Part 1 — Commentaries On the Twelve Stanzas and Their Terms, According To Their Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas. (continued 10)

Before the creation of Adam, two races lived on Earth, the one succeeding the other; the Devs who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who reigned but 2,000, and while the former were still in existence. The Devs were giants, strong and wicked; the Peris were smaller in stature, but wiser and kinder.

Here we recognize the Atlantean Giants and the Âryans, or the Râkshasas of the Râmâyana and the children of Bharata-varsha, or India; the Ante- and the Post-diluvians of the Bible.

Gyan (or Gnan, Jnâna, True or Occult Wisdom and Knowledge), [pg 412] also called Gian-ben-Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris.919 He had a shield as famous as that of Achilles, only instead of serving against an enemy in war, it served as a protection against black magic, the sorcery of the Devs. Gian-ben-Gian had reigned 2,000 years when Iblis, the Devil, was permitted by God to defeat the Peris and scatter them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield, which, by being produced on the principles of Astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments, and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate, or Karma.920 They count ten kings in their last metropolis called Khanoom, and make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam. These kings answer to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given by Berosus.

Distorted as these legends are now found to be, one can hardly fail to identify them with the Chaldæan, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew traditions, for the Jewish myth, though disdaining in its exclusiveness to speak of Pre-Adamite nations, nevertheless allows these to be clearly inferred, by sending out Cain—one of the only two living men on earth—into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city.921

Now if we compare the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the 9,000 years which Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the last Atlantis, a very strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked on this, but distorted it by his interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may restore the figures to their true meaning. We read in the Critias:

First of all one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed since the war of the nations, which lived above and outside the Pillars of Hercules, and those which peopled the lands on this side.

In the Timæus Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Âryans were 200,000 years old when the first great “Island,” or Continent, was [pg 413] submerged, there seems hardly any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldæa and Persia through whose exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, we find the Hebrews calling a week “seven days,” and speaking of a “week of years” when each of its days represents 360 solar years, and the whole “week” is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years, in the secret calculations of their Sods. We of the present times call an age a “century.” They of Plato's day, the initiated writers, at any rate, by a millennium meant not 1,000 but 100,000 years; while the Hindûs, more independent than any, have never concealed their chronology. Thus, for 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years, during which space of time—i.e., from the first appearance of the Âryan Race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began gradually sinking922 and other continents to appear on the surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato's small island of Atlantis—the Âryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the Kali Yuga, and was the Mahâbhârata, or Great War, so famous in Indian history. Such blending of events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years that have elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures. The latter event had never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because of their isolation; being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our era.

History catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great Mysteries for the first time through Herodotus, if we do not take into account the Bible, and its queer chronology.923 And how little Herodotus could tell is confessed by himself when, speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate at Saïs, in the sacred precinct of Minerva, he says:

[pg 414]

Behind the chapel ... is the tomb of One, whose name I consider it impious to divulge.... In the enclosure stand large obelisks and there is a lake near, surrounded with a stone wall formed in a circle.... In this lake they perform by night, that person's adventures, which the Egyptians call Mysteries: on these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I must observe a discreet silence.924

On the other hand, it is well to know that no secret was so well preserved and so sacred with the Ancients, as that of their cycles and computations. From the Egyptians down to the Jews it was held as the highest sin to divulge anything pertaining to the correct measure of time. It was for divulging the secrets of the Gods, that Tantalus was plunged into the infernal regions; the keepers of the sacred Sibylline Books were threatened with the death penalty for revealing a word from them. Sigalions, or images of Harpocrates, were in every temple—especially in those of Isis and Serapis—each pressing a finger to the lips. And the Hebrews taught that to divulge the secrets of the Kabalah, after initiation into the Rabbinical Mysteries, was like eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; it was punishable by death.

And yet we Europeans have accepted the exoteric chronology of the Jews! What wonder that it has ever since influenced and coloured all our conceptions of Science and the duration of things!

The Persian traditions, then, are full of two nations or races, now entirely extinct, as some think. But this is not so; they are only transformed. These traditions are ever speaking of the Mountains of Kaf (Kafaristan?), which contain a gallery built by the giant Argeak, wherein statues of the ancient men under all their forms are preserved. They call them Sulimans (Solomons) or the wise kings of the East, and count seventy-two kings of that name.925 Three among them reigned for 1,000 years each.926

Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, was murdered by his giant brother. His father had a perpetual fire preserved in the tomb which contained his cremated ashes; hence—the origin of fire-worship, as some Orientalists think!

Then came Huschenk, the prudent and the wise. It was his Dynasty which re-discovered metals and precious stones, after they had been concealed by the Devs or Giants in the bowels of the Earth, and also [pg 415] how to make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk, again, who is credited with having written the work called Eternal Wisdom, and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and Ispahan, though indeed they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is built on six other older cities, so these cities may be built on emplacements of other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it can only be inferred from another legend.

In the same tradition this wise prince is credited with having made war against the Giants on a twelve-legged Horse, whose birth is attributed to the amours of a crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This “Dodecapod” was found on the “dry island” or new continent; much force and cunning had to be used to secure the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk mounted him, than he defeated every enemy. No Giants could withstand his tremendous power. Finally, however, this king of kings was killed by an enormous rock which the Giants threw at him from the great mountains of Damavend.927

Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the best of, and finally kills, the Dragon. He is the great enemy of the Devs who, in his day, dwelt in the Mountains of Kaf, and occasionally made raids on the Peris. The old French chronicles of the Persian folklore call him the Dev-bend, the conqueror of the Giants. He, too, is credited with having founded Babylon, Nineveh, Diarbek, etc. Like his grand-sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz) also had his steed, only far more rare and rapid—a bird called Simorgh-Anke. A marvellous bird, in truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious.928 What says that Persian Phœnix? It complains of its old age, for it was born cycles and cycles before the days of Adam (Kaimurath). It has witnessed the revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the birth and the close of twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied Esoterically will give us again 840,000 years.929 Simorgh is born with the last Deluge of the Pre-Adamites, says the “Romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif”!930

What says the Book of Numbers? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the Lunar Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris), and his three sons—Ka-yin, [pg 416] Habel, and Seth—represent the three Races, as already explained. Noah-Xisuthrus represents, in his turn (in the cosmo-geological key), the Third Race separated, and his three sons, its last three races; Ham, moreover, symbolizing that race which uncovered the “nakedness” of the Parent Race, and of the “Mindless,” i.e., committed sin.

Tahmurath visits on his winged steed the Mountains of Koh-Kaf or Kaph. He finds there the Peris ill-treated by the Giants, and slays Argen, and the giant Demrusch. Then he liberates the good Peri, Mergiana,931 whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the “dry island,” i.e., the new continent of Europe.932 After him came Giamschid, who builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns 700 years, and, in his great pride, believes himself immortal, and demands divine honours. Fate punishes him; he wanders for 100 years in the world under the name of Dhulkarnayn, the “two-horned.” But this epithet has no connection with the “two-horned” gentleman of the cloven foot. The “two-horned” is the epithet given in Asia—which is uncivilized enough to know nothing of the attributes of the Devil—to those conquerors who have subdued the world from the East to the West.

Then come the usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who vanquishes the former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend. These are followed by many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new Dynasty.

Such is the legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. To begin with, what are the Mountains of Kaf?

Whatever they may be in their geographical status, whether they are the Caucasian or Central Asian mountains, legend places the Devs and Peris far beyond these mountains to the North, the Peris being the remote ancestors of the Parsîs or Farsîs. Oriental tradition is ever referring to an unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which, nevertheless, are situated the “Fortunate Islands,” wherein, from the beginning of life on earth, bubbles the “Fountain of Life.”933 The legend asserts, moreover, that a portion of the first “dry island” (continent), having detached itself from the main body, has remained, since then, beyond the Mountains of Koh-Kaf, “the stony [pg 417] girdle that surrounds the world.” A journey of seven months' duration will bring him who is possessed of “Soliman's Ring” to that “Fountain,” if he keep on journeying North, straight before him as the bird flies. Journeying, therefore, from Persia straight North, will bring one along the sixtieth degree of longitude, holding to the West, to Nova Zembla; and from the Caucasus to the eternal ice beyond the Arctic Circle would land one between the sixtieth and forty-fifth degrees of longitude, or between Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen. This, of course, if one has the dodecapodian Horse of Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath, or Taimuraz, upon which to cross over the Arctic Ocean.934

Nevertheless, the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will maintain, to this day, that far beyond the snow-capped summits of Kap, or Caucasus, there is a great continent now concealed from all; that it is reached by those who can secure the services of the twelve-legged progeny of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings,935 or by those who have the patience to wait for the good pleasure of Simorgh-Anke, who promised that before she dies she will reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once more visible and within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs will build between that portion of the “dry island” and its severed parts.936 This relates, of course, to the Seventh Race, Simorgh being the Manvantaric Cycle.

