Part 3 — Footnotes (continued 2)

447.

In calling the animal “soulless” we do not deprive the beast, from the humblest to the highest species, of a Soul, but only of a conscious surviving Ego-Soul, i.e., that principle which survives after a man, and reïncarnates in a like man. The animal has an Astral Body, that survives the physical form for a short period; nevertheless its (animal) Monad does not reïncarnate in the same, but in a higher species, and has no “Devachan” of course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are latent.

448.

Manual of Geology, p. 302.

449.

The “fables” and “myths” about Leda and Jupiter, and such like, could never have sprung up in people's fancy, had not the allegory rested on a fact in Nature. Evolution, gradually transforming man into a mammal, did in his case only what it did in that of other animals. But this does not prevent man from having always stood at the head of the animal world and other organic species, and from having preceded the former.

450.

See the Section on “The Chronology of the Brâhmans,” p. 69.

451.

To avoid confusion, let the reader remember that the term Root-Race applies to one of the seven great Races, sub-race to one of its great Branches, and family-race to one of the sub-divisions, which include nations and large tribes.

452.

In the Section on “The Fifth Race and its Divine Instructors,” in the Commentary on Stanza XII, the nature of these “Instructors” is explained.

453.

The present yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early branches of the Fourth Race. Of the Third, the only pure and direct descendants are, as said above, a portion of the fallen and degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors belonged to a division of the seventh sub-race of the Third. The rest are of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in stature and intellectual capacities.

454.

Language is certainly coëval with reason, and could never have been developed before men became one with the informing principles in them—those who fructified and awoke to life the mânasic element dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor Max Müller tells us in his Science of Thought: “Thought and language are identical.” To add to this, however, the reflection that thoughts which are too deep for words, do not really exist at all, is rather risky, for thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in eternity whether expressed or not. Logos is both reason and speech. But language, proceeding in cycles, is not always adequate to express spiritual thoughts. Moreover, in one sense, the Greek Logos is the equivalent of the Sanskrit Vâch, “the immortal (intellectual) ray of spirit.” And the fact that Vâch (as Devasenâ, an aspect of Sarasvatî, the Goddess of Hidden Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate Kumâra, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference to the Kumâras, those “who refused to create,” but who were compelled later on to complete divine Man by incarnating in him. All this will be fully explained in the Sections that follow.

455.

Ptolemy, speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitæ or Kabul tribes, calls them Ἀριστόφυλοι, Aristophyli, the aristocratic or noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves Ben-Issraël, children of Is (sa) raël, from Issa, “woman and also earth,” sons of Mother Earth. But if you call an Afghan Yahoudi (Jew), he will kill you. The names of the supposed twelve tribes of the Jews, and the names of the real twelve tribes of the Afghans, are the same. The Afghans being far older (at any rate, their Arabic stock) than the Israëlites, no one need be surprised to find such tribal names among them as Youssoufzic, sons of Joseph, in Punjcaure and Boonere; Zablistanee (Zebulon); Ben-manasseh, sons of Manasseh, among the Khojar Tartars; Isaguri, or Issachar, now Ashnagor in Afghanistan, etc. The whole twelve names of the so-called twelve tribes are names of the signs of the Zodiac, as is now well proven. In any case, the names of the oldest Arabic tribes, re-transliterated, yield the names of the zodiacal signs and likewise of the mythical sons of Jacob. Where are the traces of the Jewish twelve tribes? Nowhere. But there is a trace, and a deep one, that the Jews have tried to deceive people with the help of these names. For, see what happens ages after the ten tribes had wholly disappeared from Babylon. Ptolemy Philadelphus, desiring to have the Hebrew Law translated for him into Greek (the famous Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of the Jews, Eleazar, to send him six men from each of the twelve tribes; and the seventy-two representatives (of whom sixty were ghosts apparently) came to the king in Egypt and translated the Law amid miracles and wonders. See Butler's Horæ Biblicæ, Josephus, and Philo Judæus.

456.

The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has gradually, and with every generation and variety, tended more and more to return to the original type of its male forefather—the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.

457.

Androgyne.

458.

Dr. A. Wilder; who says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.

459.

Vol. i. pp. 575, 576.

460.

Foĕ-kouĕ-ki; ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques; par Chy Fa-hian: translated by Abel Remusat.

461.

Seventh year, 1855.

462.

De Mirville's Des Esprits, ii. 423. See also Moses Maimonides, More Nevochim.

463.

Sciences Occultes, p. 464.

464.

Révolution du Globe, Vol. v. p. 247.

465.

We read in De Mirville's “Mémoire â l'Académie” (ii. 431) of the “naïve astonishment of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, when M. de Paravey showed to him, in some old Chinese works and Babylonian tiles, dragons, ... ornithorhynchuses and saurians (aquatic animals found only in Australia), etc., extinct animals that he had thought unknown on earth ... till his own day.”

466.

See Isaiah, xxx. 6: “The viper and the flying serpent,” and the fiery serpents conquered by the brazen serpent of Moses.

467.

The fossils, reconstructed by Science which we know, ought to be sufficient warrant for the possibility of even a Leviathan, not to mention Isaiah's flying serpents, or Saraph Mehophep, words which are translated in all the Hebrew dictionaries as “Saraph,” enflamed or fiery venom, and “Mehophep,” flying. But, although Christian Theology has always connected both Leviathan and Saraph Mehophep with the Devil, the expressions are metaphorical and have nought to do with the “Evil One.” Nevertheless, the word “Dragon” has now become a synonym for the latter. In Bretagne the word Drouk now signifies “Devil,” whence, as we are told by Cambry (Monuments Celtiques, p. 299), the Devil's Tomb in England, Droghedanum Sepulcrum. In Languedoc the meteoric fires and will-o'-the-wisps are called Drac, and in Bretagne Dreag and Wraie or wraith; the castle of Drogheda in Ireland meaning the Devil's castle. (De Mirville, ibid., ii. 423.)

468.

The ultramontane writers accept the whole series of draconian stories given by Father Kircher, in his Œdipus Ægyptiacus, “De Genesi Draconum,” quite seriously. According to that Jesuit, he himself saw a dragon which was killed in 1669 by a Roman peasant, as the director of the Museo Barberini sent it to him, to take the beast's likeness, which Father Kircher did and had it published in one of his in-folios. After this he received a letter from Christopher Scherer, Prefect of the Canton of Soleure, Switzerland, in which that official certifies to his having seen himself, with his own eyes, one fine summer night in 1619, a living dragon. Having remained on his balcony “to contemplate the perfect purity of the firmament,” he writes, “I saw a fiery, shining dragon rise from one of the caves of Mount Pilatus and direct himself rapidly towards Fluelen to the other end of the lake. Enormous in size, his tail was still longer and his neck stretched out. His head and jaws were those of a serpent. In flying, he emitted on his way numerous sparks (? !).... I thought at first I was seeing a meteor, but soon, looking more attentively, I was convinced by his flight and the conformation of his body that I saw a veritable dragon. I am happy to be thus able to enlighten your Reverence on the very real existence of those animals”—in dreams, the writer ought to have added, of long past ages. (Ibid., p. 424.)

469.

As a convincing proof of the reality of the fact, a Roman Catholic refers the reader to the picture of the incident painted by Simon de Sienne, a friend of the poet, on the portal of the Church Notre Dame du Don at Avignon, notwithstanding the prohibition of the Sovereign Pontiff, who “would not allow this triumph of love to be enthroned in the holy place”; and adds: “Time has injured the work of art, but has not weakened its tradition.” (Ibid., p. 425.) De Mirville's “Dragon-Devils” of our era seem to have no luck, as they disappear most mysteriously from the museums where they are said to have been. Thus the Dragon embalmed by Ulysses Aldovrandus and presented to the Musée du Sénat, either in Naples or Bologna, “was there still in 1700,” but is there no more. (Ibid., p. 427.)

470.

Op. cit., ii. 422.

471.

Ibid., p. 433.

472.

Ibid., pp. 432, 433. This is about as just as though, a few millenniums hence, a fanatic of some future new creed, who was bent upon glorifying his religion at the expense of ancient Christianity, were to say: Everywhere the quadruped lamb was adored. The nun, calling it the Agnus, placed it on her bosom; the priest laid it on the altar. It figured in every Paschal meal, and was glorified loudly in every temple. And yet the Christians dreaded it and hated it, for they slew and devoured it. Heathens, at any rate, do not eat their sacred symbols. We know of no serpent or reptile-eaters, except in Christian civilized countries, where they begin with frogs and eels, and must end with real snakes, as they have begun with lamb and ended with horse-flesh.

473.

Ibid., p. 423.

474.

Pantheon, 3.

475.

The Solar Chnouphis, or Agathodæmon, is the Christos of the Gnostics, as every scholar knows. He is intimately connected with the Seven Sons of Sophia (Wisdom), the Seven Sons of Aditi, Universal Wisdom, her eighth being Mârttânda, the Sun, which Seven are the Seven Planetary Regents or Genii. Therefore Chnouphis was the Spiritual Sun of Enlightenment, of Wisdom, hence the patron of all the Egyptian Initiates, as Bel-Merodach, or Bel-Belitanus, became later with the Chaldæans.

476.

Hermes, or rather Thot, was a generic name. Abul Feda shows in his Historia Anti-Islamitica, five Hermes, and the names of Hermes, Nebo, Thot were given respectively in various countries to great Initiates. Thus Nebo, the son of Merodach and Zarpanitu, whom Herodotus calls Zeus-Belos, gave his name to all the great Prophets, Seers and Initiates. They were all “Serpents of Wisdom,” as connected with the Sun astronomically, and with Wisdom spiritually.

477.

Pantheon, text 15.

478.

i. 555.

479.

Genesis, xlix. 17, 18, and 5, 6.

480.

Dunlap, in his Introduction to Sod, the Mysteries of Adoni (xi), explains the word “Sod” as arcanum, religious mystery, on the authority of Schindler's Penteglott, 1201. “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him,” says Psalm, xxv. 14. This is a mistranslation of the Christians, for it ought to read: “Sod Ihoh (the Mysteries of Ihoh) are for those who fear him.” “Al [El] is terrible in the great Sod of the Kedeshim (the Priests, the Holy, the Initiated).”—Psalm, lxxxix. 7 (ibid.). The Kedeshim were very far from holy. See the Section on “The Holy of Holies,” in Part II of this Volume.

