaphysical interpretation of the Bible. But they commence, unfortunately for them, at the wrong end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon the metaphysical in their Scriptures, to study and master that which relates to the purely physical—e.g., its hints on Geology and Ethnology. For such allusions to the septenary constitution of the Earth and Man, to the seven Rounds and Races, abound in the New as in the Old Testament, and are as visible as the Sun in the heavens to him who reads both symbolically. To what do the laws in chapter xxiii of Leviticus apply? What is the philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadal offerings and symbolical calculations as:

Ye shall count ... from the morrow after the Sabbath ... that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete.... And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish, etc.(1744)

We shall be contradicted, no doubt, when we say that all these “wave” and “peace” offerings were in commemoration of the seven “Sabbaths” of the Mysteries. These Sabbaths are seven Pralayas between seven Manvantaras, or what we call Rounds; for “Sabbath” is an elastic word, meaning a period of rest of whatever nature, as explained elsewhere. And if this is not sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which adds:

Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days [forty‐nine, 7 × 7, stages of activity, and forty‐nine stages of rest, on the seven Globes of the Chain, and then comes the rest of Sabbath, the fiftieth]; and ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.(1745)

That is, ye shall make an offering of your flesh or “coats of skin,” and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits. This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was an institution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews viâ the “Chaldees,” who were the “wise men” of a caste, not of a nation, a community of great Adepts come from their “Serpent‐holes,” who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if this interpretation from Leviticus (full of the disfigured Laws of Manu) is found too far‐fetched, then turn to Revelation. Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to the famous chapter xvii, with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,” or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity—“ceremonial magic” of old, with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce of ritualistic worship. The “mystery” of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul‐killing Churchianity and of Superstition.

The beast that ... was, and is not, ... and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains [seven Continents and seven Races] on which the woman sitteth—

the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have covered that symbol “with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs” who protested and do protest.

And there are seven kings [seven Races]; five are fallen [our Fifth Race included], and one is [the Fifth continues], and the other [the Sixth and the Seventh Races] is not yet come; and when he [the Race “king”] cometh, he must continue a short space.(1746)

There are many such apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find them out for himself.

If the Bible combines with Archæology and Geology to show that human civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological epochs—why should not the statements of The Secret Doctrine be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific to disbelieve, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the famous Thenay flints(1747) “were carved by the dryopithecus monkey”; or, with the Occultist, that the anthropomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically demonstrated, that:

There was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species of mammal identical with species now extant(1748)

—and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are(1749)—then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch,(1750) is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent Naturalists:

Thus, in the savage of quaternary ages, who had to fight against the mammoth with stone weapons for arms, we find all those craniological characters generally considered as the sign of great intellectual development.(1751)

Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe the learned Abbé Bourgeois.

As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the “Mentone man” (6ft. 8in.), others may yet be excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that:

In a tomb of the Neolithic age ... a skeleton of extraordinary size was found in 1807.

It was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.

And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7ft. to even 9ft. and 11 ft. high, this only proves—on the law of atavism, or the reäppearance of ancestral features of character—that there was a time when 9ft. and 10ft. was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo‐European race.

But as the subject has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what the moderns now know.

The great nation mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred, had fought with the Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race of Palæolithic savages. Nevertheless, even in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and initiates, no one seems to have preserved any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages; they were themselves descended from an alien race, and had settled in Egypt some 400,000 years before,(1752) but their Initiates had preserved all the records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the statues of 341 kings who had reigned over their little Atlanto‐Aryan sub‐race.(1753) If we allow only twenty years as an average figure for the reign of each king, the duration of the Egyptian Empire has to be pushed back, from the days of Herodotus, about 17,000 years.

Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern Archæologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years, and generously concede to Thebes, with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests—Initiates—journeying in a north‐westerly direction, by land, viâ what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phœnician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still travelling by land, on the north‐ western promontory of the New Continent.(1754)

What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits? The Archaic Records show the Initiates of the second sub‐race of the Âryan family moving from one land to the other for the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptacles for the ashes of generations to come. When did this occur? The fact of their crossing from France to Great Britain by land may give an idea of the date when such a journey could have been performed on terra firma.

It was when:

The level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher than it is at the present day. The valley of the Somme was not hollowed to the depth it has now attained; Sicily was joined to Africa, Barbary to Spain. Carthage, the Pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Uxmal and Palenque were not yet in existence, and the bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to undertake their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were yet unborn. What we know with certainty is that European man was contemporaneous with the extinct species of the quaternary epoch ... that he witnessed the upheaval of the Alps(1755) and the extension of the glaciers, in a word that he lived for thousands of years before the dawn of the remotest historical traditions. It is even possible that man was the contemporary of extinct mammalia of species yet more ancient ... of the elephas meridionalis of the sands of St. Prest, or at the least of the elephas antiquus, assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius, since their bones are found in company with carved flints in several English caves, associated with those of the rhinoceros hæemitechus and even of the machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date. M. Ed. Lartet is also of opinion that there is nothing really impossible in the existence of man as early as the Tertiary period.(1756)

If “there is nothing impossible” scientifically, in the idea, and it may be admitted that man was already in existence as early as the Tertiary period, then it is just as well to remind the reader that Mr. Croll places the beginning of that period 2,500,000 years back; but there was a time when he assigned to it 15,000,000 years.

And if all this may be said of European man, how great is the antiquity of the Lemuro‐Atlantean and of the Atlanto‐Âryan man? Every educated person who follows the progress of Science, knows how all vestiges of man during the Tertiary period are received. The calumnies that were poured on Desnoyers in 1863, when he announced to the Institute of France that he had made a discovery

In the undisturbed Pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartres, proving the coëxistence of man and the elephas meridionalis—

were equal to the occasion. The later discovery, in 1867, by the Abbé Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch, and the reception it was given at the Pre‐historic Congress held at Brussels in 1872, proves that the average man of Science will see only that which he wishes to see.(1757)

The modern Archæologist, though speculating ad infinitum upon the dolmens and their builders, knows, in fact, nothing either of them or of their origin. Yet these weird and often colossal monuments of unhewn stones—which consist generally of four or seven gigantic blocks placed together—are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in groups or rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and variously upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks. People name them “devil’s altars,” druidic stones, and giant tombs. The stones of Carnac in Morbihan, Brittany—nearly a mile in length and numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows—are twin sisters of those at Stonehenge. The conical menhir of Loch‐maria‐ker, in Morbihan, measures twenty yards in length and nearly two yards across. The menhir of Champ Dolent (near St. Malo) rises thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth below. Such dolmens and pre‐historic monuments are met with in almost every latitude. They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark (among the local tumuli from twenty‐seven to thirty‐five feet in height); in Shetland; in Sweden, where they are called Ganggriften (or tombs with corridors); in Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hünengräben); in Spain, where is the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga; in Africa; in Palestine and Algeria; in Sardinia, with the Nuraghi and Sepolture dei Giganti, or tombs of giants; in Malabar; in India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (Giants) and of the Râkshasas, the Men‐demons of Lankâ; in Russia and Siberia, where they are known as the Koorgan; in Peru and Bolivia, where they are termed the Chulpas or burial places, etc.