It is very curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century a.d., should have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt at first, in a country “beyond the Ocean,” a proof of which had been given him in India, by a learned Chaldæan. He says:

The lands we live in are surrounded by the Ocean, but beyond that Ocean there is another land which touches the walls of the sky; and it is in this land that man was created and lived in Paradise. During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his ark into the land his posterity now inhabits.937

[pg 418]

The twelve-legged Horse of Huschenk was found on that continent named the “dry island.”

The “Christian Topography” of Cosmas Indicopleustes and its merits are well known; but here the good father repeats a universal tradition, which has now, moreover, been corroborated by facts. Every arctic traveller suspects a continent or a “dry island” beyond the line of eternal ice. Perhaps now the meaning of the following passage from one of the Commentaries may become clearer.

In the first beginnings of [human] life, the only dry land was on the right end938 of the Sphere, where it [the Globe] is motionless.939 The whole Earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid.... There, man was born on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara.940 There was eternal spring in darkness. [But] that which is darkness to the man of to-day, was light to the man of his dawn. There, the Gods rested, and Fohat941 reigns ever since.... Thus the wise Fathers say that man is born in the head of his Mother [Earth], and that her feet at the left end generated [begot] the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon ... Between the First and Second [Races] the Eternal Central [Land] was divided by the Water of Life.942

It flows around and animates her [Mother Earth's] body. Its one end issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet [the Southern Pole]. It gets purified [on its return] to her heart—which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah, which then [in the beginnings] was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man's dwelling [the Earth] that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes.943 During the First and Second [Races] the belt was covered with the great waters. [But] the great [pg 419]Mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-gear [the cap]. She travailed harder for the Third [Race] and her waist and navel appeared above the water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the World.944She broke toward the setting Sun from her neck945 downward [to the South-West], into many lands and islands, but the Eternal Land [the cap] broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the World. All these perished [in their turn]. Then appeared the abode of the wicked [the Atlantis]. The Eternal Land was now hid, for the waters became solid [frozen] under the breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon's mouth, etc.

This shows that Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its Root-Continent, so to speak, already existed, and that part of the world now known as Asia was only cut off from it in a later age, and divided by the glacial waters.

If, then, the teaching is understood correctly, the first Continent which came into existence capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust, and remains so to this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the few arctic travellers who perceived it.

During the Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a continuation of the “head” from the “neck.” Beginning on both hemispheres, on the line above the most noryhern part of Spitzbergen,946 [pg 420] on Mercator's Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the American side, the localities that are now occupied by Baffin's Bay and the neighbouring islands and promontories. There it hardly reached, southward, the seventieth degree of latitude; here it formed the horseshoe continent of which the Commentary speaks; of the two ends of which, one included Greenland with a prolongation which crossed the fiftieth degree a little South-West, and the other Kamschatka, the two ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the early part of the Third Race, Lemuria was formed. When it was destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.

Western Speculations, Founded On The Greek And Paurânic Traditions.

Thus it becomes natural to find that, on even such meagre data as have reached the profane historian, Rudbeck, a Swedish Scientist, about two centuries ago, tried to prove that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He even thought that he had found in the configuration of ancient Upsala, the situation and measurements of the capital of “Atlantis” as given by the Greek sage. As Bailly proved, Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly likewise, and still more so, for Sweden and Norway had formed part and parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis on the European side, just as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had belonged to it, on the Asiatic. Only, once more, when was it? We can find it out approximately only by studying the Purânas, that is to say if we will have nought to do with the Secret Teachings.

Three-quarters of a century have already elapsed since Wilford brought forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the “White Island,” the Atala of the Purânas. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala is one of the seven Dvîpas, or Islands, belonging to the nether Lokas, one of the seven regions of Pâtâla (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford947 shows, the Purânas place it “on the seventh zone or seventh climate”—rather, on the seventh measure of heat—which thus locates it between the latitudes of 24° and 28° North. It is then to be sought [pg 421] on the same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between the latitudes of 50° and 60°. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis, the White Island. Its enemy is called the “White Devil,” the Demon of Terror, for he says:

In their [the Hindû and Persian] romances, we see Cai-caus going to the mountain of Az-burj, or As-burj, at the foot of which the sun sets, to fight the Div-sefid, or white devil, the Târa-daitya of the Purânas, and whose abode was on the seventh stage of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the Bauddhists; ... or, in other words, to the White Island.948

Now here the Orientalists have been, and are still, facing the Sphinx's riddle, the erroneous solution of which will ever destroy their authority—if not their persons—in the eyes of every Hindû scholar, whether or not an Initiate. For there is not a statement in the Purânas—on the conflicting details of which Wilford based his speculations—which has not several meanings, and which does not apply to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. If the old Hindûs divided the face of the Globe into seven Zones, Climates, Dvîpas, geographically, and into seven Hells and seven Heavens, allegorically, the measure of seven did not apply in both cases to the same localities. Now it is the North Pole, the country of “Meru,” which is the seventh division, as it answers to the seventh Principle (or fourth metaphysically), of the Occult calculation. It represents the region of Âtmâ, of pure Soul, and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara is shown as the seventh Zone, or Dvîpa, which encompasses the Kshîra Ocean, or Ocean of Milk (the ever-frozen white region) in the Vishnu and other Purânas.949 And Pushkara, with its two Varshas, lies directly at the foot of Meru. For it is said that:

The two countries north and south of Meru are shaped like a bow, ... [and that] one half of the surface of the earth is on the south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru—beyond which is half of Pushkara.

Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu-dvîpa,950 in the middle of which stands Meru, for it is the country inhabited by beings who [pg 422] live ten thousand years, who are free from sickness or failing; where there is neither virtue nor vice, caste or laws, for these men are “of the same nature as the Gods.”951 Wilford is inclined to see Meru in Mount Atlas, and locates there also the Lokâloka. Now Meru, we are told, which is the Svar-loka, the abode of Brahmâ, of Vishnu, and the Olympus of Indian exoteric religions, is described geographically as “passing through the middle of the earth-globe, and protruding on either side.”952 On its upper station are the Gods, at the nether, or South Pole, is the abode of Demons (Hells). How then can Meru be Mount Atlas? Besides which, Târadaitya, a Demon, cannot be placed on the seventh zone if the latter be identified with the White Island, which is Shveta-dvîpa, for reasons given in the foot-note above.

Wilford accuses the modern Brâhmans “of having jumbled them [islands and countries] all together”; but it is he who has jumbled them still more. He believes that as the Brahmânda and Vâyu Purânas divide the old Continent into seven Dvîpas, said to be surrounded by a vast ocean, beyond which lie the regions and mountains of Atala, hence:

Most probably the Greeks derived their notion of the celebrated Atlantis, which, as it could not be found after having once been discovered, they conceived to have been destroyed by some shock of nature.953

As we find certain difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests, Plato, and even Homer, all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala—a nether region located at the Southern Pole—we prefer holding to the statements given in the Secret Books. We believe in the seven Continents, four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future. We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,954 refers to the geographical names given (i) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole Earth during the period of a Root-Race, in general; (ii) to what remained of these after a geological Race Pralaya, as Jambu, for instance; and (iii) to those localities which will enter, after future cataclysms, into the formation of new universal Continents, Peninsulas, or Dvîpas955—each Continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land [pg 423] surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever “jumble” the nomenclature of these may represent to the profane, there is none, in fact, to him who has the key.

Thus, we believe we know that, though two of the Paurânic Islands—the Sixth and Seventh Continents—are yet to come, nevertheless there were, or there are, lands which will enter into the composition of the future dry lands, of new Earths whose geographical faces will be entirely changed, as were those of the past. Therefore we find in the Purânas that Shâka-dvîpa is (or will be) a Continent, and that Shankha-dvîpa, as shown in the Vâyu Purâna, is only “a minor island,” one of the nine divisions (to which Vâyu adds six more) of Bhârata-varsha. Because Shankha-dvîpa was peopled by “Mlechchhas [unclean foreigners], who worshipped Hindû divinities,” therefore they were connected with India.956 This accounts for Shankhâsura, a King of a portion of Shankha-dvîpa, who was killed by Krishna; that King who resided in the palace “which was an ocean shell, and whose subjects lived in shells also,” says Wilford.