481.

“The members of the Priest-Colleges were called Sodales,” says Freund's Latin Lexicon (iv. 448). “Sodalities were constituted in the Idæan Mysteries of the Mighty Mother,” writes Cicero in De Senectute. (Dunlap, ibid., p. xii.)

482.

xxx. 6.

483.

The priests of Baal who jumped over the fires. But this was a Hebrew term and a local one. Saraph means “fiery or flaming venom.”

484.

Book of the Dead, ch. xxxix.

485.

The same ram's horns are found on the heads of Moses which were seen on some old medals by the writer in Palestine, one of which is still in her possession. The horns, forming part of the shining aureole on the statue of Moses in Rome by Michael Angelo, are vertical instead of being bent down to the ears, but the emblem is the same; hence the Brazen Serpent.

486.

But see Harris' Magic Papyrus, No. v, and the ram-headed Ammon manufacturing men on a potter's wheel.

487.

Brasseur de Bourbourg, Mexique, pp. 135 and 574.

488.

Ulûpî (Ulûpl) has an entirely Atlantean ring about it. Like Atlantis, it is neither a Greek nor a Sanskrit name, but reminds one of Mexican names.

489.

Mahâbhârata, Âdi Parva, Shlokas 7788, 7789. The Bhâgavata Purâna (ix. xx. 31), as explained by Shrîdhara, the commentator, makes Ulûpî the daughter of the king of Manipûra (see Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, iv. 160); but the late Pandit Dayânand Sarasvatî, certainly the greatest Sanskrit and Paurânic authority in India on such questions, personally corroborated that Ulûpî was daughter of the king of the Nâgas in Pâtâla, or America, 5,000 years ago, and that the Nâgas were Initiates.

490.

Isis Unveiled, ii. 293.

491.

Foh-tchou, in Chinese meaning literally Buddha's lord, or the teacher of the doctrines of Buddha—Foh.

492.

This mountain is situated south-west of China, almost between China and Tibet.

493.

Ibid., pp. 293, 294.

494.

Let the reader be reminded that in the Zohar, and also in all the Kabalistic works, it is maintained that “Metatron united with Shekinah.” Now Shekinah as the Veil (Grace) of Ain Suph, representing the Logos, is that very Tree of Knowledge; while Shamaël—the dark aspect of the Logos—occupies only the bark of that tree, and has the knowledge of evil alone. As Lacour, who saw in the scene of the Fall (Genesis, iii) an incident pertaining to Egyptian Initiation, says: “The Tree of the Divination, or of the Knowledge of Good and Evil ... is the science of Tzyphon, the Genius of Doubt, tzy to teach, and phon, doubt. Tzyphon is one of the Aleim; we shall see him presently under the name of Nach, the tempter” (Les Œloim, vol. ii. p. 218). He is now known to Symbologists under the name of Jehovah.

495.

This is the view taken and adopted by all the Church Fathers, but it is not the real Esoteric Teaching. The curse did not begin with the formation of either man or woman, for their separation was a natural sequence of evolution, but with the breaking of the law.

496.

By which human nature lives; not even the animal—but the misguided, sensual and vicious nature, which men, not Nature, created. See the Section “Cross and Circle.”

497.

See Zohar, i. 172, a and b.

498.

Compare the Section on “The Mysteries of the Hebdomad” in Part II of this Volume.

499.

Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 1.

500.

The Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation, Robert Brown, junr., F.S.A. London, 1881.

501.

Mythical Monsters, pp. 2-4.

502.

Ibid., p. 20.

503.

Ibid., pp. 36, 37.

504.

The Human Species, p. 52.

505.

Manual of Geology, p. 301.

506.

Ibid., p. 17.

507.

Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 16. See also Recherches, etc., des Mammifères, plate 1. Paris, 1868 to 1874.

508.

Preface to the Shan Hai King, or “Wonders by Land and Sea.”

509.

Vol. i. pp. 589, et seqq.

510.

There are Archæologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, refuse any great antiquity to even one single monument in India. In his work, Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India, he ventures to express the very extraordinary opinion that “Egypt had ceased to be a nation before the earliest of the cave-temples of India was excavated.” In short, he does not admit the existence of any cave-temple anterior to the reign of Ashoka, and seems anxious to prove that most of these rock-cut temples were executed during a period extending from the time of that pious Buddhist king until the destruction of the Andhra dynasty of Magadha, in the beginning of the fifth century. We believe such a claim to be perfectly arbitrary. Further discoveries will show that it is erroneous and unwarranted.

511.

America, at the time of its discovery, was called Atlanta by some native tribes.

512.

Since then Donnelly's Atlantis has appeared, and soon its actual existence will have become a scientific fact.

513.

It is so divided to this day, and Theosophists and Occultists, who have learned something of the occult but undeniable power of Dugpaship at their own expense, know this but too well.

514.

See De Mirville's Pneumatologie: Des Esprits, iii. 57, et seqq.

515.

See Max Müller, Chips, i. 339; “Popol Vuh.” Compare also Holmberg, Ethnographische Skizzen über die Völker des Russischen Amerika. Helsingfors, 1855.

516.

Op. cit., pp. 13-15.

517.

Ibid., p. 308.

518.

An approach to the statues at Bamian—also a Buddha 200 feet high—is found near a Jain settlement in Southern India, and appears to be the only one that remains at present.

519.

Even Wilson admits that Râma and Râvana were personages founded on historical facts. “The traditions of the South of India uniformly ascribe its civilization ... and the settlement of civilized Hindûs [the Fifth Race] to the conquest of Lankâ by Râma” (Vishnu Purâna, iii. 318)—the victory of the “Sons of Gods” over the Atlantean sorcerers, says the true tradition.

520.

Thus we are shown one hero, to give an instance, first born as the “unrighteous but valiant monarch” (Purusha) of the Daityas, Hiranyakashipu, slain by the Avatâra Nara-sinha (Man-lion). Then he was born as Râvana, the giant king of Lankâ, and killed by Râma; after which he is reborn as Shishupâla, the son of Rajarshi (King Rishi) Damaghosha, when he is again killed by Krishna, the last incarnation of Vishnu. This parallel evolution of Vishnu (Spirit) with a Daitya, as man, may seem meaningless, yet it gives us the key not only to the respective dates of Râma and Krishna but even to a certain psychological mystery.

521.

Compare Hibbert Lectures, 1877, Sayce, pp. 134-138.

522.

The Gods became No-Gods.

523.

Race.

524.

Yellow-white.

525.

Strictly speaking, it is only from the time of the Atlantean, brown and yellow giant races, that one ought to speak of man, since it was the Fourth Race only which was the first completely human species, however much larger in size than we are now. In Man: Fragments of Forgotten History (by two Chelâs), all that is said of the Atlanteans is quite correct. It is chiefly this Race which became “black with sin,” that brought the divine names of the Asuras, the Râkshasas and the Daityas, into disrepute, and passed them on to posterity as the names of fiends. For, as said, the Suras, Gods or Devas, having incarnated in the wise men of Atlantis, the names of Asuras and Râkshasas were given to the ordinary Atlanteans. Owing to the incessant conflicts of the latter with the last remnants of the Third Race and the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” their names have led to the later allegories about them in the Purânas. “Asura was the generic appellation of all the Atlanteans who were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Âryans (Gods).” (Man, p. 77.)

526.

In the beginning.

527.

The sub-races.

528.

Their colours.

529.

Stanza VII, Shloka 24.

530.

See Shlokas 32, 34.

531.

In general, the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the “fallen” Angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd. About a dozen could be cited, of the most varied character as to details, and all from the pens of educated lay authors, “university graduates” of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author of Earth's Earliest Ages, G. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Mystics, metaphysicians, poets, and every contemporary author on Oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the “Prince of the Air,” and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in this wise: “Satan is the ‘Anointed Cherub’ of old.... God created Satan, the fairest and wisest of all His creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the Air.... He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis ... and of an altogether different and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, his vast empire is our earth, if not the whole solar system.... Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition.” Then we are informed that “Satan was from the moment of his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty” (! !): that he “awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of those whom God had appointed.” Then the Devil “passes from the royalty to his priestly dignity” (! ! !). “Satan was also a priest of the Most High,” etc., etc. And now—“Antichrist will be Satan incarnate.” (Chap. III and pp. 56-59.) The pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already appeared—they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the Perfect Way, of Isis Unveiled, of the Mystery of the Ages, and even of the Light of Asia ! ! The author notes the “avowed origin” of Theosophy from the “descending angels,” from the “Nephilim,” or the Angels of Genesis (vi), and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as our Secret Doctrine endeavours to show—unless he refuses to belong to the present humanity.

532.

Compare x. 8, where it speaks of all who have come before Jesus, being “thieves and robbers.”

533.

Verse 14.

534.

Luke, x. 18.

535.

It is not correct to refer to Christ—as some Theosophists do—as Buddhi, the sixth principle in man. The latter per se is a passive and latent principle, the Spiritual Vehicle of Âtmâ, inseparable from the manifested Universal Soul. It is only in union and in conjunction with Self-consciousness that Buddhi becomes the Higher Self and the Divine, discriminating Soul. Christos is the seventh principle, if anything.

536.

xix. 7.

537.

Ibid., verse 8.

538.

xviii. 24.

539.

To make it plainer, any one who reads the passage in Luke, will see that the remark follows the report of the seventy, who rejoice that “even the devils [the spirit of controversy and reasoning, or the opposing power, since Satan means simply ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’] are subject unto us through thy name.” (Luke, x. 17.) Now, “thy name” means the name of Christos, or Logos, or the Spirit of true Divine Wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of intellectual or mere materialistic reasoning—the Higher Self in short. And when Jesus remarks on this that he has “beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers, notifying to them that he already knew it, and a reference to the incarnation of the Divine Ray—the Gods or Angels—which falls into generation. For not all men, by any means, benefit by that incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and dead during the whole life. Truly “no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son,” as added by Jesus then and there (verse 22)—the “Church of Christ” less than any one else. The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the terms “Father” and “Son,” and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Earth. For the teachings of Christ were Occult teachings, which could only be explained at Initiation. They were never intended for the masses, for Jesus forbade the twelve to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans (Matth., x. 5), and repeated to his disciples that the “mystery of the kingdom of God” was for them alone, not for the multitudes (Mark, iv. 11).