There is no country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are they all connected with serpents and dragons, with alligators and crocodiles? Because remains of “Palæolithic man” were, it is thought, found in some of them, and because, in the funeral mounds of America, bodies of later races were discovered with the usual paraphernalia of bone necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns, etc., they are, therefore, ancient tombs! But surely the two famous mounds—one in the Mississippi valley and the other in Ohio—known respectively as the “Alligator Mound” and the “Great Serpent Mound,” were never meant for tombs.(1758) Yet one is told authoritatively that the mounds, and the mound or dolmen builders, are all “Pelasgic” in Europe, antecedent to the Incas in America, yet not of “extremely distant times.” They are built by “no race of dolmen builders,” who never existed save in the earlier archæological fancy (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp). Finally Virchow’s opinion of the giant tombs of Germany is now accepted as an axiom. Says that German Biologist:

The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.

And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.(1759)

That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the “tombs” is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them. Cremation was universal till a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,(1760) and man’s size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub‐race of the Âryan stock, which sub‐race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,(1761) or rather the ashes of generations of giants.

Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so‐called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World’s history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,” both good and bad.

It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejecting à priori the actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after all is Ancient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round‐headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair‐faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively and de facto side by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam‐Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair‐ complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam‐Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.

In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.

If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities “Los Campos de los Gigantes,” the “Fields of Giants,” are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches. “All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,” and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.

Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise, Such men as live in these degenerate days.

If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller’s tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty‐six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.

That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In the Journal of the Anthropological Institute(1762) such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of the Bible can never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by “giants,” and further adding that they were “hairy” men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these “satyrs”—some alive, others “pickled” and “preserved.” The word “giants” being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the “Great Dragons,” and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the “Gods” and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.

The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the “Mighty Serpent,” the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the “Magi of the Gauls and Britons.” But they were more than that. The author of Indian Antiquities finds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;(1763) others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.

Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of “worlds,” as also in that of seven “creations” (of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven‐ fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In the Book of God we read:

The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas. Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.

And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:

When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.(1764)

One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter iii of the Second Epistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:

There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.(1765)

If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of “Peter.” What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root‐Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.

It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the Avesta the Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. The Avesta speaks of the three thirds of the Earth because the Rig Veda mentions:

Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.(1766)

But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. The Avesta has not borrowed the idea from the Rig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The “three strata or layers” do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth is septempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it is tripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of the Avesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess‐work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth’s Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three “zones,” if this word is read “planes.” As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the “septempartite earth.”(1767) For:

According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, the seven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth [which they surely are. For] between them there flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.(1768)

The “Ocean” is Space, of course, for the latter was called “Waters of Space” before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of the Yasna).(1769) But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger’s work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the “incongruities” of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such “incongruities” and “coïncidences” concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in the Purânas, namely:

The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view, the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.(1770)

Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator, “the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,” and “the other names” do not mean “the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,” but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:

Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West

—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in the Book of Dzyan (11) thus:

The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The “Earth” (our world) is tripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given in Vendidâd (xix. 39), showing that:

Qaniratha alone is combined with imat, “this” (earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word “avat,” “that” or those—upper earths.

Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.

The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(1771) Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:

Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna(1772)—

where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:

That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—

but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.(1773)

These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.

Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it. It was the last to produce animals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator’s) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.

Grote’s suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.

A. Some Statements About The Sacred Islands And Continents In The Classics, Explained Esoterically.

All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many others. But as no Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knew, posterity got only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a Moralist than as a Geographer and Ethnologist or Historian, the Greek Philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one event which he located on one comparatively small island 3,000 stadia long by 2,000 wide (or about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland); whereas the priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as “all Asia and Lybia” put together.(1774) But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato’s narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.(1775) It was not he who invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks in his Odyssey of the Atlantes—who are our Atlanteans—and of their island. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses. The Atlantes and the Atlantides of Mythology are based upon the Atlantes and the Atlantides of History. Both Sanchuniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much their accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.

In our own day we witness the extraordinary fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakspere and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful Races—the Lemurians and the Atlanteans—have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic.

Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes—a people of Western Africa—who gave their name to Mount Atlas: who were vegetarians, and “whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams”; and who, moreover,

Daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them.

These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas gives the key to this. If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to the other statement—that they daily “cursed the sun”—this again had nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration that grew with the Race. It is explained in our Commentaries.

They [the sixth sub‐race of the Atlanteans] used magic incantations even against the Sun—

failing in which they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the Moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the Gods. Thence the same traditions, taking form in the Bible, about the antediluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, and found also in the Book of Enoch.

Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing the land in which all the Gods had received their birth; as also of having had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them Astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from antiquity.

The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old Continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and a universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean; for both Continents bore Races instructed by divine Masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reäppearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso—the “watery deep.” Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the “sustainer” of the huge pillars that separate the Heavens from the Earth. He is their “supporter.” And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,(1776) Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and join his brother Iapetus in the depths of Tartarus.(1777) Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning:

[Atlas] standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the universe, and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the earth and the celestial vault—the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere.(1778)

For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their horizons on its “shoulders.”

Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron’s translation of the Homeric word ἕχει by sustinet, as it is not possible to see:

How Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in various localities.

If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a Continent in the West said to support Heaven and Earth at once,(1779) i.e., the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders support the celestial vault—an allusion to the gigantic peaks of the Lemurian and Atlantean Continents—the epithet “supporter” becomes very correct. The term conservator for the Greek word ἕχει, which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning φυλάσσει and ἐπιμελεῖταυ, does not render the same sense.

The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running along the terrestrial border or disc. These mountain peaks plunged their roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost Continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thus, the Lybians called Mount Atlas the “Pillar of Heaven,” according to Herodotus,(1780) and Pindar qualified the later Ætna as the “Celestial Pillar.”(1781) Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when the African continent had not yet been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, independent, belonging to the Continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell,(1782) for Australia is now part of the Eastern Continent. Proud Atlas, according to Esoteric tradition, having sunk one‐third of its size into the waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.

This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo‐ Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told.(1783) So secret was the knowledge of the last island of Atlantis, indeed—on account of the superhuman powers possessed by its inhabitants, the last direct descendants of the Gods or Divine Kings, as it was thought—that to divulge its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as much in his ever‐suspected Meropis, when he speaks of the Phœnicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.

There are Orientalists and Historians—and they form the majority—who, while feeling quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the Bible, and some of the events narrated in it, show great disgust at the “immorality” in the Pantheons of India and Greece.(1784) We may be told that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato, express the same disgust; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented—“those miserable stories of the poets,” as Euripides phrases it.(1785)

But there may have been another reason for this, perhaps. To those who knew that there was more than one key to Theogonic Symbolism, it was a mistake to have expressed it in a language so crude and misleading. For if the educated and learned Philosopher could discern the kernel of wisdom under the coarse rind of the fruit, and knew that the latter concealed the greatest laws and truths of psychic and physical nature, as well as the origin of all things—not so with the uninitiated profane. For him the dead‐letter was religion; the interpretation—sacrilege. And this dead‐ letter could neither edify nor make him more perfect, seeing that such an example was given him by his Gods. But to the Philosopher—especially the Initiate—Hesiod’s Theogony is as historical as any history can be. Plato accepts it as such, and gives out as much of its truths as his pledges permitted.

The fact that the Atlantes claimed Uranus for their first king, and that Plato commences his story of Atlantis by the division of the great Continent by Neptune, the grandson of Uranus, shows that there were continents before Atlantis and kings before Uranus. For Neptune, to whose lot the great Continent fell, finds on a small island only one human couple made of clay—i.e., the first physical human man, whose origin began with the last sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race. It is their daughter Clito that the God marries, and it is his eldest son Atlas who receives for his part the mountain and the continent which were called by his name.(1786)

Now all the Gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindû Pantheon and the Rishis, were the septiform personations (1) of the Noumena of the Intelligent Powers of Nature; (2) of Cosmic Forces; (3) of Celestial Bodies; (4) of Gods or Dhyân Chohans; (5) of Psychic and Spiritual Powers; (6) of Divine Kings on Earth, or the incarnations of the Gods; and (7) of Terrestrial Heroes or Men. The knowledge how to discern among these seven forms the one that is intended, belonged at all times to the Initiates, whose earliest predecessors had created this symbolical and allegorical system.