On the banks of the Nîlâ957 there were frequent contests between the Devatâs [Divine Beings, Demi-gods] and the Daityas [Giants]: but the latter tribe having prevailed, their king and leader, Shankhâsura, who resided in the ocean, made frequent incursions ... in the night.958

It is not on the banks of the Nile, as Wilford supposes, but on the coasts of Western Africa, South of where now lies Morocco, that these battles took place. There was a time when the whole of the Sahara Desert was a sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then, only after another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that other wilderness, the Desert of Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in Paurânic tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said:

The people were between two fires; for, while Shankhâsura was ravaging one side of the continent, Cracacha [or Krauncha], king of Crauncha-dwîp [Krauncha-dvîpa], used to desolate the other: both armies ... thus changed the most fertile of regions into a barren desert.

That not only the last island of Atlantis, spoken of by Plato, but a large Continent, first divided, and then broken later on into seven peninsulas and islands (called Dvîpas), preceded Europe, is sure. It covered the whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as [pg 424] portions of the North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated by Indian Purânas, Greek writers, and Asiatic, Persian, and Mahommedan traditions. Wilford, who sorely confuses the Hindû and the Mussulman legends, shows this, however, clearly.959 His facts and quotations from the Purânas give direct and conclusive evidence that the Âryan Hindûs and other ancient nations were earlier navigators than the Phœnicians, who are now credited with having been the first seamen that appeared in the post-diluvian times. This is what we read in the Asiatick Researches:

In this distress the few natives, who survived [in the war between Devatâs and Daityas] raised their hands and hearts to Bhagavân, and exclaimed, “Let him that can deliver us ... be our king”; using the word Ît [a magic term not understood by Wilford, evidently] which reëchoed through the whole country.960

Then comes a violent storm, the waters of the Kâlî are strangely agitated, “when there appeared from the waves ... a man, afterwards called Ît, at the head of a numerous army, saying ‘abhayan,’ or there is no fear”; and scattered the enemy. “The King Ît,” explains Wilford, “is a subordinate incarnation of Mrīra”—Mrida, a form of Rudra, probably?—who “reëstablished peace and prosperity throughout all Shankha-dvîpa, through Barbaradêsa, Misra-st'hân and Arva-st'hân, or Arabia,”961 etc.

Surely, if the Hindû Purânas give a description of wars on continents and islands situated beyond Western Africa in the Atlantic Ocean; if their writers speak of Barbaras and other people such as Arabs—they who were never known to navigate, or cross the Kâla-pâni, the Black Waters of the Ocean, in the days of Phœnician navigation—then these Purânas must be older than those Phœnicians who are placed at from 2,000 to 3,000 years b.c. At any rate, their traditions must have been older,962 for an Adept writes:

[pg 425]

In the above accounts, the Hindûs speak of this island as existing and in great power; it must, therefore, have been more than eleven thousand years ago.

But another proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindû Âryans who described the last surviving island of Atlantis, or rather of that remnant of the Eastern portion of that Continent which had perished soon after the upheaval of the two Americas963—the two Varshas of Pushkara. And they described what they knew, for they had once dwelt on it. This may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by an Adept who criticizes Wilford. Recalling what that Orientalist had brought forward concerning the Mount Ashburj “at the foot of which the sun sets,” where was the war between the Devatâs and the Daityas,964 he says:

We will consider, then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island, and of the remaining Mount Ashburj. It was on the seventh stage of the world, i.e., in the seventh climate (which is between the latitude of 24 degrees and latitude 28 degrees north).... This island, the daughter of the Ocean, is frequently described as lying in the West; and the Sun is represented as setting at the foot of its mountain (Ashburj, Atlas, Teneriffe or Nila, no matter the name), and fighting the White Devil of the “White Island.”

Now, if we consider this statement from its astronomical aspect, as Krishna is the incarnated Sun (Vishnu), a solar God, and as he is said to have killed Div-sefid, the White Devil—a possible personification of the ancient inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas—he may perchance be only a representation of the vertical beams of the Sun. Again, these inhabitants, the Atlantides, as we have seen, are accused by Diodorus of daily cursing the Sun, and ever fighting his influence. This is, however, only an astronomical interpretation. It will now be proved that Shankhâsura, and Shankha-dvîpa, and all their history, is also geographically and ethnologically Plato's Atlantis in Hindû dress.

It has just been remarked that since, in the Paurânic accounts, the island is still existing, these accounts must be older than the 11,000 years which have elapsed since Shankha-dvîpa, or the Poseidonis of Atlantis, disappeared. But is it not barely possible that Hindûs should [pg 426] have known the island still earlier? Let us turn again to astronomical demonstrations, which make this quite plain if with the said Adept one assumes that:

At the time when the summer tropical “colure” passed through the Pleiades, when Cor Leonis would be upon the equator, and when Leo was vertical to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the island of Atlantis at noon.

This explains, perhaps, why the Sinhalese, the heirs of the Râkshasas and Giants of Lankâ, and the direct descendants of Sinha, or Leo, became connected with Shankha-dvîpa or Poseidonis (Plato's Atlantis). Only, as shown by Mackey's Sphinxiad, this must have occurred about 23,000 years ago, astronomically; at which time the obliquity of the ecliptic must have been rather more than 27 degrees, and consequently Taurus must have passed over Atlantis or Shankha-dvîpa. And that it was so is clearly demonstrated. Say the Commentaries:

The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bhârata to Shankha to meet Rishabha [Taurus] every Kalpa. But when those of the White Island [who descended originally from Shveta-dvîpa],965 who had mixed with the Daityas [Giants] of the land of iniquity, had become black with sin, then Nandi remained for ever in the White Island [or Shveta-dvîpa].... Those of the Fourth World [Race] lost AUM.

Asburj, or Azburj, whether the peak of Teneriffe or not, was a volcano, when the sinking of the “Western Atala,” or Hell, began, and those who were saved told the tale to their children. Plato's Atlantis perished between water below and fire above; the great mountain vomiting flames all the while.

The “fire-vomiting Monster” survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate island.

Do the Greeks, who are accused of borrowing a Hindû fiction (Atala), and inventing from it another (Atlantis), stand also accused of getting their geographical notions and the number seven from them?

“The famous Atlantis exists no longer, but we can hardly doubt that it did once,” says Proclus, “for Marcellus, who wrote a history of Ethiopian affairs, says that such, and so great, an island once existed, and this is evidenced by those who [pg 427]composed histories relative to the external sea. For they relate that in this time there were seven islands in the Atlantic sea sacred to Proserpine; and besides these, three of immense magnitude, sacred to Pluto, ... Jupiter, ... and Neptune. And, besides this, the inhabitants of the last island [Poseidonis] preserved the memory of the prodigious magnitude of the Atlantic island as related by their ancestors, and of its governing for many periods all the islands in the Atlantic sea. From this isle one may pass to other large islands beyond, which are not far from the firm land, near which is the true sea.”

These seven Dvîpas [inaccurately rendered islands] constitute, according to Marcellus, the body of the famous Atlantis.... This evidently shows that Atlantis is the old continent.... The Atlantis was destroyed after a violent storm [?]: this is well known to the Paurâunics, some of whom assert that in consequence of this dreadful convulsion of nature, six of the Dvîpas disappeared.966

Enough proofs have now been given to satisfy the greatest sceptic. Nevertheless, direct proofs based on exact Science will also be added. And yet even though volumes were written, it would be to no purpose for those who will neither see nor hear, except through the eyes and ears of their respective authorities.

Hence the teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon, the mount in the land of Mizpeth—meaning “anathema,” “destruction”—is the same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the “Lord loved well.” And so mixed up are facts and personages in the said scholiasts' brains, that, when the Zohar explains the “Birds” which inspired Balaam to mean “Serpents,” to wit, the Wise Men and Adepts at whose School he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy—the opportunity is again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the “winged dragons of Evil, whose chief is Samael”—the Jewish Satan! As Spencer says:

It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scape-goat of Israel, who assumed the name of one of them [Azaz(y)el], was sent.

We say it is not so. The Zohar has the following explanation on the practice of magic which is called in Hebrew Nehhaschim, or the “Serpents' Works.” It says (part iii. col. 302):

It is called Nehhaschim, because the magicians [practical Kabalists] work surrounded by the light of the Primordial Serpent, which they perceive in heaven as a luminous zone composed of myriads of small stars.