540.

So, for instance, in the Purânas, Pulastya, a Prajâpati, or son of Brahmâ—the progenitor of the Râkshasas, and the grandfather of Râvana, the great king of Lankâ in the Râmâyana—had, in a former birth, a son named Dattoli, “who is now known as the sage Agastya,” says Vishnu Purâna (Wilson's Trans., i. 154). This name of Dattoli alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings. He is called respectively, Dattoli, Dattâli, Dattotti, Dattotri, Dattobhri, Dambhobhi and Dambholi. These seven variants have each a secret sense, and refer in the Esoteric Commentaries to various ethnological classifications, and also to physiological and anthropological mysteries of the primitive races. For, surely, the Râkshasas are not Demons, but simply the primitive and ferocious Giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the Globe, as the Fifth Race is now. Vasishtha is a warrant of this, if his words addressed to Parâshara, who attempted a bit of Jadoo (sorcery), which he calls “sacrifice,” for the destruction of the Râkshasas, mean anything. For he says: “Let no more of these unoffending ‘Spirits of Darkness’ be consumed.” (See for details, Mahâbhârata, Âdi Parvan, s. 176; also Linga Purâna, Pûrvârdha, s. 64; Wilson, ibid., i. 8, 9.)

541.

We have a passage from a Master's letter which has a direct bearing upon these incarnating Angels. Says the letter: “Now there are, and there must be, failures in the ethereal Races of the many Classes of Dhyân Chohans, or Devas [progressed entities of a previous Planetary Period], as well as among men. But still, as the failures are too far progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyân-Chohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower Kingdoms, this then happens. Where a new Solar System has to be evolved, these Dhyân Chohans are borne in by influx ‘ahead’ of the Elementals [entities ... to be developed into humanity at a future time] and remain as a latent or inactive spiritual force, in the Aura of a nascent World ... until the stage of human evolution is reached.... Then they become an active force and commingle with the Elementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity.” That is to say, to develop in man, and endow him with his Self-conscious Mind, or Manas.

542.

Appendix XV, pp. 369, et seqq.

543.

When the Earth with its Planetary Chain and Man were to appear.

544.

Our Earth and the physical plane of consciousness.

545.

When the pure, celestial Beings or Dhyân Chohans, and the great Pitris of various classes were commissioned—the one to evolve their Images or Chhâyâs, and make of them physical man, the others to inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence and the comprehension of the Mysteries of Creation.

546.

The “dynasties of kings” who all regard themselves as the “anointed,” reigning by the “Grace of God,” whereas in truth, they reign by the grace of Matter, the Great Illusion, the Deceiver.

547.

Ibid., loc. cit., verse 10.

548.

See the “Primeval Manus of Humanity.”

549.

The “Heavenly Man,” please mark again the word, is the “Logos” or the “Son” Esoterically. Therefore, once that the title was applied to Christ, who was declared to be God and the very God himself, Christian Theology had no choice. In order to support its dogma of a personal Trinity it had to proclaim, as it still does, that the Christian Logos is the only true one, and that all the Logoi of other religions are false, and are only the masquerading Evil Principle, Satan. See whereto this has led Western Theology!

550.

“For the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Light and Life, brought forth by its Word another Mind or Workman; which, being God of the Fire and the Spirit, fashioned and formed seven other Governors, which in their Circles contain the Phenomenal World, and whose disposition is called Fate or Destiny.” (Sect. ix. c. 1, ed. of 1579.) Here it is evident that Mind, the Primeval Universal Divine Thought, is neither the Unknown Unmanifested One, since it abounds in both sexes—is male and female—nor yet the Christian “Father,” as the latter is a male and not an androgyne. The fact is that the “Father,” “Son,” and “Man” are hopelessly mixed up in the translations of Pymander.

551.

The allegory of the fire of Prometheus is another version of the rebellion of the proud Lucifer, who was hurled down to the “bottomless pit,” or simply on to our Earth, to live as man. The Hindû Lucifer, the Mahâsura, is also said to have become envious of the Creator's resplendent Light, and, at the head of inferior Asuras (not Gods, but Spirits), to have rebelled against Brahmâ; for which Shiva hurled him down to Pâtâla. But, as philosophy goes hand in hand with allegorical fiction in Hindû myths, the “Devil” is made to repent, and is afforded the opportunity to progress: he is a sinful man esoterically, and can by Yoga, devotion, and adeptship, reach his status of “one with the deity,” once more. Hercules, the Sun-God, descends to Hades (the Cave of Initiation) to deliver the victims from their tortures, etc. The Christian Church alone creates eternal torment for the Devil and the damned that she has invented.

552.

Why, for instance, should Éliphas Lévi, the very fearless and outspoken Kabalist, have hesitated to divulge the mystery of the Fallen Angels so-called? That he knew the fact and the real meaning of the allegory, both in its religious and mystical, as well as in its physiological sense, is proved by his voluminous writings and frequent allusions and hints. Yet Éliphas, after having alluded to it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his later Histoire de la Magie (pp. 220, 221): “We protest with all our might against the sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We pretend neither to deny nor affirm here the tradition on the Fall of the Angels.... But if so ... then the prince of the Angelic Rebels can be at best the last and the most powerless among the condemned—now that he is separated from deity—which is the principle of every power.” This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave Jennings writes in his weird, staccato-like style: “Both Saint Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted personages, or dignified heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are each represented with their appropriate faculties and attributes. These are reproduced and stand multiplied—distinguished by different names in all the mythologies [including the Christian]. But the idea regarding each is a general one. This idea and representative notion is that of the all-powerful champion—child-like in his ‘virgin innocence’—so powerful that this God-filled innocence (the Seraphim ‘know most,’ the Cherubim ‘love most’) can shatter the world (articulated—so to use the word—in the magic of Lucifer, but condemned), in opposition to the artful constructions, won out of the permission of the Supreme—artful constructions (‘this side life’)—of the magnificent apostate, the mighty rebel, but yet, at the same time, the ‘Light-bringer,’ the Lucifer—the ‘Morning Star,’ the ‘Son of the Morning’—the very highest title ‘out of heaven,’ for in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an apparently incredible side of his character—for let the reader carefully remark that qualities are of no sex—this Archangel Saint Michael is the invincible, sexless, celestial ‘Energy’—to dignify him by his grand characteristics—the invincible ‘Virgin-Combatant,’ clothed ... and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the Gnostic ‘refusal to create.’ This is another myth, a ‘myth within myths,’ ... a stupendous ‘mystery of mysteries,’ because it is so impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as the Apocalypse. Unrevealable as the ‘Revelation.’ ” (Phallicism, pp. 212, 213.) Nevertheless, this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. Though, of course, as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of Phallicism gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand his real drift.

553.

“Creation”—out of preëxistent eternal Substance, or Matter, of course, which Substance, according to our teachings, is Boundless, Ever-existing Space.

554.

The Luciferians, a sect of the fourth century who are alleged to have taught that the soul was a carnal body transmitted to the child by its father, and the Lucianists, another and earlier sect of the third century a.d., who taught all this, and further, that the animal soul was not immortal, philosophized on the grounds of the real Kabalistic and Occult teachings.

555.

This “Central Sun” of the Occultists even Science is obliged to accept astronomically, for it cannot deny the presence in sidereal space of a central body in the Milky Way, a point unseen and mysterious, the ever-hidden centre of attraction of our Sun and System. But this “Sun” is viewed differently by the Occultists of the East. While the Western and Jewish Kabalists—and even some pious modern Astronomers—claim that in this Sun the God-head is specially present, referring to it the volitional acts of God—the Eastern Initiates maintain that, as the Supra-divine Essence of the Unknown Absolute is equally in every domain and place, the “Central Sun” is simply the centre of Universal Life-Electricity; the reservoir within which that Divine Radiance, already differentiated at the beginning of every “creation,” is focussed. Though still in a Laya, or neutral condition, it is, nevertheless, the one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, Life-Centre.

556.

Op. cit., pp. 287-289.

557.

See Commentary to Stanza VII, Volume I.

558.

The fourth and the fifth from below beginning with the Physical Body; the third and the fourth, if we reckon from Âtmâ.

559.

New Aspects of Life.

560.

Angelic, Spiritual Essences, immortal in their Being, because unconditioned in Eternity; but periodical and conditioned in their Manvantaric manifestations.

561.

Op. cit., pp. 97, 98, 2nd ed., 1887.

562.

The history of Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is to be found in Part II, Section V.

563.

By an Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a Protestant clergyman, he became a Mohammedan; then a rabid Atheist; after meeting with a Master, a Guru, he became a Mystic; then a Theosophist who doubted, despaired—threw up white for black magic, went insane and joined the Roman Church. Then again turning round, anathematized her, re-became an Atheist, and died cursing humanity, knowledge, and God, in whom he had ceased to believe. Furnished with all the Esoteric data to write his “War in Heaven,” he made a semi-political article out of it, mixing Malthus with Satan, and Darwin with the Astral Light. Peace be to his—Shell. He is a warning to the Chelâs who fail. His forgotten tomb may now be seen in the Mussulman burial ground of Joonaghur, Kathiawar, India.

564.

The author talks of the active, fighting, damning Jehovah as though he were a synonym of Parabrahman! We have quoted from this article to show where it dissents from Theosophic teachings; otherwise it would be quoted some day against us, as everything published in the Theosophist generally is.

565.

The Theosophist, vol. iii. p. 68.

566.