Thus while Uranus, or the Host representing this celestial group, reigned and ruled over the Second Race and their then Continent, Cronus or Saturn governed the Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptune(1787) and others fought in the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole Earth in the day of the Fourth Race. Poseidonis, or the last island of Atlantis—the “third step” of Idas‐pati, or Vishnu, in the mystic language of the Secret Books—lasted till about 12,000 years ago.(1788) The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in claiming that it was their country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas, where “the Gods were born”—i.e., “incarnated.” But it was after their fourth incarnation that they became, for the first time, human kings and rulers.

Diodorus speaks of Uranus as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either consciously or otherwise, the Continents; but as we have shown, Plato indirectly corrects the statement. The first astronomical teacher of men was Uranus, because he is one of the seven Dhyân Chohans of that Second Period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara, that of Svârochisha, among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding Gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis,(1789) the teacher of Astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the names of Brahmâ. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the Sky, Ouranos), and name him as their first teacher of Astronomy. Uranus gave birth to the Titans of the Third Race, and it is they, personified by Saturn‐Cronus, who mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who fell into generation, when “creation by will was superseded by physical procreation,” they needed Uranus no more.

And here a short digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence of the last scholarly production of Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century, “The Greater Gods of Olympos,” the ideas of the general public about Greek Mythology have been still further perverted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as, “the true key to the Homeric conception,” whereas this “key” is merely a “blind.”

[Poseidon] is indeed essentially of the earth earthy ... strong and self‐asserting, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive—

but this is because he symbolizes the Spirit of the Fourth Root‐Race, the Ruler of the Seas, that Race which lives above the surface of the seas,(1790) which is composed of the giants, the children of Eurymedon, the race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan, and the one‐eyed Cyclops. Though Zeus reign over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules, and who is the true key to the triad of the Cronid Brothers, and to our human races. Poseidon and Nereus are one; the former the Ruler or Spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of its submersion, the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the living Race, Nereus, its Spirit, reïncarnated in the subsequent Fifth or Âryan Race; and this is what the Greek scholar of England has not yet discovered, or even dimly perceived. And yet he makes many observations upon the “artfulness” of Homer, who never names Nereus, at whose designation we arrive only through the patronymic of the Nereids!

Thus the tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to confine their speculations to the exoteric images of Mythology and to lose sight of their inner meaning; and it is remarkably illustrated in the case of Mr. Gladstone, as we have shown. While almost the most conspicuous figure of our age as a statesman, he is at the same time one of the most cultured scholars to whom England has given birth. Grecian literature has been the beloved study of his life, and he has found time amid the bustle of public affairs to enrich contemporary literature with contributions to Greek scholarship, which will make his name famous through coming generations. At the same time, as his sincere admirer, the present writer cannot but feel a deep regret that posterity, while acknowledging his profound erudition and splendid culture, will yet, in the greater light which must then shine upon the whole question of Symbolism and Mythology, judge that he has failed to grasp the spirit of the religious system which he has often criticized from the dogmatic Christian standpoint. In that future day it will be perceived that the Esoteric key to the mysteries of the Christian as well as of the Grecian Theogonies and Sciences, is the Secret Doctrine of the pre‐historic nations, which, along with others, he has denied. It is that doctrine alone which can trace the kinship of all human religious speculations, or even of so‐called “revelations,” and it is this teaching which infuses the spirit of life into the lay figures on the Mounts of Meru, Olympus, Walhalla, or Sinai. If Mr. Gladstone were a younger man, his admirers might hope that his scholastic studies would be crowned by the discovery of this underlying truth. As it is, he but wastes the golden hours of his declining years in futile disputations with that giant free‐thinker, Col. Ingersoll, each fighting with the weapons of exoteric temper, drawn from the arsenals of ignorant Literalism. These two great controversialists are equally blind to the true Esoteric meaning of the texts which they hurl at each other’s heads like iron bullets, while the world alone suffers by such controversies; since the one helps to strengthen the ranks of Materialism, and the other those of blind Sectarianism of the dead‐letter. And now we may return once more to our immediate subject.

Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our commentators. The power of names is great, and has been known since the first men were instructed by the Divine Masters. And as Solon had studied it, he translated the “Atlantean” names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of “Atlantis.”

Thus, in the Critias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself surrounded by mountain chains, and the plain was smooth and level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other; they surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.(1791)

Now in other places the entire size of the island of Poseidonis is given as about the same as that assigned here to the “plain around the city” alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great Continent, and the other to its last remnant—Plato’s island.

And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million men; its navy as 1,200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!

The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters—seven sub‐races—whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope, Merope, Alcyone, and Celæno. This ethnologically—as they are credited with having married Gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides have become the seven Pleiades (?). In Occult Science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to Karmic Law.

Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria, confused with Atlantis several thousands of years before our era; and these were the Egyptians, the Phœnicians (Sanchuniathon), and the old Greeks (Diodorus, after Plato). But the oldest civilized country of Asia—India—can likewise be shown to claim the same descent. Sub‐races, guided by Karmic Law or destiny, repeat unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother‐races. As the comparatively fair Brâhmans—when invading India with its dark‐coloured Dravidians—have come from the North, so the Âryan Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The Occult Sciences show that the founders, the respective groups of the seven Prajâpatis, of the Root‐Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find:

He who understands the age of Dhruva(1792) who measures 9090 mortal years, will understand the times of the Pralayas, the final destiny of nations, O Lanoo.

Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should locate its great Progenitors and Saints in Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is 70,000 years, however, since the Pole of the Earth pointed to the further end of Ursa Minor’s tail; and many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the constellation of Ursa Major.

The Âryan Race was born and developed in the far North, though after the sinking of the Continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further South into Asia. Hence Prometheus is the son of Asia, and Deucalion, his son, the Greek Noah—he who created men out of the stones of mother Earth—is called a northern Scythe, by Lucian, and Prometheus is made the brother of Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the snows.(1793)

Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the Gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phœnicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed.(1794) All the “fables” of Greece would be found to be built on historical facts, if that history had only passed to posterity unadulterated by myths. The “one‐eyed” Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Cœlus and Terra—three in number, according to Hesiod—were the last three sub‐races of the Lemurians, the “one‐eye” referring to the wisdom‐eye;(1795) for the two front eyes were fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of Ithaca himself was saved by putting out the eye of Polyphemus with a fire‐ brand, is based upon the psycho‐physiological atrophy of the “third eye.” Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a “Sage” in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.(1796) His adventure with the latter—a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey—is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of the Third Race to lose their all‐penetrating spiritual eye. The other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclopes to avenge the death of his son Asclepius, does not refer to the three sub‐races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the “wisdom‐eye.” The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the South as much as in the North; the latter were confined to the North solely. Thus Apollo—pre‐ eminently the God of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration, killed them—his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal—and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions.(1797) Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean God is the Sun personified, which during the course of the Sidereal Year—25,868 years—changes the climates on the Earth’s surface, making frigid regions of tropical, and vice versâ. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his “Greater Gods of Olympos”:

The qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athenê) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology.(1798)

The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo’s mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phœbus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries, wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle.(1799) Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its Race—geologically.(1800)

When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine—Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of “birds,” the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels—then the bright God assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of seership, when he sends the astral double of Æneas to the battle field,(1801) and has the gift of appearing to his seers without being visible to other persons present,(1802) a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the North Wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe—the Atlantean Race—the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, personifying the seven sub‐races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches(1803) allegorizes the history of the two Continents. The wrath of the “Sons of God,” or of “Will and Yoga,” at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great;(1804) and the destruction of the children of Niobe by the children of Latona—Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the Earth’s axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms—is thus very clear.(1805) The fable about the never‐ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain—Atlantis covered with water—is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades, or Atlantides, the grand‐daughter of Atlas therefore,(1806) because she represents the last generations of the doomed Continent.