This means simply the Astral Eight, so called by the Martinists, by Éliphas Lévi, and now by all the modern Occultists.

[pg 428]

The “Curse” From A Philosophical Point Of View.

The foregoing teachings of the Secret Doctrine, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brâhmanas and Purânas, the Vendîdâd and other Mazdean scriptures, down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane; all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition. Space forbids us, in these volumes, from entering into further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our Fifth (Âryan) Humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one Philosopher and Scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our Esoteric Doctrine are, in almost every case, corroborated by inferential as well as by direct proof, that neither the “legendary” Giants, nor the lost Continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding Races, are quite baseless tales. In the Addenda which close this volume, Science will find itself more than once unable to reply; these Addenda, will, it is hoped, finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number in nature, and our figures in general.

Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete—the disposing of that most pernicious of all the theological dogmas, the Curse under which man-kind is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed disobedience of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden.

Creative powers in man were the gift of Divine Wisdom, not the result of sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour of Jehovah, who first curses Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the supposed crime committed, and then blesses his “chosen people” by saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”967 The Curse was not brought on mankind by the Fourth Race, for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the still more gigantic Antediluvians, had perished in the same way; hence the Deluge was no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and geological law. Nor was the Curse of Karma called down upon them for seeking natural union, as all the mindless animal-world [pg 429] does in its proper seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the divine gift, and wasting the life-essence for no purpose except bestial personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of Genesis will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and the commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as easy for woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never intended that woman should bring forth her young ones “in sorrow.” Since that period, however, during the evolution of the Fourth Race, there came enmity between its seed and the “Serpent's” seed, the seed or product of Karma and Divine Wisdom. For the seed of woman, or lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge, by turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the Law of Karma “bruised the heel” of the Atlantean Race, by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,968 until, from being the healthy king of animal creation in the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our Race, a helpless, scrofulous being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the Globe to constitutional and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all animals!969

This is the real Curse from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in Kabalistic Esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the Curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead of a blessing—a gift quickened by the “Lords of Wisdom,” who have poured on the human Manas the fresh dew of their own Spirit and Essence. The Divine Titan has then suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by Æschylus in his “Prometheus Bound,” when, at the close of the first Titanic Age (the Age that followed that of Ethereal Man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlochâ), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as—

[pg 430]

Seeing, they saw in vain;

Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams,

Through the long time all things at random mixed.

Our Saviours, the Agnishvâtta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of Wisdom”—personified by the Greeks in Prometheus970—may well be left unrecognized and unthanked, in the injustice of the human heart. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora's gift; but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, as the Evil Ones, is too heavy a Karma for “Him” who, when Zeus “ardently desired” to quench the entire human race, “dared alone” to save that “mortal race” from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is make to say:

From sinking blasted down to Hades' gloom.

For this by these dire tortures I am bent,

Grievous to suffer, piteous to behold,

I who did mortals pity....

The chorus remarking very pertinently:

Vast boon was this thou gavest unto mortals!

Prometheus answers:

Yea, and besides 'twas I that gave them fire.

Chorus: Have now these short-lived creatures flame-eyed fire?

Prom.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn....

But, with the arts, the “fire” received has turned into the greatest curse; the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.971 It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect;

[pg 431]

The restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law.972

Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's Protagoras, with that “wisdom which ministers to physical well-being,” but the lower aspect of Manas of the animal (Kâma) having remained unchanged, instead of “an untainted mind, heaven's first gift,” there was created the eternal vulture of ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair, coupled with “the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals” (556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.

Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name (Pro-me-theus, “he who sees before him” or futurity) shows973—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological [pg 432] insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanus:

Of prophecies the various modes I fixed, (492)

And among dreams did first discriminate

The truthful vision ... and mortals guided

To a mysterious art....

All arts to mortals from Prometheus came....

Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early Races, this will be no real digression.

The subject of Æschylus' trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to all cultured readers. The Demi-god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their secret—the mystery of the Creative Fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by Cronus974 and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a Personal Deity, which will not see Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light-giver,” is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—

E'en he the fore-ordained cannot escape....

—ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus—

Ay, a son bearing stronger than his sire (787)

One of thine [Io's] own descendants it must be (791)

—is born. This “Son” will deliver Prometheus (suffering Humanity) from his own fatal gift. His name is, “He who has to come.”

On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning—on the authority of the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the daughter of Inachus, persecuted by Zeus—a whole prophecy is constructed by some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan:

And, portent past belief, the speaking oaks

By which full clearly, in no riddling phrase,

Wast hailed as the illustrious spouse of Zeus ... (853)

... stroking thee

With touch alone of unalarming hand;

Then thou dark Epaphos shalt bear, whose name

Records his sacred gendering ... (870).

[pg 433]

This was construed by several fanatics—Des Mousseaux and De Mirville amongst others—into a clear prophecy. Io “is the mother of God,” we are told, and “dark Epaphos”—Christ. But, the latter has not dethroned his Father, except metaphorically, if one has to regard Jehovah as that Father; nor has the Christian Saviour hurled his Father down into Hades. Prometheus says (in verse 930) that Zeus will be humbled yet:

... such marriage he prepares

Which from his throne of power to nothingness

Shall hurl him down; so shall be all fulfilled

His father Kronos' curse....

.... Then let him sit

Confiding in his lofty thunder-peals,

And wielding with both hands the fiery bolt;

For these shall not avail, but fall he shall,

A fall disgraceful, not to be endured.... (980).

“Dark Epaphos” was the Dionysus-Sabasius, the son of Zeus and of Demeter in the Sabasian Mysteries, during which the “Father of the Gods,” assuming the shape of a Serpent, begot on Demeter Dionysus, or the Solar Bacchus. Io is the Moon, and at the same time the Eve of a new race, and so is Demeter—in the present case. The Promethean myth is a prophecy indeed; but it does not relate to any of the cyclic Saviours who have appeared periodically in various countries and among various nations, in their transitionary conditions of evolution. It points to the last of the mysteries of cyclic transformations, in the series of which mankind, having passed from the ethereal to the solid physical state, from spiritual to physiological procreation, is now carried onward on the opposite arc of the cycle, toward that second phase of its primitive state, when woman knew no man, and human progeny was created, not begotten.

That state will return to it and to the world at large, when the latter shall discover and really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast problem of sex. It will be like “the light that never shone on sea or land,” and has to come to men through the Theosophical Society. That light will lead on and up to true spiritual intuition. Then, as expressed once in a letter to a Theosophist,

The world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the world will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers to procreate Buddha-like children—or Demons.... When that knowledge comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the Demons, will die out.

[pg 434]

If we reflect upon the serial development of the allegory, and the character of the heroes, the mystery may be unriddled. Cronus is of course “Time” in its cyclic course. He swallows his children—the personal Gods of exoteric dogmas included. Instead of Zeus he has swallowed his stone idol; but the symbol has grown, and has only developed in human fancy as mankind has been cycling down toward only its physical and intellectual—not spiritual—perfection. When it is as far advanced in its spiritual evolution Cronus will be no longer deceived. Instead of the stone image he will have swallowed the anthropomorphic fiction itself. Because, the Serpent of Wisdom, represented in the Sabasian Mysteries by the anthropomorphized Logos, the unity of spiritual and physical Powers, will have begotten in Time (Cronus) a progeny—Dionysus-Bacchus, or the “dark Epaphos,” the “mighty one,” the Race that will overthrow him. Where will he be born? Prometheus traces him to his origin and birth-place in his prophecy to Io. Io is the Moon-goddess of generation—for she is Isis and she is Eve, the Great Mother.975 He traces the path of the (racial) wanderings as plainly as words can express it. She has to quit Europe and go to Asia's continent, reaching there the highest of the mountains of Caucasus (v. 737), the Titan telling her:

When thou hast crossed the flood, limit betwixt

Two continents, fronting the burning East.... (810)—

that she must travel Eastward, after passing the “Kimmerian Bosphorus,” and cross what is evidently the Volga and now Astrakhân on the Caspian Sea. After this she will encounter “fierce northern blasts” and cross thither to the land of the “Arimaspian host” (East of Herodotus' Scythia) to—

Pluto's gold-abounding flood.... (825).

[pg 435]

This is rightly conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the Ural, the Arimaspi of Herodotus being “the recognized inhabitants of this golden region.”