Explaining the Kabalah, Dr. Henry Pratt says: “Spirit was to man [to the Jewish Rabbin, rather!] a bodiless, disembodied, or deprived, and degraded being, and hence was termed by the ideograph Nahash, ‘Deprived’; represented as appearing to and seducing the human race—man through the woman.... In the picture from this Nahash, this spirit was represented by a serpent, because from its destitution of bodily members, the serpent was looked upon as a deprived and depraved and degraded creature.” (New Aspects of Life, p. 235.) Symbol for symbol there are those who would prefer that of the serpent—the symbol of wisdom and eternity, deprived of limbs as it is—to the Jod (י)—the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in the Kabalah—the God of the male symbol of generation.

567.

Zohar, iii. 61c.

568.

Daksha, the “intelligent, the competent.” “This name generally carries with it the idea of creative power.” He is a son of Brahmâ and of Aditi, and agreeably to other versions, a self-born power, which, like Minerva, sprang from his father's body. He is the chief of the Prajâpatis, the Lords or Creators of Being. In Vishnu Purâna, Parâshara says of him: “In every Kalpa [or Manvantara] Daksha and the rest are born and are again destroyed.” And the Rig Veda says that “Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha,” a reference to the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine Essence.

569.

Bhâgavata Purâna, iv. 24, 4.

570.

No one of these Orders is distinct from the Pitris or Progenitors. As says Manu (iii. 284): “The wise call our fathers Vasus; our paternal grandfathers, Rudras; our paternal great grandfathers, Âdityas; agreeably to a text of the Vedas.” “This is an everlasting Vedic text,” says another translation.

571.

As now discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder literature, it was the same in Chaldæan Theogony. Ishtar, “eldest of Heaven and of Earth.” Below him the Igigi or Angels of Heaven, and the Anûnaki, or Angels of Earth. Below these again various classes of Spirits and “Genii” called Sadu, Vadukku, Ekimu, Gallu—of which some were good, some evil. (See Smith's Babylonian Mythology, also Sayce's Hibbert Lectures, p. 141.)

572.

Some superior, others inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reïncarnating Monads, which could not all be of the same degree of purity in their last births in other Worlds. This accounts for the difference of races, the inferiority of the savage and other human varieties.

573.

“There are,” says Topinard in the English edition of his Anthropology, with a preface by Professor Broca, “three fundamental elements of colour in the human organism—namely, the red, the yellow, and the black, which, mixed in variable quantities with the white of the tissues, give rise to those numerous shades seen in the human family.” Here is Science again unintentionally supporting Occultism.

574.

It must be remembered that the “last remnants” here spoken of, refer to those portions of the “Great Continent” which still remained, and not to any of the numerous islands which existed contemporaneously with the Continent. Plato's “island,” for instance, was one of such remnants; the others having sunk at various periods previously. An Occult “tradition” teaches that such submersions occur whenever there is an eclipse of the “Spiritual Sun.”

575.

See the remarks on the Root and Seed Manus infra, and the Section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,” at the end of the Commentaries on this Stanza.

576.

Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate attempt to reconcile the Genetic account with Science (see his “Dawn of Creation” and “Proem to Genesis,” in The Nineteenth Century, 1886), has brought upon him the Jovian thunderbolt hurled by Mr. Huxley. The dead-letter account warranted no such attempt; and his fourfold order, or division, of animated creation, has turned into the stone which, instead of killing the fly on the sleeping friend's brow, killed the man himself. Mr. Gladstone has killed Genesis for ever. But this does not prove that there is no Esotericism in the latter. The fact that the Jews and all the Christians, the modern as well as the early sects, have accepted the narrative literally for two thousand years, proves only their ignorance, and shows the great ingenuity and constructive ability of the Initiated Rabbis, who built the two accounts—the Elohistic and Jehovistic—Esoterically, and purposely confused the meaning by the vowelless glyphs or word-signs in the original text. The six days (Yom) of creation do mean six periods of evolution, and the seventh day is that of culmination, of perfection—not of rest. These refer to the seven Rounds and the seven Races with a distinct “creation” in each; though the use of the words Boker, “dawn” or “morning,” and Ereb, “evening twilight”—which have Esoterically the same meaning as Sandhyâ, “twilight,” in Sanskrit—have led to a charge of the most crass ignorance of the order of evolution.

577.

Modern Science and Modern Thought, p. 337.

578.

Dowson's Hindû Classical Dictionary, sub voce.

579.

Op. cit., p. 335.

580.

“Follow the law of analogy”—the Masters teach. Âtmâ-Buddhi is dual and Manas is triple, inasmuch as the former has two aspects, and the latter three, i.e., as a “principle” per se, which gravitates, in its higher aspect, to Âtmâ-Buddhi, and follows, in its lower nature, Kâma, the seat of terrestrial and animal desires and passions. Now compare the evolution of the Races, the First and the Second of which are of the nature of Âtmâ-Buddhi, of which they are the passive Spiritual progeny, while the Third Root-Race shows three distinct divisions or aspects physiologically and psychically—the earliest sinless, the middle portions awakening to intelligence, and the third and last decidedly animal, i.e., Manas succumbs to the temptations of Kâma.

581.

Laing, op. cit., ibid.

582.

The whole trouble is this: neither Physiologists nor Pathologists will recognize that the cell-germinating substance, the Cytoblastema, and the mother-lye from which crystals originate, are one and the same essence, save in differentiation for certain purposes.

583.

Huxley, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, iii. 151.

584.

Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera, p. xi.

585.

Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, vol. iii. Very strangely, however, he has recently again changed his opinion. The Sun, he says, is only 15,000,000 years old.

586.

Bastian, The Beginnings of Life, ii. 622.

587.

Laing, Modern Science and Modern Thought, p. 171.

588.

In Isis Unveiled, vol. i. p. 389, this is noticed and half explained.

589.

Hence the philosophy in the allegory of the 7, 10, and finally 21, Prajâpatis, Rishis, Munis, etc., who all are made the “fathers” of various beings and things. The order of the seven classes, or orders of plants, animals, and even inanimate things, given at random in the Purânas, is found in several commentaries in the correct rotation. Thus, Prithu is the father of the Earth. He “milks” her, and makes her bear every kind of grain and vegetable, all enumerated and specified. Kashyapa is the “father” of all the reptiles, snakes, demons, etc.

590.

See vol. i. pp. 151, et seqq., concerning the “Tree of Evolution”—the “Mundane Tree.”

591.

Checked and modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which imposes a restriction on the advance of all species when a higher type makes its appearance.

592.

See Origin of Species, p. 145.

593.

Bastian, Beginnings of Life, ii. pp. 622, 623.

594.

Vol. ii. p. 278.

595.

Op. cit., i. 9.

596.

Ibid., ii. 283, 284.

597.

See his Lettres sur l'Atlantide.

598.

This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that: “The Noëtic family also ... bore the appellations of Atlanteans and Titans; and the great patriarch himself was called, by way of eminence, Atlas and Titan.” (Ibid., ii. 285.) And if so, then, according to the Bible, Noah must have been the progeny of the Sons of God, the Fallen Angels, agreeably to the same authority, and of the “daughters of men who were fair.” (See Genesis, vi.) And why not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his sons and daughters, who perished in the Deluge, as bad as the rest of mankind?

599.

In that wonderful volume of Donnelly, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, the author, speaking of the Âryan colonies from Atlantis, and of the arts and sciences—the legacy of our Fourth Race—bravely announces that “the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene age.” This is an enormous allowance for a modern scholar to make; but civilization dates still further back than the Miocene Atlanteans. Secondary-period man will be discovered, and with him his long forgotten civilization.

600.

Nature is the Natural Body, the Shadow of the Progenitors.

601.

Man is the “Heavenly Man,” as already stated.

602.

Divine Pymander, i. 16.

603.

The Pymander of our museums and libraries is an abridgment of one of the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phœnician MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the Genesis of Enoch. But even its disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators and Seven Primitive Men. As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Cadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial Sages—incarnated Dhyân Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies—who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their Master's names. This custom passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes—of whom Egyptologists count five—Enoch, etc.; they are all inventors of letters; none of them die; they still live, and are the first Initiators into, and Founders of, the Mysteries. It was only very lately that the Genesis of Enoch disappeared from among the Kabalists. Guillaume Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the Books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Éliphas Lévi tells his readers.

604.

Uranus is a modified Varuna, the “universal encompasser,” the “all-embracer,” and one of the oldest of the Vedic Deities—Space, the maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Âdityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the “Leviathan”—Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the Signs of the Zodiac. Varuna, without whom “no creature can even wink,” was degraded like Uranus, and, like him, fell into generation; his functions—“the grandest cosmical functions,” as Muir calls them—having been degraded from Heaven to Earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same Orientalist says: “The attributes and functions ascribed to Varuna [in the Vedas] impart to his character a moral elevation and sanctity far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity.” But to understand correctly the reason of his fall, like as that of Uranus, one has to see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and sinful work of man's fancy, and also to study the mysteries which Varuna is said to have imparted to Vasishtha. Only “his secrets and those of Mitra are not to be revealed to the foolish.”

605.

Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 7.

606.

Cronus is not only Χρόνος, Time, but also, as Bréal showed, in his Hercule et Cacus (p. 57), comes from the root kar, “to make, to create.” Whether Bréal and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in saying that in the Vedas, Krânan (sic) is a Creative God, we have our doubts. Bréal probably meant Karma, or rather Visvakarman, the Creative God, the “omnificent” and the “great architect of the world.”

607.

See Stanzas III—X, et seqq., and also Berosus' account of primeval creation.

608.

The Titanic struggle, in Theogony at least, is the fight for supremacy between the children of Uranus and Gæa (or Heaven and Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans, against the children of Cronus, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting struggle going on to this day between the Spiritual Inner Man and the man of flesh, in one sense.

609.

Just as the “Lord God,” or Jehovah, is Cain, esoterically, and the “tempting serpent” as well; the male portion of the androgynous Eve—before her “Fall,” the female portion of Adam Kadmon—the left side, or Binah, of the right side, Chokmah, in the first Sephirothal Triad.

610.

Decharme, op. cit., p. 284.

611.