A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous influence on antiquity. He adds:

If these mythical names are mere allegories, then all that they have of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real tradition—however altered—then the ancient history is wholly their history.(1807)

So much so, that all ancient writings—prose and poetry—are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, the first physical Races, though the Third and the Fourth in number in the evolution of Fourth Round Humanity on our Globe. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the Age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash‐wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot, they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet.(1808) Such were the giants of the first physical Races.

The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna, ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the “Sons of God,” or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge to rid the Earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zarathushtra as one of the “Sons of God.” It says:

Thou, O Zarathushtra, didst make all demons [Sorcerers], who before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth [helped them to submersion].

The Lemurians, and also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes—the “Sons of Night” or Darkness, and the “Sons of the Sun” or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and “tried to wrench the Lord of Light” from their better‐favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the Ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months’ duration in the polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the North where the year was divided into a day and night each of six months’ duration, for Pliny distinctly says so.(1809) They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mæotis—between 45° and 50° latitude. Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians—which nation stopped near the Tanais, after having crossed Asia.

These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year.(1810)

As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor:

Sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves.(1811)

Even the writers of the Zohar knew this fact, as it is written:

In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old [or the Ancient], we learn ... there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants.(1812)

The island of Delos, the Asteria of Greek Mythology, was never in Greece, for this country, in that day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern Seas. One calls it Basilea, or “Royal”;(1813) the other, Pliny, names it Osericta,(1814) a word which, according to Rudbeck,(1815) had

A significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the Divine Kings or God‐kings—

or again the “Royal Island of the Gods,” because the Gods were born there, i.e., the Divine Dynasties of the Kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let Geographers and Geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiöld on his “Vega” voyage in the Arctic regions.(1816) The Secret Books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once, since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a Paradise before they became Hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks, and the cold Realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the Goddess‐Queen of the country of the dead, “holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet it was the birthplace of Apollo, who was the brightest of Gods, in Heaven—astronomically—as he was the most enlightened of the Divine Kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad, wherein Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the God of the Four Races) and six times in human form,(1817) i.e., as connected with the Divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries—which have now become uninhabitable—as well as the name given to “man” both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church Fathers for inventing a Hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality.(1818)

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths—known to and communicating with the Greeks—who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub‐races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root‐ races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub‐race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name, it is averred, came from pelagus, the “great sea.” Noah’s Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men—or rather of nations—who were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldæan Xisuthrus, the Hindû Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun—the “Beloved of the Gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe—or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the Gods did the same in the North, are all identical as personages. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the Continent and the Island of Atlantis.

The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition viâ Pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote about the Titans—the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, a race which descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birthplace of the first giants. The Commentaries on the Sacred Books explain that the said region was the far North, the Polar Lands now, the Pre‐Lemurian earliest Continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.

But who were the Nephilim of Genesis (vi. 4)? There were Palæolithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the Book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race, and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean Race. What is the meaning of Poseidon’s amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric Records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of those Lemuro‐Atlantean Races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, “monsters,” as the Stanzas have it.

Now Mythology, built upon Hesiod’s Theogony, which is but a poetized record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Cronus for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with a hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub‐races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in Mythology every personage almost is a God or Demi‐god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect,(1819) and that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub‐races, the Esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole Globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the Earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called the “Eternal or Perpetual Land,” and the Antarctic the “Ever‐living” and the “Concealed”; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reäppear in turn, into and above the Great Waters.

From the first appearance of the great Continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants have been imprisoned in their circle by Cronus. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon—or Neptune—hence by the seas, which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad makes it Tartarus.(1820) When the Gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus—the deity of the Fourth Race—the Father of the Gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants that they might help him to conquer the Gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.(1821) The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Râkshasas of Lankâ and the Bhârateans, the mèlée of the Atlanteans and Âryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds, or Peris, became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the Angels of God and the Angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub‐race born but yesterday, and one of the latest issues of the Âryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.

But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar—as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire—that Hesiod’s Theogony is based upon historical facts,(1822) it becomes easier for the Occult Teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from Mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.

Such symbols as are found in all the exoteric creeds are so many landmarks of pre‐historic truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then Hyperborean and Saturnine;(1823) thus showing the Golden Age and Reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many‐sided in its character indeed—climatically, ethnologically and morally. For the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi‐sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling‐places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations, and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations, we may seek for some more corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.

Section VII. Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Existence of Several Submerged Continents.

It may not be amiss—for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of a lost Miocene Atlantis into an “antiquated myth”—to append a few scientific admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely indifferent to such questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit that, in any case, a cautious agnosticism as to geological problems concerning the remote past is far more philosophical than à priori denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient data.

Meanwhile two very interesting instances, that have been lately met with, may be pointed out as “confirming” certain passages in the letter of a Master, published in Esoteric Buddhism. The eminence of the authorities will not be questioned (we italicize the corresponding passages):

Extract from Esoteric Buddhism, p. 70.

(1.)

The sinking of Atlantis (the group of continents and isles) began during the Miocene period ... and it culminated first in the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps, and second with that of the last of the fair islands mentioned by Plato.

Extract from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.

(1.)

Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis—a continent or archipelago of large islands occupying the area of the North Atlantic? There is, perhaps, nothing unphilosophical in the hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, “The Alps have acquired 4,000 and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene epoch” (Lyell’s Principles, p. 256, 2nd Ed.)—a Post‐Miocene depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths.(1824)

Extract from Esoteric Buddhism, pp. 64, 65.

(2.)

Lemuria ... should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent than Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned with their high civilizations and “gods”; yet between the two catastrophes a period of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria flourishing and ending her career just about that lapse of time before the early part of the Eocene age, since its Race was the Third. Behold the relics of that once great nation in some of the flat‐headed aborigines of your Australia.

Extract from an article in the Popular Science Review, v. 18, by Professor Seemann, Ph.D., F.L.S., V.‐P.A.S.

(2.)

It would be premature to say, because no evidence has yet been adduced, that men may not have existed in the Eocene age, especially as it can be shown that a race of men, the lowest we know of, co‐exists with that remnant of the Eocene flora which still survives on the continent and islands of Australia.

Extract from The Pedigree of Man, p. 81.

Hæckel, who fully accepts the reality of a former Lemuria, also regards the Australians as direct descendants of the Lemurians. Persistent forms of both [his Lemurian] stems are in all probability still surviving, of the former in the Papuans and Hottentots, of the latter in the Australians and in one division of the Malays.

With regard to a former civilization, of which a portion of these degraded Australians are the last surviving offshoot, the opinion of Gerland is strongly suggestive. Commenting upon the religion and mythology of the tribes, he writes:

The statement that Australian civilization [?] indicates a higher grade, is nowhere more clearly proved than here [in the province of religion] where everything resounds like the expiring voices of a previous and richer age.... The idea that the Australians have no trace of religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated.(1825)

As to Hæckel’s view of the relationship between the Australians and the Malays, as two branches of a common stock, he is in error when he classes the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a mixed stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub‐races with the seventh sub‐race of the Third Root‐Race. Like the Hottentots, they are of indirect Lemuro‐Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact—to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma—that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the Globe, among those races, whose “time is up”—among just those stocks, be it remarked, which Esoteric Philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all‐sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. Even the Materialist Lefèvre says:

Nothing can save those that have run their course. It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle.... The peoples that have been relatively most spared, those who have defended themselves most valiantly, Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion.(1826)

True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed, an instance of the operation of Cyclic Law, difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the “destined cycle” and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their “appointed hour”? The answer that it is due to a “mental disproportion” between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden “checks to fertility” which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize, with Occultists, that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lèfevre remarks:

The time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three great human types.

The time is before the Sixth Root‐Race dawns; the three types are the white (Âryan, Fifth Root‐Race), the yellow, and the African negro—with their crossings (Atlanto‐European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc.—all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root‐Race runs through a gamut of seven sub‐races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the “why.” The tide‐wave of incarnating Egos has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity. Some extraordinary and unexplained statistics as to race extinction are given by de Quatrefages.(1827) No solution, except on Occult lines, is able to account for these.

But we have digressed from our direct subject. Let us hear now what Professor Huxley has to say on the subject of former Atlantic and Pacific Continents.

He writes in Nature:

There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or geological evidence at present accessible, to render untenable the hypothesis that an area of the Mid‐Atlantic or Pacific sea‐bed as big as Europe, should have been upheaved as high as Mont Blanc, and have subsided again any time since the Palæozoic epoch, if there were any grounds for entertaining it.(1828)

That is to say, then, that there is nothing to militate against positive evidence of the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postulates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Berthold Seemann assures us in the Popular Science Review that:

The facts which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of several large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present floras of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental connection between South‐Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests upon a solid historical basis.... Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river‐banks (from Asia generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the East. The West also furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a later period, was to facilitate communication between the two continents in such a remarkable manner. At that time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just [?] just rising above the ocean.(1829)

And in another number of the same review(1830) Mr. W. Duppa Crotch, M.A., F.L.S., in an article entitled “The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations,” alludes to the same subject:

Is it probable that land could have existed where now the broad Atlantic rolls? All tradition says so: old Egyptian records speak of Atlantis, as Strabo and others have told us. The Sahara itself is the sand of an ancient sea, and the shells which are found upon its surface prove that, no longer ago than the Miocene period, a sea rolled over what is now desert. The voyage of the “Challenger” has proved the existence of three long ridges(1831) in the Atlantic Ocean,(1832) one extending for more than three thousand miles, and lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account for the marvellous similarity of the fauna of the Atlantic islands.(1833)...

The submerged continent of Lemuria, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is considered to afford an explanation of many difficulties in the distribution of organic life, and, I think, the existence of a Miocene Atlantis will be found to have a strong elucidative bearing on subjects of greater interest [truly so!] than the migration of the lemming. At all events, if it can be shown that land existed in former ages where the North Atlantic now rolls, not only is a motive found for these apparently suicidal migrations, but also a strong collateral proof that what we call instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial inheritance of previously acquired experience.

At certain periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and perish. Coming, as they do, from all parts of Norway, the powerful instinct which survives throughout ages as an inheritance from their progenitors impels them to seek a continent, once existing but now submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a watery grave.

In an article containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace’s Island Life—a work devoted largely to the question of the distribution of animals, etc.—Mr. Starkie Gardiner writes:

By a process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of different kinds, he arrives at the conclusion that the distribution of life upon the land as we now see it has been accomplished without the aid of important changes in the relative positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we must believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa, New Zealand and Australia, Europe and America, have been united at some period not remote geologically, and that seas to the depth of 1,000 fathoms have been bridged over; but we must treat as “utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command” [! !], the supposition that temperate Europe and temperate America, Australia, and South America, have ever been connected, except by way of the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, and that lands now separated by seas of more than 1,000 fathoms depth have ever been united.

Mr. Wallace, it must be admitted, has succeeded in explaining the chief features of existing life distribution, without bridging the Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the Poles, yet I cannot help thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more easily explained by admitting the former existence of the connection between the coast of Chili and Polynesia(1834) and Great Britain and Florida, shadowed by the sub‐marine banks which stretch between them. Nothing is urged that renders these more direct connections impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why the floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The route by which [according to the Anti‐Atlantean and Lemurian hypotheses of Wallace] the floras of South America and Australia are supposed to have mingled, is beset by almost insurmountable obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number of subtropical American plants in our Eocenes necessitates a connection more to the South than the present 1,000 fathom line. Forces are unceasingly acting, and there is no reason why an elevating force once set in action in the centre of an ocean should cease to act until a continent is formed. They have acted and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent geological time, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits repeatedly that sea‐beds have been elevated 1,000 fathoms, and islands have risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to suppose that the upheaving forces are limited in power, is, it seems to me, to again quote from Island Life, “utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command.”(1835)

The “father” of English Geology—Sir Charles Lyell—was a uniformitarian in his views of continental formation. We find him saying:

Professors Unger (Die Versunkene Insel Atlantis) and Heer (Flora Tertiaria Helvetiæ) have advocated on botanical grounds the former existence of an Atlantic Continent during some part of the tertiary period, as affording the only plausible explanation that can be imagined of the analogy between the Miocene flora of Central Europe, and the existing flora of Eastern America. Professor Oliver, on the other hand, after showing how many of the American types found fossil in Europe are common to Japan, inclines to the theory, first advanced by Dr. Asa Gray, that the migration of species, to which the community of types in the Eastern States of North America, and the Miocene flora of Europe is due, took place when there was an overland communication from America to Eastern Asia between the fiftieth and sixtieth parallels of latitude, or south of Behring’s Straits, following the direction of the Aleutian islands. By this course they may have made their way, at any epoch, Miocene, Pliocene, or Postpliocene, antecedently to the Glacial epoch, to Amoorland, on the East coast of Northern Asia.(1836)

The unnecessary difficulties and complications here incurred in order to avoid the hypothesis of an Atlantic Continent, are really too apparent to escape notice. If the botanical evidences stood alone, scepticism would be partially reasonable; but in this case all branches of Science converge to one point. Science has made blunders, and has exposed itself to greater errors than it would be exposed to by the admission of our two now invisible Continents. It has denied even the undeniable, from the days of the Mathematician Laplace down to our own, and that only a few years ago.(1837) We have Professor Huxley’s authority for saying that there is no à priori improbability whatever against possible evidences supporting the belief. But now that the positive evidence is brought forward, will that eminent Scientist admit the corollary?