And here comes (between verses 825 and 835) a puzzle to all the European interpreters. Says the Titan:

To these [Arimaspi and Grypes] approach not; a far border land

Thou next shalt reach, where dwells a swarthy race

Near the Sun's founts, whence is the Æthiop river;

Along its banks proceed till thou attain

The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights

Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends.

There Io was ordained to found a colony for herself and her sons. Now we must see how the passage is interpreted. Io is told that she has to travel Eastward till she comes to the river Ethiops, which she is to follow till it falls into the Nile—hence the perplexity. “According to the geographical theories of the earliest Greeks,” we are informed by the author of the version of “Prometheus Bound”:

This condition was fulfilled by the river Indus. Arrian (vi. 1) mentions that Alexander the Great, when preparing to sail down the Indus [having seen crocodiles in the river Indus, and in no other river except the Nile ...], seemed to himself to have discovered the sources of the Nile; as though the Nile, rising from some place in India, and flowing through much desert land, and thereby losing its name Indus, next ... flowed through inhabited land, being now called Nile by the Ethiopians of those parts and afterwards by the Egyptians. Virgil in the IVth Georgic echoes the obsolete error.976

Both Alexander and Virgil may have erred considerably in their geographical notions; but the prophecy of Prometheus has not in the least so sinned—not, at any rate, in its Esoteric spirit. When a certain Race is symbolized, and events pertaining to its history are rendered allegorically, no topographical accuracy ought to be expected in the itinerary traced for its personification. Yet it so happens, that the river Ethiops is certainly the Indus, and it is also the Nîl or Nîlâ. It is the river born on the Kailâsa Heaven mountain, the Mansion of the Gods—22,000 feet above the level of the sea. It was the Ethiops river, and was so called by the Greeks, long before the days of Alexander, because its banks, from Attock down to Sind, were peopled by tribes generally referred to as the Eastern Ethiopians. India and Egypt were two kindred nations, and the Eastern Ethiopians—the mighty builders—have come from India, as is pretty well proved, it is hoped, in Isis Unveiled.977

[pg 436]

Then why could not Alexander, and even the learned Virgil, have used the word Nile or Neilos when speaking of the Indus, since it is one of its names? To this day the Indus is called, in the regions around Kalabagh, Nîl, “blue,” and Nîlâ, the “blue river.” The water there is of such a dark blue colour that this name was given to it from time immemorial; a small town on its banks being called by the same name, and existing to this day. Evidently Arrian, who wrote far later than the days of Alexander, and who was ignorant of the old name of the Indus, has unconsciously slandered the Greek conqueror. Nor are our modern historians much wiser, in judging as they do, for they often make the most sweeping declarations on mere appearances, as much as their ancient colleagues ever did in days of old, when no Encyclopædias were yet ready for them.

The race of Io, the “cow-horned maid,” is then simply the first pioneer race of the Æthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile, which received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India.978 Therefore Prometheus says to Io979 that the sacred Neilos—the God, not the river—shall guide her “to the land, three-cornered,” namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained to found “that far-off colony.” (833 et seqq.)

It is there that a new race (the Egyptians) will begin, and a “female race” (873) which, “fifth in descent” from dark Epaphos—

Fifty in number shall return to Argos.

Then one of the fifty virgins will fail through love and shall—

... A kingly race in Argos bear....

But from this seed shall dauntless heroes spring,

Bow—famous, who shall free me from these ills.

[pg 437]

When these heroes shall arise, the Titan does not reveal; for as he remarks:

This, to set forth at large needs lengthy speech.

But “Argos” is Arghyavarsha, the Land of Libations of the old Hierophants, whence the Deliverer of Humanity will appear, a name which became ages later that of its neighbour, India—the Aryâvarta of old.

That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made known by several ancient writers; among others by Cicero980 and by Clemens Alexandrinus.981 The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact of Æschylus being charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They say that being himself uninitiated, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his Trilogies on a public stage.982 But he would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated; which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a Daimon to reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical Drama of Initiation. At all events, it is not the “father of the Greek tragedy” who invented the prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed by the priests during the Mysteria of the Sabasia.983 The latter was one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras, the Sun, called Sabasius on some old monuments, with Jupiter and Bacchus. It was never, however, the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.

The translator of the drama wonders how Æschylus could become guilty of such

Discrepancy between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the “Prometheus Bound” and that depicted in the remaining dramas.984

This is just because Æschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain the intellectual “Sphinx” of the ages. Between Zeus, the Abstract Deity of Grecian thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter represented in the Mysteries no higher a principle [pg 438] than the lower aspect of human physical intelligence—Manas wedded to Kâma; whereas Prometheus—the divine aspect of Manas merging into and aspiring to Buddhi—was the divine Soul. Zeus, whenever shown as yielding to his lower passions, is the Human Soul and nothing more—the jealous God, revengeful and cruel in its Egotism or “I-am-ness.” Hence, Zeus is represented as a Serpent—the intellectual tempter of man—which, nevertheless, begets in the course of cyclic evolution the “Man-Saviour,” the Solar Bacchus or Dionysus—more than a man.

Dionysus is one with Osiris, with Krishna, and with Buddha, the heavenly Wise One, and with the coming (tenth) Avatâra, the glorified Spiritual Christos, who will deliver the suffering Chrestos—mankind, or Prometheus, on its trial. This, say Brâhmanical and Buddhistic legends, echoed by the Zoroastrian and now by the Christian teachings (the latter only occasionally), will happen at the end of the Kali Yuga. It is only after the appearance of Kalki Avatâra, or Sosiosh, that man will be born from woman without sin. Then will Brahmâ, the Hindû deity, Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), the Zoroastrian, Zeus, the Greco-Olympian Don Juan, Jehovah, the jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their likes in the universal Pantheon of human fancy—vanish and disappear in thin air. And along with these will vanish their shadows, the dark aspects of all these Deities, ever represented as their “twin brothers” and creatures, in exoteric legend—their own reflection on Earth, in Esoteric Philosophy. The Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans, must be all dethroned on that day, when every dark evil passion will be subdued.

There is one Eternal Law in Nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries, and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this Law of spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become freed from its false Gods, and find itself finally—Self-redeemed.

In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus, of whom the proto- and anti-types are found in every ancient Theogony, stands in each of them at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human physical life. Cronus is “Time,” whose first law is that the order of the successive and harmonious phases, in the process of evolution during cyclic development, should be strictly preserved—under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development, [pg 439] that man—higher animal though he may be—should become at once, intellectually, spiritually, and psychically, the Demi-god he is on Earth, while his physical frame remains weaker, more helpless and ephemeral, than that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent; the tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling God. The gift of Prometheus thus became a Curse—though foreknown and foreseen by the Host personified in that personage, as his name well shows.985 It is in this that rests, at one and the same time, its sin and its redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual self-conscious pain and even torture, “while myriad time shall flow,” to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation was premature and not in the programme of Nature, the Heavenly Host, “Prometheus,” still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least, one portion of mankind.986 But while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility—the result of his free will—besides every ill to which mortal man and flesh are heir. This torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was still un-achieved at that period of formation.

Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical, once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the chief cause, if not the sole origin, of Evil.987 Highly philosophical [pg 440] is the allegory which shows Cronus cursing Zeus for dethroning him, in the primitive Golden Age of Saturn, when all men were Demi-gods, and for creating a physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then as delivering to his (Zeus') revenge the culprit, who despoiled the Gods of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their level, intellectually and spiritually. In the case of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the Primeval Progenitors, of the Pitaras, the “Fathers” who created man senseless and without mind; while the Divine Titan stands for the Spiritual Creators, the Devas who “fell” into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but physically stronger, than the “Prometheans”; therefore, the latter are shown conquered. “The lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled and thus defeated the plans of Zeus,” was on this Earth in its own sphere and plane of action; whereas the superior Host was an exile from Heaven, who had got entangled in the meshes of Matter. The inferior Host were masters of all the Cosmic and lower Titanic Forces; the higher Titan possessed only the Intellectual and Spiritual Fire. This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual mankind; the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of Matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and repentance. In every such case one sees once more—

A god ... in fetters, anguish fraught;

The foe of Zeus, in hatred held of all—

a God, bereft even of that supreme consolation of Prometheus, who suffered in self-sacrifice—

For that to men he [I] bore too fond a mind—

as the divine Titan is moved by altruism, but the mortal man by selfishness and egoïsm in every instance.