In the Egyptian legend, called the “Two Brothers,” translated by M. Maspéro (the ex-director of the Boulaq Museum), the original of Pandora is given. Noom, the famous heavenly artist, creates a marvellous beauty, a girl whom he sends to Batoo, after which the happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is man, and the girl Eve, of course. (See Revue Archéologique, March, 1878, and also Decharme, ibid., p. 285.)

612.

Yima is not the “first man” in the Vendîdâd, but only in the theories of the Orientalists.

613.

Bœotia was submerged and subsequently ancient Athens and Eleusis.

614.

Opera et Dies, v. 108.

615.

Nem., VI. i.

616.

See Apollod., i. 7, 2; and Ovid, Metam., i. 260, et seqq.

617.

Deutsche Mythol., i. 545, 3rd edit., and Hanusch Schlawische Myth., p. 235. See Decharme, ibid., p. 288, who gives “nine times,” and not seven.

618.

Hesiod, Opera et Dies, 143-155.

619.

See Æschylus, Septem contra Thebas.

620.

Decharme, ibid., pp. 289, 290.

621.

Races.

622.

It was said.

623.

In Sanskrit Dâkinî.

624.

The name is used here in the sense, and as a synonym, of “sorcerers.” The Atlantean Races were many, and their evolution lasted for millions of years. All of them were not bad, but became so towards the end of their cycle, as we, the Fifth Race, are now fast becoming.

625.

The “Gods of the Elements” are by no means the Elementals. The latter are at best used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves.

626.

Cain was the “sacrificer,” as shown at first in Chap. iv. of Genesis, of “the fruit of the ground,” of which he was the first tiller, while Abel “brought of the firstlings of his flock” to the Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first male, Abel of the first female humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the Third Race. The “murdering” is blood-shedding, but not taking life.

627.

Genesis, vi.

628.

It is, perhaps, with an eye to this degradation of the highest and purest Spirits, who broke through the intermediate planes of lower consciousness, the “Seven Circles of Fire” of Pymander, that St. James is made to say “This wisdom (sophia) descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish”; now this Sophia is Manas, the “Human Soul,” the Spiritual Wisdom or Soul being Buddhi, which being so near the Absolute, is, per se, only latent consciousness, and is dependent upon Manas for manifestation beyond its own plane.

629.

This is the “Undying Race,” as it is called in Esotericism, and exoterically the fruitless generation of the first progeny of Daksha, who curses Nârada, the divine Rishi, for having dissuaded the Haryashvas and the Shabalâshvas (the sons of Daksha) from procreating their species, by saying: “Be born in the womb; there shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions.” After this, Nârada, the representative of that race of fruitless ascetics, is said, as soon as he dies in one body, to be reborn in another.

630.

Âdi Parvan, p. 113.

631.

Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., ii. 12.

632.

The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva España of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, as follows: “In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this land [Cholula] was in obscurity and darkness ... but immediately after the light of the sun arose in the East, there appeared gigantic men ... who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered after that to all parts of the earth.” “A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of Giants called Quinanes,” says the author of Atlantis (p. 204).

633.

Histoire de la Terre, p. 154.

634.

There are critics who, finding no evidence for the existence of Tertullian save in the writings of Eusebius, “the veracious,” are inclined to doubt it.

635.

Heroica, p. 35.

636.

Hist. Nat., VII. xvi.

637.

See for the above De Mirville, Pneumatologie Des Esprits, iii. 46-48.

638.

Élévations, p. 56.

639.

And that, notwithstanding the formal prohibition at the great Church Council of Elyrus in a.d. 303, when it was declared that “the form of God, which is immaterial and invisible, shall not be limited by figure or shape.” In 692, the Council of Constantinople similarly prohibited the faithful “to paint or represent Jesus as a lamb,” as also “to bow the knee in praying, as it is the act of idolatry.” But the Council of Nicæa (787) brought this idolatry back, while that of Rome (883) excommunicated John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, for showing himself an enemy of image worship.

640.

Genesis, v. Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Charles Gould, in his Mythical Monsters (p. 212), writes: “Its mythologies, histories, religions, popular stories, and proverbs, all teem with references to a mysterious being who has a physical nature and spiritual attributes. Gifted with an accepted form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for the assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather, producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising tempests and allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the scattered legends which everywhere abound relating to this subject.” This “mysterious being” is the mythical Dragon, i.e., the symbol of the historical and actual Adept, the Master and Professor of Occult Sciences of old. It has already been stated elsewhere, that the great “Magicians” of the Fourth and Fifth Races were generally called “Serpents” and “Dragons” after their Progenitors. All these belonged to the Hierarchy of the so-called “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, answering to the Agnishvâtta Pitris, the Maruts and Rudras generally, as the issue of Rudra their father, who is identified with the God of Fire. More is said in the text. Now Clement, an initiated Neo-Platonist, knew, of course, the origin of the word “Dragon,” and why the initiated Adepts were so called, as he knew the secret of the Agathodæmon, the Christ, the seven-vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new faith required the transformation of all the rivals of Jehovah—the Angels supposed to have rebelled against that “Elohim,” as the Titan Prometheus rebelled against Zeus, the usurper of his father's kingdom—and that “Dragon” was the mystic appellation of the “Sons of Wisdom”; from this knowledge came his definition, as cruel as it was arbitrary, “serpents and giants signify demons,” i.e., not “Spirits,” but Devils, in Church parlance.

641.

Part IV, Ch. xxvii, p. 291.

642.

“What would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese—I now speak of the inland, the true Chinamen, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now occupying the throne—the aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race, reached their highest civilization when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia.” (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 67.) And this handful of the inland Chinese are all of a very high stature. Could the most ancient MSS. in the Lolo language (that of the aborigines of China) be got at and correctly translated, many a priceless piece of evidence would be found. But they are as rare as their language is unintelligible. So far, one or two European Archæologists only have been able to procure such priceless works.

643.

Quoted in De Mirville, op. cit., iii. 53. Remember the same statement in the Book of Enoch, as also the ladder seen by Jacob in his dream. The “two worlds” mean, of course, the two planes of Consciousness and Being. A seer can commune with Beings of a higher plane than the Earth, without quitting his arm-chair.

644.

See the Commentary on the Four Races—and on the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” the immaculate progeny of the Androgynous Third Race.

645.

In the Kabalah the pronunciation of the four-lettered ineffable Name is “a most secret arcanum”—“a secret of secrets.”

646.

The Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 81.

647.

Ibid., p. 84, lines 12, 14 and 15.

648.

Returning once more to this most important subject in Archaic Cosmogony, even in the Norse legends, in the Sacred Scrolls of the Goddess Saga, we find Loki, the brother by blood of Odin—just as Typhon, Ahriman, and others are respectively brothers of Osiris and Ormazd—becoming evil only later, when he had mingled too long with humanity. Like all other Fire or Light Gods—Fire burning and destroying as well as warming and giving life—he ended by being regarded in the destructive sense of “Fire.” The name Loki, we learn from Asgard and the Gods (p. 250), has been derived from the old word liuhan, to enlighten. It has, therefore, the same origin as the Latin lux, light. Hence Loki is identical with Lucifer or Light-bringer. This title, being given to the Prince of Darkness, is very suggestive and is in itself a vindication against theological slander. But Loki is still more closely related to Prometheus, for he is shown chained to a sharp rock, while Lucifer, also identified with Satan, was chained down in Hell; a circumstance, however, which prevented neither of them from acting with all freedom on Earth, if we accept the theological paradox in its fulness. Loki is a beneficent, generous and powerful God in the beginnings of time, and the principle of good, and not of evil, in early Scandinavian Theogony.

649.

The Greek mythos alluded to a few pages back, namely the mutilation of Uranus by his son Cronus, is an allusion to this “theft” of the divine creative Fire by the Son of the Earth and Heavens. If Uranus, the personification of the Celestial Powers, has to cease creating (he is made impotent by Cronus (Chronos), the God in Time), so, in the Egyptian Cosmogony, it is Thot, the God of Wisdom, who regulates this fight between Horus and Set, the latter being served by the former as Uranus is by Cronus. (See Book of the Dead, xvii, line 26.) In the Babylonian account it is the God Zu, who strips the “Father of the Gods” of “umsimi”—the ideal creative organ, not the “crown” (!) as G. Smith thought (op. cit., pp. 115, 116). For, in the fragment K. 3454 (British Museum), it is said very clearly, that Zu having stripped the “venerable of heaven” of his desire, he carried away the “umsimi of the gods,” and burnt thereby “the tereti [the power] of all the gods,” thus “governing the whole of the seed of all the angels.” As the umsimi was “on the seat” of Bel, it could hardly be the “crown.” A fourth version is in the Bible. Ham is the Chaldæan Zu, and both are cursed for the same allegorically described crime.

650.

Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the Kabalah.

651.

Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 248. These are the Beings whose legendary existence has served as a ground-work upon which to build the Rabbinical Lilith, and what the believers in the Bible would term the Antediluvian women, and the Kabalists the Pre-Adamite races. They are no fiction—this is certain, however fantastic the exuberance of later growth.

652.

Op. cit., pp. 101, 102.

653.

For suggestiveness, we would recommend a short article by Visconde de Figanière, F.T.S., in The Theosophist, entitled “Esoteric Studies.” Its author expounds therein quite an Occult theory, though to the world a new idea—“the progress of the Monad concurring with the retrogression of Form, i.e., with decrease of the vis formativa.” (Vol. viii. p. 666.) He says, “Who knows what shape vehicled the Ego in remote rings [Rounds, or Races?]?... May not man's type ... have been that of the Simiadæ in its variety? Might not the Monkey-kingdom of Râmâyana fame rest on some far-off tradition relating to a period when that was the common lot, or rather aspect, of man?” And the author winds up a very clever, though too short, exposition of his theory by saying that which every true Occultist will endorse: “With physico-ethereal man there must be involution of sex. As physico-astral man depended on entities of the sub-human class (evolved from animal prototypes) for rebirth, so will physico-ethereal man find among the graceful, shapely orders issuing from the air-plane, one or more which will be developed for his successive embodiments when procreated forms are given—a process which will include all mankind only very gradually. The [Pre-?] Adamic and Post-Adamic races were giants; their ethereal counterparts may possibly be liliputians—beauteous, luminous, diaphanous—but will assuredly be giants in mind” (p. 671).