Touching on the problem in another place Sir Charles Lyell tells us:

Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, we gather much information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed almost all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of the world [continental, not cosmic, catastrophes]. We learn from Plutarch that this was the theme of one of the hymns of Orpheus, so celebrated in the fabulous ages of Greece. It was brought by him from the banks of the Nile; and we even find in his verses, as in the Indian systems, a definite period assigned for the duration of every successive world. The returns of great catastrophes were determined by the period of the Annus Magnus, or great year, a cycle composed of the revolutions of the sun, moon, and planets, and terminating when these return together to the same sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to have set out.... We learn particularly from the Timæus of Plato that the Egyptians believed the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges. The sect of Stoics adopted most fully the system of catastrophes destined at certain intervals to destroy the world. These, they taught, were of two kinds—the cataclysm, or destruction by deluge, which sweeps away the whole human race, and annihilates all the animal and vegetable productions of nature, and the ecpyrosis, or conflagration, which destroys the globe itself [submarine volcanoes]. From the Egyptians they derived the doctrine of the gradual debasement of man from a state of innocence [nascent simplicity of the first sub‐races of each Root‐Race]. Towards the termination of each era the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of men [degeneracy into magical practices and gross animality of the Atlanteans], and a shock of the elements, or a deluge, overwhelmed them; after which calamity, Astræa again descended on the earth to renew the golden age [dawn of a new Root‐Race].(1838)

Astræa, the Goddess of Justice, is the last of the deities to forsake the Earth, when the Gods are said to abandon it and to be taken up again into heaven by Jupiter. But, no sooner does Zeus carry from Earth Ganymedes—the object of lust, personified—than the Father of the Gods throws down Astræa on the Earth again, on which she falls upon her head. Astræa is Virgo, the constellation of the Zodiac. Astronomically it has a very plain significance, and one which gives the key to the occult meaning. But it is inseparable from Leo, the sign that precedes it, and from the Pleiades and their sisters, the Hyades, of which Aldebaran is the brilliant leader. All these are connected with the periodical renovations of the Earth, with regard to its continents—even Ganymedes, who in astronomy is Aquarius. It has already been shown that while the South Pole is the “Pit” (or the infernal regions figuratively and cosmologically), the North Pole is geographically the First Continent; while astronomically and metaphorically the Celestial Pole, with its Pole Star in Heaven, is Meru, or the Seat of Brahmâ, the Throne of Jupiter, etc. For in the age when the Gods forsook the Earth and were said to ascend into Heaven, the ecliptic had become parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac appeared to descend from the North Pole to the north horizon. Aldebaran was in conjunction then with the Sun, as it was 40,000 years ago, at the great festival in commemoration of that Annus Magnus, of which Plutarch spoke. Since that Year—40,000 years ago—there has been a retrograde motion of the equator, and about 31,000 years ago Aldebaran was in conjunction with the vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even in Christian Mysticism, is too well known to need repetition. The famous Orphic Hymn on the great periodical cataclysm divulges the whole Esotericism of the event. Pluto, in the Pit, carries off Eurydice, bitten by the Polar Serpent. Then Leo, the Lion, is vanquished. Now, when the Lion is “in the Pit,” or below the South Pole, then Virgo, as the next sign, follows him, and when her head, down to the waist, is below the southern horizon—she is inverted. On the other hand, the Hyades are the rain or Deluge constellations; and Aldebaran—he who follows, or succeeds the daughters of Atlas, or the Pleiades—looks down from the eye of Taurus. It is from this point of the ecliptic that the calculations of the new cycle were commenced. The student has to remember also, that when Ganymedes—Aquarius—is raised to heaven—or above the horizon of the North Pole—Virgo or Astræa, who is Venus‐Lucifer, descends head downwards below the horizon of the South Pole, or the Pit; which Pit, or the Pole, is also the Great Dragon, or the Flood. Let the student exercise his intuition by placing these facts together; no more can be said. Lyell remarks:

The connection between the doctrine of successive catastrophes and repeated deteriorations in the moral character of the human race, is more intimate and natural than might at first be imagined. For, in a rude state of society, all great calamities are regarded by the people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man.... In like manner in the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of the inhabitants.(1839)

True; but was it not owing to the fact that all Esoteric truths were given out to the public by the Initiates of the temples under the guise of allegories? “Jupiter,” is merely the personification of that immutable Cyclic Law, which arrests the downward tendency of each Root‐Race after attaining the zenith of its glory.(1840) We must admit allegorical teaching, unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske’s singularly dogmatic opinion that a myth:

Is an explanation by the uncivilized mind, of some natural phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, for the ingenuity is wasted [!!] which strives to detect in myths the remnants of a refined primeval science—but an explanation. Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means of allegory [how does Mr. Fiske know?], nor were they such sorry pedants as to talk in riddles when plain language would serve their purpose.(1841)

We venture to say the language of the initiated few was far more “plain,” and their Science‐Philosophy far more comprehensive and satisfying alike to the physical and spiritual wants of man, than even the terminology and system elaborated by Mr. Fiske’s master—Herbert Spencer. What, however, is Sir Charles Lyell’s “explanation” of the “myth”? Certainly, he in no way countenances the idea of its “astronomical” origin, as asserted by some writers.

The two interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyell’s solution is as follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal changes from the absence (?) of any reliable historical data on the point, as well as from a strong bias to the uniformitarian conceptions of geologic changes,(1842) he attempts to trace the Atlantis “tradition” to the following sources:

(1) Barbarous tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God, who is assumed in this way to punish immoral races.

(2) Hence the commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.

(3) The primary source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia—a continent subject to violent earthquakes. Exaggerated accounts would thus be handed down the ages.

(4) Egypt, being herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not inconsiderable geologic knowledge on these cataclysmal traditions.

An ingenious “explanation,” as all such are! But proving a negative is proverbially a difficult task. Students of Esoteric Science, who know what the resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such laboured hypothesis. Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always able to furnish a reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch of Science, seem to necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic changes on the surface of our planet, the impartial critic who is not a specialist, will recognize the immense difficulty of explaining away the cumulative evidences—namely, the archaeological, ethnological, geological, traditional, botanical, and even biological—in favour of former continents now submerged. When each science is fighting for its own hand, the cumulative force of the evidence is almost invariably lost sight of.

In the Theosophist we wrote:

We have as evidence the most ancient traditions of various and wide‐separated peoples—legends in India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal isles of Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages, and in the traditions of the richest literature in the world—the Sanskrit literature of India—there is an agreement in saying, that, ages ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological upheaval was engulfed by the sea(1843) [Lemuria]. And it is our firm belief ... that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since the memory of man, never had nor could have any intercourse with, or even a knowledge of each other, have yet a tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea; that there were in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of the Gods, and to punish them for their incessant quarrelling, swallowed them up. Notwithstanding the geographical fact that New Zealand, and Sandwich and Easter Islands, are at a distance from each other of between 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that, according to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate islands, for instance, the Marquesan, Society, Fiji, Tahitian, Samoan, and other islands, could, since they became islands, ignorant as their people were of the compass, have communicated with each other before the arrival of Europeans; yet they one and all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward the West, on the Asian side. Moreover with very small differences, they all speak dialects evidently of the same language, and understand each other with little difficulty, have the same religious beliefs and superstitions, and pretty much the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered earlier than a century ago, and the Pacific Ocean itself was unknown to Europe until the days of Columbus, and these islanders have never ceased repeating the same old traditions since the Europeans first set foot on their shores, it seems to us a logical inference that our theory is nearer to the truth than any other. Chance would have to change its name and meaning, were all this due but to chance alone.(1844)

Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the hypothesis of a former Lemuria, declares:

A great series of animal‐geographical facts is explicable only on the hypothesis of the former existence of a Southern Continent of which the Australian mainland is a remnant.... [The distribution of species] points to the vanished land of the south, where perhaps the home of the progenitors of the Maki of Madagascar may also be looked for.(1845)

Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago, arrives at the following conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand:

The inference that we must draw from these facts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo do essentially form a part of a former Australian or Pacific Continent, although some of them may never have been actually joined to it. This continent must have been broken up not only before the Western Islands were separated from Asia, but probably before the extreme south‐eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent formation.(1846)

According to Hæckel:

Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race; but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.(1847)

In one sense Hæckel is right as to Lemuria—the “cradle of the human race.” That Continent was the home of the first physical human stock—the later Third‐Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite different. Hæckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.

Professor Rütimeyer, the eminent Palæontologist, asks:

Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant‐eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and Australia must be the remains—need this conjecture raise difficulties at a moment when, from their fossil remains, Heer restores to our sight the ancient forests of Smith’s Sound and Spitzbergen?(1848)

Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists—the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary. With regard, however, to the former, it is found that:

(1) The Miocene floræ of Europe have their most numerous and striking analogues in the floræ of the United States. In the forests of Virginia and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip‐trees, evergreen oaks, plane trees, etc., which correspond with European Tertiary flora, term for term. How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed “explanation” to the effect that the transition was by way of Asia and the Aleutian Islands is a mere uncalled‐for theory, obviously upset by the fact that a large number of these floræ only appear East of the Rocky Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a Trans‐Pacific migration. They are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.

(2) Skulls exhumed on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a striking similarity to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littré). Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear representations of undoubted negro heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is now N.W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.

(3) According to Farrar the “isolated language” of the Basques has no affinities with the other languages of Europe,(1849) but with:

The aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent [America] and those alone.(1850)

Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.

Palæolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a pure Atlantean, as we have previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a much later date than this, but their affinities, as here shown, go far to prove the original extraction of their remote ancestors. The “mysterious” affinity between their tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India will be understood by those who have followed our outline of continental formations and shiftings.

(4) Stones have been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured symbols similar to those found on the shore of Lake Superior. Berthollet was induced by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of the early men of the Canary Islands and America.(1851)

The Guanches of the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the Atlanteans. This fact will account for the great stature evidenced by their old skeletons, as well as by those of their European congeners, the Cro‐Magnon Palæolithic men.

(5) Any experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along the Canary Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of volcanic and rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every side by that vast watery space. Frequent questions of this kind led finally to the expedition of the famous Leopold von Buch, which took place in the first quarter of the present century. Some Geologists maintained that the volcanic islands had been raised right from the bottom of the ocean, the depth of which in the immediate vicinity of the island varies from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these groups—including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verde—the remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united Africa with America. The latter men of Science supported their hypothesis by a mass of evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient “myths.” Hoary “superstitions,” such as the fairy‐like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden of the Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them mythoi connected with the Peak of Teneriffe, did not go far with sceptical Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species, showing either a previous connection between America and the remaining groups of the islands—the hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the Old World by the waves was too absurd to stand long—found more serious consideration. But it is only quite lately, and after Donnelly’s book had been published several years, that the theory has had a greater chance than ever of becoming an accepted fact. Fossils found on the Eastern Coast of South America have now been proved to belong to the Jurassic formations, and are nearly identical with the Jurassic fossils of Western Europe and Northern Africa. The geological structure of both coasts is also almost identical; the resemblance between the smaller marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of the South American, the Western African, and the South European coasts, is also very great. All such facts are bound to bring Naturalists to the conclusion that there has been, in distant pre‐historic ages, a continent which extended from the coast of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands and North Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.

(6) The great resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South America, North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and admits of no explanation, unless the ocean is bridged with an Atlantis. But why, also, is there so marked a similarity between the fauna of the (now) isolated Atlantic islands? Why did the specimens of Brazilian fauna dredged up by Sir C. Wyville Thompson resemble those of Western Europe? Why does a resemblance exist between many of the West African and West Indian animal groups? Again:

When the animals and plants of the Old and New World are compared, one cannot but be struck with their identity; all, or nearly all, belong to the same genera, while many, even of the species, are common to both continents ... indicating that they radiated from a common centre [Atlantis].(1852)

The horse, according to Science, originated in America. At least, a large proportion of the once “missing links” connecting it with inferior forms have been exhumed from American strata. How did the horse penetrate into Europe and Asia, if no land communication bridged the oceanic interspaces? Or if it is asserted that the horse originated in the Old World, how did such forms as the hipparion, etc., get into America in the first instance on the migration hypothesis?

Again:

Buffon had ... remarked the repetition of the African in the American fauna, how, for example, the llama is a juvenescent and feeble copy of the camel, and how the puma of the New represents the lion of the Old World.(1853)

(7) The following quotation runs with No. 2, but its significance is such and the writer cited is so authoritative, that it deserves a place to itself:

With regard to the primitive dolichocephalæ of America, I entertain a hypothesis still more bold, namely, that they are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks, Copts, which Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian‐Atlantidæ. We find one and the same form of skull in the Canary Islands, in front of the African coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The colour of the skin on both sides of the Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a reddish‐brown.(1854)

If, then, Basques and Cro‐Magnon Cave‐Men are of the same race as the Canarese Guanches, it follows that the former are also allied to the aborigines of America. This is the conclusion necessitated by the independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de Quatrefages. The Atlantean affinities of these three types become patent.

(8) The sea‐soundings undertaken by H.M.S. “Challenger” and the “Dolphin,” have established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in length, projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the Atlantic, extends from a point near the British Islands southwards, curving round near Cape de Verde, and running in a south‐easterly direction along the West African coast. This elevation averages some 9,000 feet in height, and rises above the waves at the Azores, Ascension, and other places. In the ocean depths around the neighbourhood of the former the ribs of a once massive piece of land have been discovered.(1855)

The inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface could never have been produced in accordance with any known laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation; but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water‐level.(1856)

It is most probable that necks of land formerly existed knitting Atlantis to South America, somewhere above the mouth of the Amazon, to Africa near Cape de Verde, while a similar point of juncture with Spain is not unlikely, as contended for by Donnelly.(1857) Whether the latter existed or not, is of no consequence, in view of the fact that what is now N.W. Africa was—before the elevation of the Sahara and the rupture of the Gibraltar connection—an extension of Spain. Consequently no difficulty can be raised as to how the migration of the European fauna, etc., took place.

Enough has now been said from the purely scientific standpoint, and it is needless, in view of the manner in which the subject has already been developed on the lines of Esoteric Knowledge, to swell the mass of testimony further. In conclusion, the words of one of the most intuitive writers of the day may be cited as admirably illustrative of the opinions of the Occultist, who awaits in patience the dawn of the coming day:

We are but beginning to understand the past; one hundred years ago the world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the lingual tie that binds together the Indo‐European nations; nothing of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow‐ headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of to‐day.(1858)

And now to conclude.

We have concerned ourself with the ancient records of the nations, with the doctrine of chronological and psychic cycles, of which these records are the tangible proof; and with many other subjects, which may, at first sight, seem out of place in this Volume. But they are necessary in truth. In dealing with the secret annals and traditions of so many nations, whose very origins have never been ascertained on more secure grounds than inferential suppositions, in giving out the beliefs and philosophy of more than pre‐historic races, it is not quite as easy to deal with the subject matter as it would be if only the philosophy and evolution of one special race, were concerned. The Secret Doctrine was the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which history refuses to deal, and to which Esoteric Teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology. The birth and evolution of the Sacred Science of the Past are lost in the very night of Time, and that even which is historic—i.e., that which is found scattered hither and thither throughout ancient classical literature—is, in almost every case, attributed by modern criticism to lack of observation in the ancient writers, or to superstition born out of the ignorance of antiquity. It is, therefore, impossible to treat this subject as one would the ordinary evolution of an art or science in some well‐ known historical nation. It is only by bringing before the reader an abundance of proofs all tending to show that in every age, under every condition of civilization and knowledge, the educated classes of every nation made themselves the more or less faithful echoes of one identical system and its fundamental traditions—that he can be made to see that so many streams of the same water must have had a common source from which they started. What was this source? If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fail to leave their impress behind them. It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every Religion and Philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them. There must be truth and fact in that which every people of antiquity accepted and made the foundation of its religions and its faith. Moreover, as Haliburton said:

Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; hear both sides, and all will be clear.

The public has hitherto had access to, and has heard but one side, or rather the one‐sided views of two diametrically opposed classes of men, whose primâ facie propositions or respective premises differ widely, but whose final conclusions are the same—the men of Science and Theology. And now our readers have an opportunity of hearing the other, and so of learning the defendants’ justification and the nature of our arguments.

If the public is to be left to its old opinions—namely, on one side, that Occultism, Magic, the legends of old etc., are all the outcome of ignorance and superstition; and on the other, that everything outside the orthodox groove is the work of the devil—what will be the result? In other words, had no theosophical and mystic literature obtained a hearing for the last few years, the present work would have had but a poor chance of impartial consideration. It would have been proclaimed—and by many will still be proclaimed—a fairy tale woven out of abstruse problems, poised in, and based on the air; built of soap‐bubbles, bursting at the slightest touch of serious reflection, with no foundation to stand upon. Even the ancient “superstitious and credulous” classical writers have no word of reference to it in clear and unmistakable terms, and the symbols themselves fail to yield a hint of the existence of such a system. Such would be the verdict of all. But when it becomes undeniably proven that the claim of the modern Asiatic nations to a Secret Science and an Esoteric History of the world is based on fact; that though hitherto unknown to the masses and a veiled mystery even to the learned—because they have never had the key to a right understanding of the abundant hints thrown out by the ancient classics—it is still no fairy tale, but an actuality; then the present work will become but the pioneer of many more such books. The statement that hitherto even the keys discovered by some great scholars have proved too rusty for use, and that they are but the silent witnesses that there do exist mysteries behind the veil which are unreachable without a new key, is borne out by too many proofs to be easily dismissed. An instance may be given as an illustration out of the history of Freemasonry.

In his Maçonnerie Occulte, Ragon, an illustrious and learned Belgian Mason, rightly or wrongly reproaches the English Masons with having materialized and dishonoured Masonry, once based upon the Ancient Mysteries, by adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the craft, the name of “Free Masonry” and “Free Masons.” The mistake is due, he says, to those who connect Masonry with the building of Solomon’s Temple. He derides the idea, and says:

The Frenchman knew well, when he adopted the title of Freemason, that it was no question of building the smallest wall, but that, initiated into the Mysteries veiled under the name of Freemasonry, which could only be the continuation or the renovation of the ancient Mysteries, he was to become a “Mason” after the manner of Apollo or Amphion. And do not we know that the ancient initiated poets, when speaking of the foundation of a city, meant thereby the establishment of a doctrine? Thus Neptune, God of reasoning, and Apollo, God of hidden things, presented themselves as masons before Laomedon, Priam’s father, to help him to build the city of Troy—that is to say, to establish the Trojan religion.(1859)

Such veiled sentences with double meaning abound in ancient classical writers. Therefore, if an attempt had been made to show that, for instance, Laomedon was the founder of a branch of Archaic Mysteries, in which the earth‐bound material soul, the Fourth Principle, was personified in Menelaus’ faithless wife, the fair Helen, and if Ragon had not come to corroborate what we asserted, we might have been told that no classical author speaks of it, and that Homer shows Laomedon building a city, not founding an Esoteric Worship or Mysteries. Who are those left now, save a few Initiates, who understand the language and correct meaning of such symbolical terms?

But though we have pointed to many a misconceived symbol bearing on our thesis, there still remains more than one difficulty to be overcome. Most important among several such obstacles is that of chronology. But this could hardly be helped. Wedged in between theological chronology and that of the Geologists, backed by all the materialistic Anthropologists, who assign dates to man and nature which fit in with their own theories alone—what could the writer do except what she has done? Since Theology places the Deluge 2448 B.C., and the World’s Creation only 5890 years ago; and since the accurate researches by the methods of “exact” Science, have led the Geologists and Physicists to assign to the incrusted age of our Globe between ten million and one thousand million of years(1860) (a trifling difference, verily!); and since the Anthropologists, to vary their divergence of opinion as to the appearance of man, ask for between 25,000 and 500,000 years—what can one who studies the Occult Doctrine do, but bravely present the Esoteric calculations before the world?

But to do this, corroboration by even a few “historical” proofs has been necessary, though all know the real value of the so‐called “historical evidence.” For, whether man appeared on Earth 18,000 or 18,000,000 years ago, can make no difference to profane history, since it only begins about a couple of thousand years before our era, and since, even then, it grapples hopelessly with the clash and din of contradictory and mutually‐ destroying opinions around it. Nevertheless, in view of the respect in which the average reader has been brought up for exact Science, even that short Past would remain meaningless, unless the Esoteric Teachings were corroborated and supported on the spot—whenever possible—by references to historical names of a so‐called historical period. This is the only guide that can be given to the beginner before he is permitted to start among the, to him, unfamiliar windings of that dark labyrinth called the pre‐historic ages. This necessity has been complied with. It is only hoped that the desire to do so, which has led the writer to be constantly bringing ancient and modern evidence as a corroboration of the archaic and quite unhistoric Past, will not bring on her the accusation of having sorely jumbled up, without order or method, the various and widely‐ separated periods of history and tradition. But literary form and method had to be sacrificed to the greater clearness of the general exposition.

To accomplish the proposed task, the writer has had to resort to the rather unusual means of dividing each Volume into three Parts; the first of which only is the consecutive, though very fragmentary, history of the Cosmogony and the Evolution of Man on this Globe. In treating of Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show that on religion, from the very earliest, has ever been based entirely on fiction, that none was the object of special revelation, and that it is dogma alone which has ever been killing primeval truth; finally, that no human‐born doctrine, no creed, however sanctified by custom and antiquity, can compare in sacredness with the religion of Nature. The Key of Wisdom that unlocks the massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost sanctuaries can be found hidden in her bosom only; and that bosom is in the countries pointed to by the great seer of the past century, Emanuel Swedenborg. There lies the Heart of Nature, that shrine whence issued the early races of primeval humanity, and which is the cradle of physical man.

Thus far have proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of the archaic, earliest Races, contained in their hitherto secret scriptural Records. But our explanations are by no means complete, nor do they pretend to give out the full text, or to have been read by the help of more than three or four keys out of the sevenfold bunch of Esoteric interpretation; and even this has only been partially accomplished. The work is too gigantic for any one person to undertake, far more to accomplish. Our main concern has been simply to prepare the soil. This, we trust we have done. These two Volumes only constitute the work of a pioneer who has forced his way into the well‐nigh impenetrable jungle of the virgin forests of the Land of the Occult. A commencement has been made in felling and uprooting the deadly upas trees of superstition, prejudice, and conceited ignorance, so that these two Volumes should form for the student a fitting prelude for other works. Until the rubbish of the ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these pages are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely depends upon the reception with which Volumes I and II shall meet at the hands of Theosophists and Mystics, whether the last Volume will ever be published.

SATYÂT NÂSTI PARO DHARMAH.

THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.

END OF VOLUME II.

[Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]

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