The modern Prometheus has now become Epi-metneus, “he who sees only after the event”; because the universal philanthropy of the former has long ago degenerated into selfishness and self-adoration. Man will become the free Titan of old, but not before cyclic evolution has reestablished the broken harmony between the two natures—the terrestrial and the divine; after which he becomes impermeable to the lower Titanic Forces, invulnerable in his Personality, and immortal in his Individuality—but this cannot happen before every animal element is eliminated from his nature. When man understands that “Deus non [pg 441]fecit mortem,”988 but that man has created it himself, he will re-become the Prometheus before his Fall.

For the full symbolism of Prometheus and the origin of this mythos in Greece, the reader is referred to Part II of this Volume, Section XX, “Prometheus, the Titan,” etc. In the said Part—a kind of supplement to the present portion—every additional information is given upon those tenets that will be the most controverted and questioned. This work is so heterodox, when confronted with the acknowledged standards of Theology and Modern Science, that no proof which tends to show that these standards often usurp an illegal authority should be neglected.

Additional Fragments From A Commentary On The Verses Of Stanza XII.

The MS. from which these additional explanations are taken belongs to the group called Tongshaktchi Sangye Songa, or the “Records of the Thirty-five Buddhas of Confession,” as they are exoterically called. These personages, however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion Buddhas, may just as well be called Rishis, Avatâras, etc., as they are “Buddhas who have preceded Shâkyamuni” only for the Northern followers of the ethics preached by Gautama. These great Mahâtmâs, or Buddhas, are a universal and common property; they are historical Sages—at any rate for all the Occultists who believe in such a Hierarchy of Sages, and who have had its existence proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity. They are chosen from among some ninety-seven Buddhas in one group, and fifty-three in another,989 mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifications of the powers of the first-named.990 These “Baskets” of the oldest writings on “palm leaves” are kept very secret. Each MS. has appended to it a short synopsis of the history of that sub-race to which the particular Buddha-Lha belonged. The one special MS. from which the fragments which follow have been extracted, and then rendered into more comprehensible language, is said to have been copied from stone tablets which belonged to a Buddha of the earliest days of the [pg 442] Fifth Race, who had witnessed the Deluge and the submersion of the chief continents of the Atlantean Race. The day when much, if not all, of that which is given here from the Archaic Records, will be found correct, is not far distant. Then the modern Symbologists will acquire the certitude that even Odin, or the God Woden, the highest God in the German and Scandinavian mythology, is one of these thirty-five Buddhas; one of the earliest, indeed, for the Continent to which he and his Race belonged is also one of the earliest—so early, in truth, that in those days tropical nature was to be found, where now lie eternal unthawing snows, and one could cross almost by dry land from Norway viâ Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present surround Hudson's Bay.991 In similar fashion, in the palmy days of the Atlantean Giants, the sons of the “Giants from the East,” a pilgrim could perform a journey from what in our days is termed the Sahara Desert, to the lands which now rest in dreamless sleep at the bottom of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Events which were never written outside the human memory, but which were religiously transmitted from one generation to another, and from race to race, may have been preserved by constant transmission “within the book volume of the brain,” and through countless æons, with more truth and accuracy than inside any written document or record. “That which is part of our souls is eternal,” says Thackeray; and what can be nearer to our Souls than that which happens at the dawn of our lives? Those lives are countless, but the Soul or Spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and though “the book volume” of the physical brain may forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections can never desert the Divine Soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever present before its mind's eye.

[pg 443]

It is this Soul-voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradition more than in written history, that what is said below is all true, and relates to pre-historic facts.

This is what is written in one passage:

The Kings of Light have departed in wrath. The sins of men have become so black that Earth quivers in her great agony.... The Azure Seats remain empty. Who of the Brown, who of the Red, or yet among the Black [Races], can sit in the Seats of the Blessed, the Seats of Knowledge and Mercy? Who can assume the Flower of Power, the Plant of the Golden Stem and the Azure Blossom?

The “Kings of Light” is the name given in all old records to the Sovereigns of the Divine Dynasties. The “Azure Seats” are translated “Celestial Thrones” in certain documents. The “Flower of Power” is now the Lotus; what it may have been at that period, who can tell?

The writer proceeds, like the later Jeremiah, to bewail the fate of his people. They had become bereft of their “Azure” (Celestial) Kings, and “they of the deva-hue,” the moon-like complexion, and “they of the refulgent (golden) face” have gone “to the Land of Bliss, the Land of Fire and Metal”—or, agreeably with the rules of symbolism, to the lands lying North and East, from whence “the Great Waters have been swept away, sucked in by the Earth and dissipated in the Air.” The wise races had perceived “the black Storm-dragons, called down by the Dragons of Wisdom”—and “had fled, led on by the shining Protectors of the most Excellent Land”—the great ancient Adepts, presumably; those the Hindûs refer to as their Manus and Rishis. One of them was Vaivasvata Manu.

They “of the yellow hue” are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now classes as the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations; and the land they fled to was no other than Central Asia. There, entirely new races were born; there, they lived and died until the separation of the nations. But this “separation” did not take place either in the localities assigned for it by Modern Science, nor in the way the Âryans are shown to have divided and separated by Prof. Max Müller and other Âryanists. Nearly two-thirds of one million years have elapsed since that period. The yellow-faced giants of the Post-Atlantean day had ample time, through this forced confinement to one part of the world, with the same racial blood and without any fresh infusion or admixture in it, during a period of nearly 700,000 years, to branch off into the most heterogeneous and diversified [pg 444] types. The same is shown in Africa; nowhere does a more extraordinary variability of types exist, from black to almost white, from gigantic men to dwarfish races; and this only because of their forced isolation. The Africans have not left their continent for several hundred thousands of years. If to-morrow the continent of Europe were to disappear and other lands to reëmerge instead, and if the African tribes were to separate and scatter on the face of the Earth, it is they who, in about a hundred thousand years hence, would form the bulk of the civilized nations. And it is the descendants of those of our highly cultured nations, who might have survived on some one island, without any means of crossing the new seas, that would fall back into a state of relative savagery. Thus the reason given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.

Such are the facts given in the Archaic Records. Collating and comparing them with some modern theories of evolution, minus Natural Selection,992 these statements appear quite reasonable and logical. Thus, while the Âryans are the descendants of the yellow Adam, the gigantic and highly civilized Atlanto-Âryan race, the Semites—and the Jews along with them—are those of the red Adam, and thus both De Quatrefages and the writers of the Mosaic Genesis are right. For, could chapter v of the First Book of Moses be compared with the genealogies found in our Archaic Bible, the period from Adam unto Noah would be found noticed therein, though of course under different names, the respective years of the Patriarchs being turned into periods, and the whole being symbolical and allegorical. In the MS. under consideration many and frequent are the references to the great knowledge and civilization of the Atlantean nations, showing the polity of several of them and the nature of their arts and sciences. If the Third Root-Race, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, are already spoken of as having been drowned “with their high civilizations and Gods,”993 how much more may the same be said of the Atlanteans!

It is from the Fourth Race that the early Âryans got their knowledge of “the bundle of wonderful things,” the Sabhâ and Mâyâsabhâ, mentioned in the Mahâbhârata, the gift of Mâyâsura to the Pândavas. It is from them that they learnt æronautics, Vimâna Vidyâ, the “knowledge of flying in air-vehicles,” and, therefore, their great arts of Meteorography and Meteorology. It is from them, again, that the Âryans inherited their most valuable Science of the hidden virtues [pg 445] of precious and other stones, of Chemistry, or rather Alchemy, of Mineralogy, Geology, Physics and Astronomy.

Several times the writer has put to herself the question: Is the story of Exodus—in its details at least—as narrated in the Old Testament, original? Or is it, like the story of Moses himself and many others, simply another version of the legends told of the Atlanteans? For who, upon hearing the story told of the latter, will fail to perceive the great similarity of the fundamental features? Remember the anger of “God” at the obduracy of Pharaoh, his command to the “chosen” ones to spoil the Egyptians, before departing, of their “jewels of silver and jewels of gold,”994 and finally the Egyptians and their Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea. Then read the following fragment of the earlier story from the Commentary:

And the “Great King of the Dazzling Face” the chief of all the Yellow-faced, was sad, seeing the sins of the Black-faced.

He sent his air-vehicles [Vimânas] to all his brother-chiefs [chiefs of other nations and tribes] with pious men within, saying:

“Prepare. Arise, ye men of the Good Law, and cross the land while [yet] dry.