654.

It may be objected that this is a contradiction. That, as the first Root-Race appeared 300,000,000 years after the vegetation had evolved, the Seed of vegetable life could not be in the First Race. We say it could; for up to man's appearance in this Round, the vegetation was of quite another kind to what it is now, and quite ethereal; this, for the simple reason that no grass or plants could have been physical, before there were animal or other organisms to breathe out the carbonic acid which vegetation has to imbibe for its development, its nutrition and growth. They are interdependent in their physical and achieved forms.

655.

Zohar, i. 21a.

656.

Ibid., iii. 48a.

657.

Ibid., ii. 76a.

658.

Op. cit., p. 666.

659.

It is stated in the Zohar that the “primordial worlds” (sparks) could not continue because man was not as yet. “The human form contains everything; and as it did not as yet exist, the worlds were destroyed.”

660.

“The Sacred Books of the East,” vol. iv; The Vendîdâd, J. Darmesteter; Fargard ii. vv. 27 (70) and 28 (74).

661.

This is the meaning when the allegory and symbol are opened and read by means of the human key, or the key to Terrestrial Anthroposophy. This interpretation of the “Ark” symbolism does not in the least interfere with its astronomical, or even theogonic keys; nor with any of the other six meanings. Nor does it seem less scientific than the modern theories about the origin of man. As said, it has seven keys to it, like the rest.

662.

Ibid., v. 30 (87).

663.

Ibid., v. 31 (93).

664.

Ibid., v. 40 (131).

665.

See also Bund., xv.

666.

Ibid., 42 (137).

667.

Bund., xix and xxiv.

668.

S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Kabbalah Unveiled, p. 104.

669.

Zohar, ii. 8b.

670.

Zohar, iii. 278a; Myer's Qabbalah, p. 217.

671.

Darwinian Evolutionists who are so wont to refer to the evidence of reversion to type—the full meaning of which, in the case of human monsters, is embraced in the Esoteric solution of the embryological problem—as proof of their arguments, would do well to enquire into those instances of modern giants who are often 8, 9, and even 11 feet high. Such reversions are imperfect, yet undeniable reproductions of the original towering man of primeval times.

672.

See Mythical Monsters, by Ch. Gould, from whose interesting and scientific volume a few passages are quoted further on. See also, in A. P. Sinnett's Occult World, the description of a cavern in the Himâlayas filled with relics of giant human and animal bones.

673.

I.e., the Third Eye was at the back of the head. The statement that the latest hermaphrodite humanity was “four-armed,” unriddles probably the mystery of all the representations and idols of the exoteric Gods of India. On the Acropolis of Argos, there was a ξόανον, a rudely carved wooden statue, attributed to Dædalus, representing a three-eyed colossus, which was consecrated to Zeus Triôpês, the “Three-eyed.” The head of the “god” has two eyes in its face and one above on the top of the forehead. It is considered the most archaic of all the ancient statues. (Schol. Vatic, ad Eurip. Troad., 14.)

674.

The inner vision could henceforth be acquired only through training and initiation, save in the cases of “natural and born magicians”—sensitives and mediums, as they are called now.

675.

This expression “petrified” instead of “ossified” is curious. The “back eye,” which is of course the Pineal Gland, so-called, the small pea-like mass of grey nervous matter attached to the back of the third ventricle of the brain, is said to almost invariably contain mineral concretions and sand, and “nothing more.”

676.

“Deeply placed within the head, covered by thick skin and muscles, true eyes, that cannot see, are found in certain animals,” says Hæckel. “Among the Vertebrata there are blind moles and field-mice, blind snakes and lizards.... They shun the daylight, dwelling ... under the ground.... [They] were not originally blind, but have evolved from ancestors that lived in the light and had well-developed eyes. The atrophied eye beneath the opaque skin may be found in these blind beings in every stage of reversion.” (Hæckel, Pedigree of Man, “Sense Organs.” p. 343: Aveling's Trans.) And if two eyes could become so atrophied in lower animals, why not one eye—the Pineal Gland—in man, who is but a higher animal in his physical aspect?

677.

Op. cit., ii. 830, 831, ninth edition; “The Thalamencephalon or Inter-brain.”

678.

The “nervous ether” of Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S.; the nerve-aura of Occultism. The “animal spirits” (?) are equivalent to the currents of nerve-auric compound circulation.

679.

Let us remember that the First Race is shown, in Occult Science, as spiritual within and ethereal without; the Second, psycho-spiritual mentally, and ethereo-physical bodily; the Third, still bereft of intellect in its beginning, is astro-physical in its body, and lives an inner life, in which the psycho-spiritual element is in no way as yet interfered with by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its two front eyes look before them without seeing either past or future. But the Third Eye “embraces Eternity.”

680.

But in a very different manner to that pictured by Hæckel as an “evolution by Natural Selection in the struggle for existence” (Pedigree of Man, “Sense Organs,” p. 335; Aveling's Trans.). The mere “thermal sensibility of the skin,” to hypothetical light-waves, is absurdly incompetent to account for the beautiful combination of adaptations existing in the eye. We have shown that “natural selection” is a pure myth when credited with the origination of variations, as the “survival of the fittest” can only take place after useful variations have sprung up, together with improved organisms. Whence came the “useful variations,” which developed the eye? Only from “blind forces ... without aim, without design”? The argument is puerile. The true solution of the mystery is to be found in the impersonal Divine Wisdom, in its Ideation—reflected through Matter.

681.

Palæontology has ascertained that in the animals of the Mesozoic age—the Saurians especially, such as the antediluvian Labyrinthodon, whose fossil skull exhibits a perforation otherwise inexplicable—the third, or odd eye must have been much developed. Several Naturalists, among others E. Korscheldt, feel convinced that whereas, notwithstanding the opaque skin covering it, such an eye in the reptiles of the present period can only distinguish light from darkness (as the human eyes do when bound with a handkerchief, or even tightly closed), in the now extinct animals that eye functioned and was a real organ of vision.

682.

Gould's Mythical Monsters, p. 27.

683.

Karma is a word of many meanings, and has a special term for almost every one of its aspects. As a synonym of sin, it means the performance of some action for the attainment of an object of worldly, hence selfish, desire, which cannot fail to be hurtful to somebody else. Karma is action, the cause; and Karma again is the “Law of Ethical Causation”; the effect of an act produced egotistically, in face of the great Law of Harmony which depends on altruism.

684.

Objectors to the doctrine of Karma should recall the fact that it is absolutely out of the question to attempt a reply to the Pessimists on other data. A firm grasp of the principles of Karmic Law knocks away the whole basis of the imposing fabric reared by the disciples of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.

685.

The doctrine and theology of the Calvinists. “The purpose of God from eternity respecting all events”—which becomes fatalism and kills free will, or any attempt of exerting it for good. “It is the preässignment or allotment of men to everlasting happiness or misery.” (Catechism.) A noble and encouraging doctrine this!

686.

In order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind, which is better acquainted with the Greek than with Âryan philosophy, some Theosophists have made an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had Nemesis been known to the Profane in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term would be unobjectionable. As it is, Nemesis has been too much anthropomorphized by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, “from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a moral feeling rather,” says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the Gods, and is pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that “feeling” was deified, and its personification became an ever-fatal and punishing Goddess. Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, we must do so in her triple character as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the last is the Goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty, Adrasteia, the “inevitable,” represents Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dikê, is the equitable Goddess reserving her wrath for those alone who are maddened with pride, egoïsm, and impiety. (See Mesomed., Hymn. Nemes., v. 2, from Brunck, Analecta II. p. 292; quoted in Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric Goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphized in its various aspects, Karma is a highly philosophical truth, a most divine and noble expression of the primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil, and ennobles our conceptions of what divine immutable Justice ought to be, instead of degrading the unknown and unknowable Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel tyrant, which we call “Providence.”

687.

Pralaya—a word already explained—is not a term that applies only to every “Night of Brahmâ,” or the World's Dissolution following every Manvantara, equal to 71 Mahâyugas. It applies also to each “Obscuration” as well, and even to every Cataclysm that puts an end, by Fire or by Water in turn, to each Root-Race. Pralaya is a general term like the word “Manu” the generic name for the Shishtas, who, under the appellation of “Kings,” are said in the Purânas to be preserved “with the seed of all things, in an ark, from the waters of that inundation [or the fires of a general volcanic conflagration, the commencement of which we already see for our Fifth Race in the terrible earthquakes and eruptions of these late years, and especially in the present year (1888)], which, in the season of a Pralaya overspreads the world [the Earth].” (Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., I. lxxxi.) Time is only a form of Vishnu—truly, as Parâshara says in the Vishnu Purâna. In the Hindû Yugas and Kalpas, we have the regular descending series 4, 3, 2, with ciphers, multiplied, as occasion requires, for Esoteric purposes, but not, as Wilson and other Orientalists thought, for “sectarian embellishments.” A Kalpa may be an Age, or Day of Brahmâ, or a sidereal Kalpa, astronomical and earthly. These calculations are found in all the Purânas, but some differ—as for instance, the “Year of the seven Rishis,” 3,030 mortal years, and the “Year of Dhruva,” 9,090, in the Linga Purâna, which are again Esoteric, and do represent actual (and secret) chronology. As said in the Brahma Vaivarta: “Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the life of Brahmâ. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous.” “Minor Kalpas” denote here every period of Destruction, as was well understood by Wilson himself, who explains the latter as “those in which the Samvarta wind or other destructive agents operate.” (Ibid., p. 54.)

688.

An intuition and a presentiment of the Shishtas may be found in Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. See the “Annotations”—the “Noah's Ark Theory,” pp. 146, 147, fifth edition.

689.

The fact that Manu himself is made to declare that he was created by Virâj, and that he then produced the ten Prajápatis, who again produced seven Manus, who in their turn gave birth to seven other Manus (Manu, i. 33-36) relates to other still earlier mysteries, and is at the same time a “blind” with regard to the doctrine of the Septenary Chain, and the simultaneous evolution of seven Humanities, or Men. However, the present work is written on the records of Cis-Himâlayan Secret Teachings, and Brâhmanical Esoteric Philosophy may now differ in form as does the Kabalah. But they were identical in hoary antiquity.

690.

There is another Esoteric reason besides this for it. A Vaivasvata is the seventh Manu, because this our Round, although the Fourth, is in the preseptenary Manvantara, and the Round itself is in its seventh stage of materiality or physicality. The close of its middle racial point occurred during the Fourth Root-Race, when Man and all Nature reached their lowest state of gross Matter. From that time, i.e., from the end of the three and a half Races, Humanity and Nature entered on the ascending arc of their Racial Cycle.

691.

The interval that precedes each Yuga is called a Sandhyâ, composed of as many hundreds of years as there are thousands in the Yuga; and that which follows the latter is named Sandhyâmsha, and is of similar duration, as we are told in Vishnu Purâna. “The interval between the Sandhyâ and the Sandhyâmsha is the Yuga denominated Krita, Tretâ, etc. The [four] Krita, Tretâ, Dvâpara, and Kali constitute a great age, or aggregate of four ages: a thousand such aggregates are a Day of Brahmâ; and fourteen Manus reign within that term.” (Op. cit., ibid., p. 49.) Now had we to accept this literally then there would be only one Manu for every 4,320,000,000 years. As we are taught that it took 300 million years for the two lower kingdoms to evolve, and that our Humanity is just 18 and some odd millions old—where were the other Manus spoken of, unless the allegory means what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches as to the 14 being each multiplied by 49.

692.

The words “Creation,” “Dissolution,” etc., do not correctly render the right meaning of either Manvantara or Pralaya. The Vishnu Purâna enumerates several: “The dissolution of all things is of four kinds,” Parâshara is made to say: Naimittika (Occasional), when Brahmâ slumbers (his Night, when, “at the end of this Day occurs a re-coalescence of the Universe, called Brahmâ's contingent re-coalescence,” because Brahmâ is this Universe itself); Prâkritika (Elemental), when the return of this Universe to its original nature is partial and physical; Âtyantika (Absolute), identification of the Embodied with the incorporeal Supreme Spirit—Mahâtmic state, whether temporary or until the following Mahâ Kalpa: also Absolute Obscuration—as of a whole Planetary Chain, etc.; and Nitya (Perpetual), Mahâ Pralaya for the Universe, Death—for man. Nitya is the extinction of life, like the “extinction of a lamp,” also “in sleep at night.” Nitya Sarga is “constant or perpetual creation,” as Nitya Pralaya is “constant or perpetual destruction of all that is born.” “That which ensues after a minor dissolution is called ephemeral creation.” (Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., i. 113, 114.) The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our statements.

693.

But see the superb definitions of Parabrahman and the Logos in T. Subba Row's Lectures on the Bhagavad Gîtâ in the early numbers of The Theosophist of 1887.

694.

See preceding foot-note.

695.

See Manu, i. 32, 33. Vaishvânara is, in another sense, the living magnetic fire that pervades the manifested Solar System. It is the most objective (though to us the reverse) and ever present aspect of the One Life, for it is the Vital Principle. (See Theosophist, July, 1883, p. 249.) It is also a name of Agni.

696.

Op. cit., pp. 134, 135.

697.

This—in the period of Secondary Creation, so called. Of the Primary, when Earth is in possession of the three Elemental Kingdoms, we cannot speak for several reasons, one of which is, that, no one but a great seer, or one naturally intuitional, will be able to realize that which can never be expressed in any existing terms.

698.

Hippocrates said that number seven “by its occult virtues tended to the accomplishment of all things, to be the dispenser of life and fountain of all its changes.” The life of man he divided into seven ages, as did Shakespeare, for “as the moon changes her phases every seven days, this number influences all sublunary beings,” and even the Earth, as we know. The teeth of a child appear in the seventh month, and he sheds them at seven years; at twice seven puberty begins, at three times seven his mental and vital powers are developed, at four times seven he is in his full strength, at five times seven his passions are most developed, etc. Thus also for the Earth; it is now in its middle age, yet very little wiser for it. The Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered sacred name of the Deity, can be resolved on Earth only by becoming septenary through the manifest Triangle proceeding from the concealed Tetraktys. Therefore, the number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As written in the Kabalah (“The Greater Holy Assembly,” v. 1161): “For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive) from the seventh. For all things depend from the seventh.” (S. L. MacGregor Mathers' Kabbalah, p. 255.)

699.

Compare Stanzas III. et seqq.

700.

St. Augustin says of Jesus: “He is a fish that lives in the midst of waters.” Christians called themselves “Little Fishes”—Pisciculi—in their sacred Mysteries. “So many fishes bred in the water, and saved by one great fish,” says Tertullian of the Christians and Christ and the Church.

701.

Esoteric Buddhism, p. 55.

702.

This event—viz., the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and the smaller island Daitya—which occurred 850,000 years ago in the later Pliocene times, must not be confounded with the submersion of the main Continent of Atlantis during the Miocene period. Geologists cannot bring the Miocene so near as 850,000 years, whatever they may do; it is, in reality, several million years ago that the main Atlantis perished.

703.

See The Athenæum, Aug. 25th, 1860.

704.

Mr. Huxley divides these races into the quintuple group of Australoids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthochroics and Melanochroics—all issuing from imaginary Anthropoids. And yet, while protesting against those who say “that the structural differences between man and apes are small and insignificant,” and adding that “every bone of the gorilla bears a mark by which it can be distinguished from a corresponding human bone, and that in the present state of creation, at least, no intermediary being fills the gap which separates the man from the troglodyte”—the great Anatomist goes on speaking of the simian characteristics in man! (See de Quatrefages, The Human Species, P. 113.)

705.

Op. cit., Isaac Myer, p. 422.

706.

Zohar, i. 119b, col. 475; ibid., p. 412.

707.

The Lemurians.

708.

Lava.

709.

Marble.

710.

Of the subterranean fires.

711.

This is the reason, perhaps, why even Easter Island, with its wondrous gigantic statues—a speaking witness to a submerged continent with a civilized mankind on it—is hardly mentioned anywhere in modern Encyclopædias. Its mention is carefully avoided except in some books of travels. Modern Science has an undeniable predilection for forcing hypotheses, built on personal hobbies, upon the cultured public, as well-established evidence: for offering it guesses instead of knowledge, and calling them “scientific conclusions.” Its specialists will evolve a thousand and one contradictory speculations rather than confess an awkward self-evident fact—preëminent among such specialists being Hæckel and his English admirers and co-thinkers. Yet “they are authorities”—we are sternly reminded. What of that? The Pope of Rome is also an authority and an infallible one—for his followers; whereas the remarkable fallibility of scientific speculations is being proven periodically with every change of the moon.

712.

Our best modern novelists, although they are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, nevertheless begin to have very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams; witness Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist Mr. Rider Haggard also had a prophetic, or rather a retrospective, clairvoyant dream before he wrote She? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead, whose surviving inhabitants sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems, in its general outlines, to step out from the imperishable pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests “that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians”; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in Esoteric Buddhism, for, she says: “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This [the nation of Kor] is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in.... Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. But the barbarians ... came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones” (pp. 180, 181). Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity—as descendants of Homo Primigenius—the ape-man, of which “no fossil remains are as yet known to us,” though they “were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day” (Hæckel). In answer to whose “probably,” Occultists point to another and a greater probability—viz., the one given in our text.

713.

Robert Brown, The Countries of the World, vol. iv. p. 43.

714.

See Stanza II. This would account for the variation and great difference between the intellectual capacities of races, nations, and individual men. While incarnating into, and in other cases only informing, the human vehicles evolved by the first brainless (“manas-less”) Race, the incarnating Powers and Principles had to take into account, and make their choice between, the past Karmas of the Monads, between which and their bodies they had to become the connecting link. Moreover, as correctly stated in Esoteric Buddhism (p. 30), “the fifth principle, or human (intellectual) soul, in the majority of mankind is not even yet fully developed.”

715.

It is said by the incarnate Logos, Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, “The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang [emanated or were born] the human race and the world” (x. 6). Here, by the seven Great Rishis, the seven great Rûpa Hierarchies or Classes of Dhyân Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the seven Rishis, Saptarshi, are the Regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, and therefore, of the same nature as the Angels of the Planets, or the seven Great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn as men on Earth in various Kalpas and Races. Moreover, “the four preceding Manus” are the four Classes of the originally Arûpa Gods—the Kumâras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.; who are also said to have incarnated. They are not Prajâpatis, as are the first, but their informing “principles”—some of which have incarnated in men, while others have made other men simply the vehicles of their “reflections.” As Krishna truly says—the same words being repeated later by another vehicle of the Logos—“I am the the same to all beings ... those who worship me [the sixth principle or the divine Intellectual Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas] are in me, and I am in them.” (Ibid., x. 29.) The Logos, being no “personality” but the Universal Principle, is represented by all the divine Powers, born of its Mind—the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism, the “Intellectual Breaths”—those Angels who are said to have made themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and quiescent, into the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is recognized, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba Row's excellent Lecture on the Bhagavad Gîtâ (Theosophist, April, 1887, p. 444).

716.

Op. cit., p. 152.

717.

It was the northern parts of the Toyâmbudhi, or sea of fresh water, in Shveta-dvîpa, which the seven Kumâras—Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana, Sanatkumâra, Jâta, Vodhu, and Panchashikha—visited agreeably with exoteric tradition. (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purâna, Asiatick Researches, vol. xi. pp. 99, 100.)

718.

Vishnu Purâna, Wilson's Trans., ii. 109.

719.

See Bibliotheca Indica, Trans. of the Golâdhyâya of the Siddhânta-shiromani, iii. 21-44.

720.

Ibid., pp. 106, 107.

721.

P. 321.

722.

Wilson, ibid., p. 137.

723.

In a lecture, Professor Pengelly, F.R.S., quotes Professor Oliver to the effect “that the present Atlantic islands' flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World,” but adds himself that, at the same time, “at some period of the Tertiary epoch, N.-E. Asia was united to N.-W. America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.” Thus Occult Science alone can reconcile the contradictions and hesitations of Modern Science. But again, surely the argument for the existence of Atlantis does not rest on Botany alone.

724.

Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, v. 381, 382.

725.

As shown in the “Preliminary Notes” to this Volume, it stands to reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even of Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost Continents. They have been adopted by us simply for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name given to those portions of the submerged Fourth Race Continent which were “beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” and which happened to keep above water after the general Cataclysm. The last remnant of these—Plato's Atlantis, or “Poseidonis,” which is another substitute, or rather a translation of the real name—was the last of the Continent above water some 11,000 years ago. Most of the correct names of the countries and islands of both Continents are given in the Purânas; but to mention them specially, as found in other more ancient works, such as the Sûrya Siddhânta, would necessitate too lengthy explanations. If, in earlier writings, the two seem to have been too faintly distinguished, this must be due to careless reading and want of reflection. If ages hence, Europeans are referred to as Âryans, and a reader confuses them with the Hindûs and the latter with the Fourth Race, because some of them lived in ancient Lankâ—the blame will not fall on the writer.

726.

See Part III, Section VI, of this Volume.

727.

See Professor J. D. Dana's article, American Journal of Science, III. v. 442, 443; Winchell's World-Life, p. 352.

728.

Speaking on periodical elevation and subsidence of the equatorial and polar regions, and ensuing changes of climate, Dr. Winchell, Professor of Geology in the University of Michigan, says: “As the movements here contemplated are cyclical, the same conditions would recur again and again; and accordingly the same fauna might return again and again to the same region, with intervals of occupation by another fauna. Progressive sedimentation would preserve the records of such faunal alterations; and there would be presented the phenomena of ‘colonies,’ ‘reäpparitions,’ and other faunal dislocations in the vertical and horizontal distributions of fossil remains. These phenomena are well known to the student of geology.” (Op. cit., p. 281.)

729.

See American Naturalist, xviii. 15-26.

730.

Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 339, 340.

731.

Pedigree of Man, Aveling's Trans., pp. 80, 81.

732.

Ibid., p. 82.

733.

Op. cit., p. 81.

734.

Esoteric Buddhism, p. 65.

735.

“Half-grown babes” in comparison with their giant brethren on other Zones. So would we now, should a like calamity overtake us.

736.

This relates to Lemuria.

737.

There are other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles—and it is just this which creates such a difficulty in the calculations of racial events. The circuit of the ecliptic is completed in 25,868 years, and, with regard to our Earth, it is calculated that the equinoctial point falls back 50.1" annually. But there is another cycle within this one. It is said that: “As the apsis goes forward to meet it at the rate of 11.24”, annually, this would complete a revolution in one hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and two years (115,302). The approximation of the equinox and the apsis is the sum of these motions, 61.34", and hence the equinox returns to the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years. (See the article on “Astronomy” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.) We mentioned this cycle in Isis Unveiled (vol. i), in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race.

738.

The Atlanteans.

739.

Twenty-seven feet.

740.

The Lemurians.

741.

Race.

742.

Compare the following Section, entitled “Cyclopean Ruins and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.”

743.

See Denon's Voyage en Egypte, vol. ii.

744.

See Esoteric Buddhism, p. 65.

745.

Cf. the chart adapted from the Challenger and Dolphin soundings in Donnelly's Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 47.

746.

Esoteric Buddhism, p. 58.

747.

History of English Literature, p. 23.

748.

Quoted in Atlantis, p. 132.

749.

Numbers, xiii. 33.

750.

Deut., iii. 11.

751.

Robert Brown, The Countries of the World, p. 43.

752.

Mentioned on pp. 44, et seqq.

753.

Ibid., pp. 43, 44, et seqq., and pp. 310, 311.

754.

De la Vega, IX. ix, quoted in De Mirville's Pneumatologie, iii. 55.

755.

The first and second, in common with Bartholdi's statue, have an entrance at the foot, leading by a winding staircase cut in the rock up into the heads. The eminent French Archæologist and Anthropologist, the Marquis de Nadeylac, in his work, justly remarks that there never was in ancient or in modern times a sculptured human figure more colossal than the first of the two.

756.

Essays, xxvi.

757.

I Corinth., x. 4.

758.

Pneumatologie, iii. p. 283.

759.

Saturn is Chronos—“Time.” His swallowing Jupiter-lapis may turn out one day a prophecy. “Peter (cephas, lapis), is the stone on which the Church of Rome is built”—we are assured. But Cronus (Chronos) is as sure to “swallow” it one day, as he has swallowed Jupiter-lapis and still greater characters.

760.

Ibid., p. 284.

761.

M. Falconnet, op. cit., t. vi, Mém., p. 513; quoted by De Mirville, op. cit., ibid., p. 285.

762.

The same, of course, as the “small voice” heard by Elijah after the earthquake at the mouth of the cave. (I Kings, xix. 12.)

763.

The rocking, or “logan,” stones bear various names; such as the clacha-brath of the Celt, the “destiny or judgment-stone”; the divining-stone, or “stone of the ordeal,” and the oracle-stone; the moving or animated stone of the Phœnicians; the rumbling stone of the Irish. Brittany has its “pierres branlantes” at Huelgoat. They are found in the Old and the New Worlds; in the British Islands, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, etc., as also in North America. (See Hodson's Letters from North America, vol. ii. p. 440.) Pliny speaks of several in Asia (Hist. Nat., i. 96); and Apollonius Rhodius expatiates on the rocking stones, and says that they are “stones placed on the apex of a tumulus, and so sensitive as to be movable by the mind” (Ackerman's Arth. Index, p. 34), referring no doubt to the ancient priests who moved such stones by will-power from a distance.

764.

See Dictionnaire des Religions, l'Abbé Bertrand, Arts., “Heræscus” and “Bétyles”; De Mirville, ibid., p. 287, who has “Heraiclus”; but see Bunsen's Egypt, i. 95.

765.

See among others, History of Paganism in Caledonia, by Dr. Th. A. Wise, F.R.A.S., etc.

766.

Sépulture des Tartares, arch. vii. p. 2227.

767.

Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes, i. 230.

768.

Op. cit., ibid., p. 290. If Ham was a Titan or Giant then were Shem and Japhet also Titans. They are either all Arkite Titans, as Faber shows—or myths.

769.

Diodorus Siculus asserts that in the days of Isis, some men were still of a vast stature, and were denominated by the Hellenes Giants. “Οἱ δὲν Αἰγύπτῳ μυθογοῦσι κατὰ τὴν Ἰσιδὸς ἡλικίαν γεγονέναι τίνας πολυσωμάτους.”

770.

Antiquités Celtiques, p. 88.

771.

Cambry, ibid., 90.

772.

Op. cit., p. 473. “It is difficult,” writes Creuzer, “not to suspect in the structures of Tiryns and Mycenæ planetary forces supposed to be moved by celestial powers, analogous to the famous Dactyli.” (Pelasges et Cyclopes.) To this day Science is in ignorance on the subject of the Cyclopes. They are supposed to have built all the so-called “Cyclopean” works whose erection would have necessitated several regiments of Giants, and yet they were only seventy-seven in all, or about one hundred, as Creuzer thinks. They are called Builders, and Occultism calls them the Initiators, who by initiating some Pelasgians, thus laid the foundation stone of true Masonry. Herodotus associates the Cyclops with Perseus “the son of an Assyrian demon” (I. vi.). Raoul Rochette found that Palæmonius, the Cyclops, to whom a sanctuary was raised, was the “Tyrian Hercules.” In any case, he was the Builder of the sacred columns of Gadir, covered with mysterious characters—of which Apollonius of Tyana was the only one in his age who possessed the key—and with figures which may still be found on the walls of Ellora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Vishvakarman, “the builder and artificer of the Gods.”

773.

Hist. Nat., t. xxxvi. p. 592; De Mirville, op. cit., ibid., p. 289.

774.

Dieu et les Dieux, p. 567.

775.

De Mirville, op. cit., ibid., p. 291. Messrs. Richardson and Barth are said to have been amazed at finding in the Desert of Sahara the same trilithic and raised stones which they had seen in Asia, Circassia, Etruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr. Rivett-Carnac, B.C.S., of Allahabad, the distinguished Archæologist, shows the same amazement on finding the description, given by Sir J. Simpson, of the cuplike markings on stones and rocks in England, Scotland, and other Western countries; “offering an extraordinary resemblance” to “the marks on the trap boulders which encircle the barrows near Nagpur”—the City of Snakes. The eminent scholar saw in this “another and very extraordinary addition to the mass of evidence ... that a branch of the nomadic tribes, who swept at an early date over Europe, penetrated into India also.” We say Lemuria, Atlantis and her Giants, and the earliest races of the Fifth Root-Race had all a hand in these betyli, lithoi, and “magic” stones in general. The cup-marks noticed by Sir J. Simpson, and the “holes scooped out on the face” of rocks and monuments found by Mr. Rivett-Carnac “of different sizes varying from six inches to an inch and a-half in diameter, and in depth from one to one and a-half inch ... generally arranged in perpendicular lines presenting many permutations in the number and size and arrangement of the cups”—are simply written records of the oldest races. Whosoever examines with attention the drawings made of such marks in Archæological Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India, etc., will find therein the most primitive style of marking or recording. Something of the sort was adopted by the American inventors of the Morse code of telegraphic writing, which reminds us of the Ogham writing, a combination of long and short strokes, as Mr. Rivett-Carnac describes it, “cut on sandstone.” Sweden, Norway, and Scandinavia are full of such written records, for the Runic characters follow the cup-marks and long and short strokes. In Johannes Magnus' Infolio one may see the representation of the demi-god, the giant Starchaterus (Starkad, the pupil of Hroszharsgrani, the Magician), holding under each arm a huge stone covered with Runic characters. This Starkad, according to Scandinavian legend, went to Ireland and performed marvellous deeds in the North and South, East and West. (See Asgard and the Gods, pp. 218-221.)