“The Lords of the storm are approaching. Their chariots are nearing the land. One night and two days only shall the Lords of the Dark Face [the Sorcerers] live on this patient land. She is doomed, and they have to descend with her. The nether Lords of the Fires [the Gnomes and Fire Elementals] are preparing their magic Agnyastra [fire-weapons worked by Magic]. But the Lords of the Dark Eye [‘Evil Eye’] are stronger than they [the Elementals] and they are the slaves of the mighty ones. They are versed in Astra [Vidyâ, the highest magical knowledge].995 Come and use yours [i.e., your magic powers, in order to counteract those of the Sorcerers]. Let every Lord of the Dazzling Face [an Adept of the White Magic] cause the Vimâna of every Lord of the Dark Face to come into his hands [or possession], lest any [of the Sorcerers] should by its means escape from the waters, avoid the Rod of the Four [Karmic Deities], and save his wicked [followers, or people].

“May every Yellow Face send sleep from himself to [mesmerize?] every Black Face. May even they [the Sorcerers] avoid pain and suffering. May [pg 446]every man true to the Solar Gods bind [paralyze] every man under the Lunar Gods, lest he should suffer or escape his destiny.

“And may every Yellow Face offer of his life-water [blood] to the speaking animal of a Black Face, lest he awaken his master.996

“The hour has struck, the black night is ready.

“Let their destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the Great Four.997 May the Kings of Light return.”

The great King fell upon his Dazzling Face and wept....

When the Kings assembled, the waters had already moved....

[But] the nations had now crossed the dry lands. They were beyond the water-mark. Their Kings reached them in their Vimânas, and led them on to the lands of Fire and Metal [East and North].

Still, in another passage, it is said:

Stars [meteors] showered on the lands of the Black Faces; but they slept.

The speaking beasts [the magic watchers] kept quiet.

The nether Lords waited for orders, but they came not, for their masters slept.

The waters arose, and covered the valleys from one end of the Earth to the other. High lands remained, the bottom of the Earth [the lands of the antipodes] remained dry. There dwelt those who escaped; the men of the Yellow Faces and of the straight eye [the frank and sincere people].

When the Lords of the Dark Faces awoke and bethought themselves of their Vimânas in order to escape from the rising waters, they found them gone.

Then a passage shows some of the more powerful Magicians of the “Dark Faces,” who awoke earlier than the others, pursuing those who had “spoilt them” and who were in the rear-guard, for—“the nations that were led away were as thick as the stars of the milky way,” says a more modern Commentary, written in Sanskrit only.

Like as a dragon-snake uncoils slowly its body, so the Sons of Men, led on by the Sons of Wisdom, opened their folds, and spreading out, expanded like a running stream of sweet waters ... many of the faint-hearted among them perished on their way. But most were saved.

Yet the pursuers, “whose heads and chests soared high above the [pg 447] water,” chased them “for three lunar terms” until finally reached by the rising waves, they perished to the last man, the soil sinking under their feet and the Earth engulfing those who had desecrated her.

This sounds a good deal like the original material upon which the similar story in Exodus was built many hundred thousands of years later. The biography of Moses, the story of his birth, childhood and rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, is now shown to have been adapted from the Chaldæan narrative about Sargon. And if so, the Assyrian tiles in the British Museum being a good proof of it, why not that of the Jews robbing the Egyptians of their jewels, the death of Pharaoh and his army, and so on? The gigantic Magicians of Ruta and Daitya, the “Lords of the Dark Face,” may, in the later narrative, have become the Egyptian Magi, and the yellow-faced nations of the Fifth Race, the virtuous sons of Jacob, the “chosen people”! One more statement has to be made. There have been several Divine Dynasties—a series for every Root-Race beginning with the Third, each series according and adapted to its Humanity. The last seven Dynasties referred to in the Egyptian and Chaldæan records belonged to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Âryan, was not entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethnology gives other names. It would be impossible, in view of the limited space at our disposal, to go any further into the description of the Atlanteans, in whom the whole East believes as much as we believe in the ancient Egyptians, but whose existence the majority of the Western Scientists deny, as they have denied, before this, many a truth, from the existence of Homer down to that of the carrier pigeon. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater than even that of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato's Atlantis, who built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainty before the advent of the “Eastern Æthiopians,” as Herodotus calls the Egyptians. This may be well inferred from the statement made by Ammianus Marcellinus, who says of the Pyramids that:

There are also subterranean passages and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful in the ancient mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost.

These men who “divined the coming of floods” were not Egyptians, who never had any, except the periodical rising of the Nile. Who were they? The last remnants of the Atlanteans, we maintain; those [pg 448] races which are dimly suspected by Science, and thinking of which Mr. Charles Gould, the well-known Geologist, says:

Can we suppose that we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in fact, penetrated yet beyond its antechambers? Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and of China, shadowy mementoes of pre-historic man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands from others, which, like the fabled (?) Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization.998

After this one can turn with more confidence to the words of a Master who wrote, several years before these words were penned by Mr. Gould:

The Fourth Race had its periods of the highest civilization. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian civilizations are nothing compared to the civilizations that began with the Third Race [—after its separation].

But if this civilization and the mastery of arts and sciences are denied to the Third and Fourth Races, no one will deny that between the great civilizations of antiquity, such as those of Egypt and India, there stretched the dark ages of crass ignorance and barbarism ever since the beginning of the Christian era up to our modern civilization, during which period all recollection of these traditions was lost. As said in Isis Unveiled:

Why should we forget that, ages before the prows of the adventurous Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phœnician vessels had circumnavigated the Globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What Archæologist will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did not erect the monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia; or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin; or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums—last mementoes of the long “lost arts”—speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century.

And the same question may be put now that was put then; it may be once more asked:

How does it happen that the most advanced standpoint that has been reached in our times, only enables us to see in the dim distance up the Alpine path of knowledge [pg 449]the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they had reached and occupied?

If modern masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they not restore to us the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do they not give us the unfading colours of Luxor—the Tyrian purple, the bright vermilion, and dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this place, and are as bright as on the first day of their application; the indestructible cement of the pyramids and of ancient aqueducts; the Damascus blade, which can be turned like a corkscrew in its scabbard without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of the stained glass that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And if Chemistry is so little able to rival even the early mediæval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, according to strong probability, were perfectly known thousands of years ago. The more Archæology and Philology advance, the more humiliating to our pride are the discoveries which are daily made, the more glorious testimony do they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps on account of the distance of their remote antiquity, have been until now considered ignorant flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition.

Among other Arts and Sciences, the Ancients—ay, as an heirloom from the Atlanteans—had those of Astronomy and Symbolism, which included the knowledge of the Zodiac.

As already explained, the whole of Antiquity believed, with good reason, that humanity and its races are all intimately connected with the Planets, and these with the Zodiacal Signs. The whole world's history is recorded in the latter. In the ancient temples of Egypt there is an example in the Dendera Zodiac; but except in an Arabic work, the property of a Sûfî, the writer has never met with a correct copy of these marvellous records of the past—and also of the future—history of our Globe. Yet the original records exist, most undeniably.

As Europeans are unacquainted with the real Zodiacs of India, and those they do happen to know of they fail to understand, as witness Bentley, the reader is advised, in order to verify the statement, to turn to the work of Denon999 in which the two famous Egyptian Zodiacs can be found and examined. Having seen them personally, the writer has no longer need to trust to what other students—who have examined and studied both very carefully—have to say of them. The assertion of the Egyptian Priests to Herodotus, that the terrestrial Pole and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, has been corroborated by Mackey, who states that the Poles are represented on the Zodiacs in both positions.

[pg 450]

And in that which shows the Poles [polar axes] at right angles, there are marks which show, that it was not the last time they were in that position; but the first[—after the Zodiacs had been traced]. Capricorn, is, therein, represented at the North Pole; and Cancer is divided, near its middle, at the South Pole; which is a confirmation that, originally they had their winter when the Sun was in Cancer. But the chief characteristics of its being a monument commemorating the first timethat the Pole had been in that position, are the Lion and the Virgin.1000

Broadly calculated, it is believed by Egyptologists that the Great Pyramid was built 3,350 b.c.;1001 and that Menes and his Dynasty existed 750 years before the appearance of the Fourth Dynasty—during which the Pyramids are supposed to have been built. Thus 4,100 years b.c. is the age assigned to Menes. Now Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson's declaration that all the facts lead to the conclusion that the Egyptians had already—

Made very great progress in the arts of civilization before the age of Menes, and perhaps before they immigrated into the valley of the Nile—1002

is very suggestive, as destroying this hypothesis of the comparatively modern civilizing of Egypt. It points to a great civilization in pre-historic times, and a still greater antiquity. The Schesoo-Hor, the “servants of Horus,” were the people who had settled in Egypt; and, as M. Maspéro affirms, it is to this “pre-historic race” that—

Belongs the honour of having constituted Egypt, such as we know it, from the commencement of the historic period.

And Staniland Wake adds:

They founded the principal cities of Egypt, and established the most important sanctuaries.1003

This was before the Great Pyramid epoch, and when Egypt had hardly arisen from the waters. Yet:

They possessed the hieroglyphic form of writing special to the Egyptians, and must have been already considerably advanced in civilization.

As says Lenormant:

It was the country of the great pre-historic sanctuaries, seats of the sacerdotal dominion, which played the most important part in the origin of civilization.

What is the date assigned to this people? We hear of 4,000, at the utmost of 5,000, years b.c. (Maspéro). Now it is claimed that it is by [pg 451] means of the Cycle of 25,868 years (the Sidereal Year) that the approximate year of the erection of the Great Pyramid can be ascertained.

Assuming that the long narrow downward passage leading from the entrance was directed towards the pole-star of the pyramid builders, astronomers have shown that in the year 2,170 b.c. the passage pointed to Alpha Draconis, the then pole-star.... Mr. Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, after stating that the pole-star was in the required position about 3,350 b.c., as well as in 2,170 b.c., says: “either of these would correspond with the position of the descending passage in the Great Pyramid; but Egyptologists tell us there can absolutely be no doubt that the later epoch is far too late.”1004

But we are also told that:

This relative position of Alpha Draconis and Alcyone being an extraordinary one ... it could not occur again for a whole Sidereal Year.1005

This demonstrates that, since the Dendera Zodiac shows the passage of three Sidereal Years, the Great Pyramid must have been built 78,000 years ago, or in any case that this possibility deserves to be accepted at least as readily as the later date of 3,350 b.c.

Now on the Zodiac of a certain temple in far Northern India, the same characteristics of the signs as on the Dendera Zodiac are found. Those who know the Hindû symbols and constellations well, will be able to find out from the description of the Egyptian, whether the indications of time are correct or not. On the Dendera Zodiac, as preserved by the modern Egyptian Coptic and Greek Adepts, and explained a little differently by Mackey, the Dion stands upon the Hydra and his tail is almost straight, pointing downwards at an angle of forty or fifty degrees, this position agreeing with the original conformation of these constellations. But adds Mackey:

In many places we see the Lion [Sinha], with his tail turned up over his back, and ending with a Serpent's head; thereby, shewing that the Lion had been inverted: which, indeed, must have been the case with the whole Zodiac, and every other Constellation, when the Pole had been inverted.

Speaking of the circular Zodiac, which is also given by Denon, he says:

There ... the Lion is standing on the Serpent, and his tail forming a curve downward, from which we find that, though six or seven hundred thousand years must have passed between the two positions, yet they had made but little or no difference in the Constellations of Leo and the Hydra; while Virgo is represented very differently in the two—in the circular Zodiac, the Virgin is nursing her child: but it seems that they had not had that idea when the Pole was first within [pg 452]the plane of the Ecliptic; for in this Zodiac, as given by Denon, we see three Virgins between the Lion and the Scales, the last of which holds, in her hand, an ear of wheat. It is much to be lamented that, there is in this Zodiac a breach of the figures in the latter part of Leo and the beginning of Virgo, which has taken away one Decan out of each sign.1006

Nevertheless, the meaning is plain, as the three Zodiacs belong to three different epochs; namely, to the last three family races of the fourth sub-race of the Fifth Root-Race, each of which must have lived approximately from 25,000 to 30,000 years. The first of these, the “Âryan-Asiatics,” witnessed the doom of the last of the populations of the Giant Atlanteans1007 (the Ruta and Daitya Island-Continents) who perished some 850,000 years ago, toward the close of the Miocene Age.1008 The fourth sub-race witnessed the destruction of the last remnant of the Atlanteans—the Âryo-Atlanteans in the last island of Atlantis, namely, some 11,000 years ago. In order to understand this, the reader is asked to glance at the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Root-Race—generally, though hardly correctly, called the Âryan Race—and the explanations appended to it.

Let the reader remember well that which is said of the divisions of Root-Races and the evolution of Humanity in this work, and stated clearly and concisely in Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.

1. There are seven Rounds in every Manvantara; this Round is the Fourth, and we are in the Fifth Root-Race, at present.

2. Each Root-Race has seven sub-races.

3. Each sub-race has, in its turn, seven ramifications, which may be called “branch” or “family” races.

4. The little tribes, shoots, and offshoots of the last-named are countless, and depend on Karmic action.

Examine the Genealogical Tree hereto appended, and you will [pg 453] understand. The illustration is purely diagrammatic, and is only intended to assist the reader in obtaining a slight grasp of the subject, amidst the confusion which exists between the terms which have been used at different times for the divisions of Humanity. It is also here attempted to express in figures—but only within approximate limits, for the sake of comparison—the duration of time through which it is possible to definitely distinguish one division from another. It would only lead to hopeless confusion if any attempt were made to give accurate dates to a few; for the Races, sub-races, etc., down to their smallest ramifications, overlap and are entangled with each other until it is nearly impossible to separate them.

The Human Race has been compared to a tree, and this serves admirably as an illustration.

The main stem of a tree may be compared to the Root-Race (a).

Its larger limbs to the various sub-races; seven in number (b1, b2, etc.).

On each of these limbs are seven “branches,” or “family” races (c).

After this the cactus-plant is a better illustration, for its fleshy “leaves” are covered with sharp spines, each of which may be compared to a nation or tribe of human beings.

Now our Fifth Root-Race has already been in existence—as a Race sui generis and quite free from its parent stem—about 1,000,000 years; therefore it must be inferred that each of the four preceding sub-races [pg 454] has lived approximately 210,000 years; thus each family race has an average existence of about 30,000 years, and thus the European “family race” has still a good many thousand years to run, although the nations or the innumerable spines upon it, vary with each succeeding “season” of three or four thousand years. It is somewhat curious to mark the comparative approximation of duration between the lives of a “family race” and a Sidereal Year.

The knowledge of the foregoing, and the absolutely correct divisions of time, formed part and parcel of the Mysteries, where these Sciences were taught to the Disciples, and where they were transmitted by one Hierophant to another. Everyone is aware that the European Astronomers assign—arbitrarily enough—the date of the invention of the Egyptian Zodiac to the years 2,000 or 2,400 b.c. (Proctor); and insist that the date of this invention coincides with that of the erection of the Great Pyramid. This, to an Occultist and Eastern Astronomer, must appear quite absurd. The Cycle of the Kali Yuga is said to have begun between the 17th and 18th of February in the year 3,102 b.c. Now the Hindûs claim that in the year 20,400 before Kali Yugam, the origin of their Zodiac coincided with the Spring Equinox—there being at the time a conjunction of the Sun and Moon—and Bailly proved by a lengthy and careful computation of that date, that, even if fictitious, the epoch from which they had started to establish the beginning of their Kali Yuga was very real. That “epoch is the year 3,102 before our era,” he writes.1009 The lunar eclipse arriving just a fortnight after the beginning of the Black Age—it took place in a point situated between the Wheat Ear of Virgo and the star Θ of the same constellation. One of their most esoteric Cycles is based upon certain conjunctions and respective positions of Virgo and the Pleiades (Krittika). Hence, as the Egyptians brought their Zodiac from Southern India and Lankâ,1010 the esoteric meaning was evidently identical. The “three Virgins,” or Virgo in three different positions, meant, with both, the record of the first three “Divine or Astronomical Dynasties,” who taught the Third Root-Race; and after having abandoned the Atlanteans to their doom, returned, or redescended rather, during the third sub-race of the Fifth, in order to reveal to saved humanity the mysteries of their birth-place—the Sidereal Heavens. The same symbolical record of the human Races and the three Dynasties (Gods, Manes—Semi-divine Astrals of the Third and Fourth—and the Heroes of the Fifth Race) which preceded [pg 455] the purely human kings, was found in the distribution of the tiers and passages of the Egyptian Labyrinth. As the three inversions of the Poles of course changed the face of the Zodiac, a new one had to be constructed each time. In Mackey's Sphinxiad the speculations of the bold author must have horrified the orthodox portion of the population of Norwich, for he says, fantastically enough: