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seven races on any particular planet, and a major manvantara is the period of one human round along the Planetary chain. Moreover, that, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 root-races on the seven planets during each Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called 'Vaivasvata' and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our Fifth race -- who saved it from the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) -- is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root, or primitive-Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root-Manu.
"For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their respective order and relation to each Round: --
"Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root-Manu of our fourth Human Wave (the reader must always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who are made to preside over the seven races of this our planet. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and ever-recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every Root-race. And it is this Vaivasvata -- the Hindu ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah and by other names -- who is the allegorical man who rescued our race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration."*
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The words "creation," "dissolution," etc., do not render correctly the right meaning of either Manvantara or Pralaya. The Vishnu Purana enumerates several: The dissolution of all things is of four kinds, Parasara is made to say: -- Naimittika (occasional), when Brahma slumbers (his night, when, "At the end of this day occurs a re-
coalescence of the Universe, called Brahma's contingent re-coalescence," because Brahma is this universe itself); "Prakritika (elemental), when the return of this universe to its original nature is partial and physical; Atyantika (absolute), identification of the embodied with the incorporeal Supreme spirit -- Mahatmic state, whether temporary or until the following Maha Kalpa: also absolute obscuration -- as of a whole [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 310 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu-antara, lit. "between two Manus") 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or sidereal Flood (a mystery), or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As the several (and quite different) events are purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Puranas in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader's mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The blinds which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.
As somebody -- Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake -- remarked, "the first principle in Hindu religious philosophy is Unity in diversity." If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, this is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same LOGOS, the celestial, as well as the terrestrial messengers and permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of activity; conscious during the period of Cosmic evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic rest, as the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which "sleepeth not," nor is it ever awake -- for it is SAT or Be-ness, not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great unseen Logos, who evolves all the other logoi, the primeval MANU who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the manifested Logos.* Hence we learn in the "Commentaries" that while no Dhyan Chohan, not even the highest, can realise completely "the condition of the preceding Cosmic evolution," "the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences of all the Cosmic evolutions throughout Eternity." This is very plain: the first Manu is called Swayambhuva,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] planetary chain, etc.; and Nitya (perpetual) Mahapralaya 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. . . . This is Samyama" (production, existence, and dissolution) ( Vishnu Purana, Book I., ch. vii.) The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our statements.
* But see the superb definitions of Parabrahmam and the Logos in Mr. Subba Row's Lectures on the Bhagavat Gita in the early numbers of the Theosophist of 1887, Feb., March, April, and May.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 311 THE FOUR EARLIER RACES.
"the Self-manifested," the Son of the unmanifested FATHER. The Manus are the creators of the creators of our First Race -- the Spirit of mankind -- which does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first "pre-
Adamic" men on Earth.
Manu declares himself created by Viraj,* or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity),** which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic activity: that Logos or UNIVERSAL MONAD (collective Elohim) that radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity -- progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated
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human monads of planetary chains as well as of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is "Swayambhuva," the SELF-BORN, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system), and whose radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhuva (a generic name, mysterious and meaning far more than appears), each of these becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity. (See "The Manus and the Manvantaras Explained by a Western Mystic and Mathematician.")
As to the question of the four distinct races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in it, except the ethereal bodies of the first races; and it is a matter of legendary, nevertheless, very correct history. That legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindus have, to this day.
Trying to account for the community of legends in the remote antiquity -- held by Chinese, Chaldean, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks -- and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of "Mythical Monsters, " remarks, that "we must not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture (as in China), the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay . . . and how much more . . . if . . . minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See preceding foot-note.
** See Manu I., 32, 33. Vaiswanara is, in another sense, the living magnetic fire that pervades the manifested solar system. It is the most objective (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.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 312 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes." ("Mythical Monsters, " by Ch. Gould, p. 134.)
And how many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from this Stanza:
"During the first seven crores of the Kalpa (70,000,000 years) the Earth and its two Kingdoms (mineral and vegetable), one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi-
ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore* the mother (Earth) grows opaque, and in the FOURTEENTH** the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of nature (geological changes) last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals."
The last change took place nearly twelve crores of years ago (120,000,000). But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier. (Commentary, xxii.)
Thus, if we are to believe esoteric teaching, there have been no more universal geological disturbances and changes for the last 120 millions of years, and the Earth was, even before that time, ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about eighteen millions of years ago, after the first great failure of nature to create beings alone, without the help of the divine "Fashioners," had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three races (See above
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Stanzas III. et seq.). The actual duration of the first two and a-half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The History of the Races begins at the separation of the Sexes, when the preceding egg-bearing androgynous race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub-races of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* 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, unless one is a great seer, or naturally intuitional, he will be unable to realise that which can never be expressed in any existing terms.
** 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 (Shakespeare), for "As the moon changes her phases every seven days, this number influences all sublunary beings," and even the Earth, as we know. With the child, it is the teeth that appear in the seventh month and he sheds them at seven years; at twice seven puberty begins, at three times seven all our 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., etc. Thus 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 Tetraktis. Therefore, the number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As written in the Kabala "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."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 313 THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF "FISH."
Third Root-Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this "destruction" which is called allegorically the great "Vaivasvata Manu Deluge," when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu (or "Humanity") remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis "with him." The allegory is very plain: --
In the Symbolism of every nation, the "Deluge" stands for Chaotic unsettled matter -- Chaos itself: and the Water for the feminine principle -- the "Great Deep." As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it -- "Arche (ark) answers to the Hebrew rasit, or Wisdom . . . . and (at the same time) to the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of nature (and of mankind) floats or broods on the great Abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane (or racial) cycle." Ark is also the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which broods over chaos. Now Vishnu is the divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of life -- the third person of the Trimurti (composed of Brahma, the Creator, Siva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver). Vishnu is shown in the allegory as guiding, under the form of a fish, the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu clean across the waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word fish. (See Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, etc.) Its theological meanings is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus is called the "Fish," and so were Vishnu and Bacchus: [[Ies]], the "Saviour" of mankind, being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called [[Ichthus]], the fish.* As to the Seven Rishis in the Ark, they symbolised the seven principles, which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and no longer a divine creature. (See for further details, "The Seventh Manu.")
Nor have we many details about the submersion of the continent inhabited by the Second Root Race. But the history of the Third, "Lemuria," is given, as is that of Atlantis, the others being only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary age (the Eocene),** and it is during this Deluge also -- an actual geological deluge this time -- that Vaivasvata Manu is again shown as saving mankind (allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is saved); so
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also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Says St. Augustin of Jesus, "For 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.
** "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 55.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 314 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,* after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato's Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.
It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. It is of this cataclysm that the old records (See the "Book of Enoch ") say that "the ends of the Earth got loose;" and upon which the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deukalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect saved, have been built. Tradition, taking into no account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both indifferently "deluges." Yet there is a great difference. The cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor -- the fourth continent -- was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred records of the East.
Hence, Modern Science denies Atlantis and its existence. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth's axis, and would attribute the reason for the change of climates to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are other men of Science, such as Sir H. James (Athenaeum, Aug. 25, 1860), and Sir John Lubbock (ibid), who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced -- only to accept it later on whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact?
How far our figures agree, or rather disagree with modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Book, where the geology and anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the same in Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned in the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This event, the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and the smaller one 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 place the Miocene only so short a way back as 850,000 years; whatever they do, it is several million years ago that the main Atlantis perished.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 315 THE INNER MAN IN THE ZOHAR.
very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which calls Atlantis "Lemuria," however, whenever it accepts such a submerged continent. With regard to the pre-human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even up to the appearance of the "Mindless" First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. More may be said: that which Science -- recognizing only physical man -- has a right to regard as the prehuman period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean race, since it is only then that man became the "complete organic being he is now." And this would make Adamic man no older than a few million of years.*
The author of the Qabbalah remarks truly that "Man to-day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being-
hood of precedent human life," or lives, rather. "According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam (Rishoun), went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge-boor-ah, Qai-
yin and Ra'hmin Seth. These three were divided into 70 species, called: the principal roots of the human race." (p. 422.)
"Said Rabbi Jehudah: 'How many garments (of the incorporeal man) are these which are crowned' (from the day man was 'created')? Said R. El'eazar: 'The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua'h spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings . . . : and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world." (Zohar I., 119b. col. 475; Qabbalah, 412.)
This relates to the races (their "garments," or degree of materiality) and to the three principles of man in their three vehicles.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Huxley divides those races into the quintuple group of Australioids, 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.)
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Next Section
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, part 1, stanza 11
The Secret Doctrine
by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 316 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA XI.
THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE
FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES.
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§§ (43) The Lemuro-Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization. The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. (44) Their statues, witnesses to the size of the Lemuro-
Atlanteans. (45) Lemuria destroyed by fire, Atlantis by water. The Flood. (46) The destruction of the fourth race and of the last antediluvian monster-animals.
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43. THEY (the Lemurians) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT OF THE FIRES (lava) VOMITED. OUT OF THE WHITE STONE OF THE MOUNTAINS (marble) AND THE BLACK STONE (of the subterranean fires) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM (a).
(a) As the History of the first two human races -- the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans -- proceeds, we have at this point to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively.
Here reference is also made to the divine Dynasties, such as were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their human kings; they are still believed in by the modern Hindus, and are enumerated in their sacred books. But of these we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern geologists are now being driven into admitting the evident existence of submerged continents. But to confess their presence is not to accept that there were men on them during the early geological periods;* --
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This is the reason why, perhaps, 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 the modern Encyclopaedias. Its mention is carefully avoided except in some books of Travels; modem science has an undeniable predilection for forcing upon the cultured public hypotheses, built on personal hobbies, as well-established evidence, for offering it guesses instead of Knowledge, and
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calling them "scientific conclusions." Its specialists will evolve a thousand and one contradictory speculations rather than confess an awkward self-evident fact -- pre-eminent among such specialists being Haeckel 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.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 317 PRESENTMENTS OF TRUTHS.
ay, men and civilized nations, not Palaeolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences, and knew astronomy, architecture and mathematics to perfection. This primeval civilization did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Yet, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub-race building their first rock-cities out of stone and lava.* One of such great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow piece of sterile ground, and was entirely destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the Lemurians of the last sub-races; and an occultist shows, therefore, no wonder on learning that the stone relics found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are "very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru," ("The Countries of the World," by Robert Brown, Vol. 4, p. 43); and that they are in the CYCLOPEAN STYLE. The first large cities, however, appeared on that region of the continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Our best modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams: witness Mr. Louis Stephenson and his 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 living men sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems to step out in its general outlines 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.)
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Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. The 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," but (which) "were PROBABLY akin to the gorilla and orang of the present day" (Haeckel). In answer to whose "probably," occultists point to another and a greater probability -- the one given in our text. (See above.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 318 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection with the former, and Karma -- its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the spark dropped into them by the "Flames," extinguished it by long generations of sexstone.* The Aryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had personally incarnated.**
It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements, his brothers -- more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them -- built cities, and cultivated arts and sciences. Nevertheless, and civilization notwithstand-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Stanza II, ante. This would account for the great difference and variation between the intellectual capacities of races, nations, and individual men. While incarnating, and in other cases only informing the human vehicles evolved by the first brainless (manasless) race, the incarnating Powers and Principles had to make their choice between, and take into account, the past Karmas of the Monads, between which and their bodies they had to become the connecting link. Besides which, 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."
** It is said by Krishna, the Logos incarnate, in the Bhagavat-gita, "The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang (emanated or was born) the human race and the world," (Chap. X. Verse 6.)
Here, by the seven great Rishis, the seven great rupa hierarchies or classes of Dhyan Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the Saptarshi (the seven Rishis) are the regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, therefore, of the same nature as the angels of the planets, or the seven great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn, all men on earth in various Kalpas and races. Moreover, "the four preceding Manus" are the four classes of the originally arupa gods -- the Kumaras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.: who are also said to have incarnated. They are not the Prajapatis, as the first are, but their informing principles -- some of which have incarnated in men, while others have made other men
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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 same to all beings. . . . those who worship me (the 6th principle or the intellectual divine Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas) are in me, and I am in them." (Ibid, 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 recognised, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba Row's excellent lecture on the Bhagavatgita, ("Theosophist," April 1887, p . 444.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 319 DEGENERATION OF MANKIND.
ing, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, they, the builders, could now obtain theirs only gradually; even these being generally used for power over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command and the guidance over his own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking. "There is no such thing as magic" philosophises "SHE," the author forgetting that "magic" in her early day still meant the great SCIENCE of WIDOM, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought -- "though there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature." (p. 152). But they have become "Secrets" only in our race, and were public property with the Third.
Gradually, mankind went down in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save the hierarchy of the "Elect," the followers and disciples of the "Sons of Will and Yoga" -- called later the "Sons of the Fire Mist."
Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub-race. But, as said in the Commentary: --
The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island (the primitive Sveta-dwipa) had perished ages before. Their (Lemuria's) elect, had taken shelter on the sacred Island (now the "fabled" Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert), while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground ("cave-men"), when the golden yellow race (the Fourth) became in its turn "black with sin." From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Sveta-dwipa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya, east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted. . . . The demi-gods of the Third had made room for the semi-
demons of the Fourth Race. Sveta-dwipa, whose northern parts of the Toyambudhi the seven Kumaras (Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatana, Sanatkumara, Jata, Vodhu, and Panchasikha) had visited, agreeably with exoteric tradition (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana; Asiat. Researches also, Vol. XI., pp. 99, 100); the White Island had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dwipa (Pushkara) and Rakshasas from the seventh
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 320 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
climate replaced the Saddhus and the ascetics of the Third age, who "had descended to them from other and higher regions." . . . .
It is evident that, taken in their dead letter, the Puranas read as an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. But if one reads chapters I., II. and III. from Book II. (Vol. II.) of Vishnu Purana and accepts verbatim its geography, geodesy, and ethnology, in the matter of Priyavrata's seven sons, among whom the father divides the seven Dwipas (Continental Islands); and then proceeds to study how the eldest son, the King of Jambu-dwipa, Agnidhra, apportioned Jambu-dwipa among his nine sons; and then how Nabhi his son, who had a hundred sons and apportioned all these in his turn -- then the reader is likely to throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the esoteric student will understand that, in the days when the Puranas were written, the true meaning was clear only to the Initiated Brahmins, who wrote those works allegorically and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will explain to the Orientalists who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, made and still are making such a mess of it, that the first three chapters (See Wilson's trans. of Vishnu Purana Book II et seq.) purposely confuse the following subjects and events: --
I. The series of Kalpas or Ages (also of Races) are never taken into account; e.g., events which have happened in one being allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying -- "Whenever any contradictions in different Puranas are observed, they are ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the like" ( Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas).
II. The several meanings of the words "Manvantara" and "Kalpa" or age, are withheld, and the general one only given.
III. In the genealogy and geography of the Kings and their Varshas (countries) and Dwipas, they are all allowed to be regarded as terrestrial regions.
Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is easy and permissible to show that: --
(a) The Seven Dwipas apportioned to Priyavrata's septenary progeny refer to several localities: first of all to our planetary chain. Jambu-dwipa alone representing our globe, the six others are the (to us) invisible companion globes of this earth. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu (dwipa) "is in the centre of all these (the so-called insular continents) and is surrounded" by a sea of salt water (lavana), whereas Plaksha, Salmalia,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 321 THE HINDU SYMBOLIZATION.
Kusa, Krauncha, Saka and Pushkara, are "surrounded severally -- by great seas of sugar-cane juice, of
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wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk," etc., etc., and such like metaphorical names. (Chap. II, Book II) This is shown furthermore by --
(b) Bhaskara Acharya, who uses expressions from the Secret Doctrine and its books, in his description of the sidereal position of all these dwipas: -- "the sea of milk and the sea of curds" etc., meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of nebulae; the more so, since he names "the country to the south of the equator Bhur-loka, that to the north Bhuva-loka, Swar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya lokas"; and says: "Those lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits," i.e., they are various paradises. (See Bibliotheca Indica. Trans. of the Goladhyaya of the Siddhanta-siromani III., 21-44).
(c) That this geographical division of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to our Round nor even to our races (the name of Bharata Varsha (India) notwithstanding), is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of Vishnu Purana. For he closes the first chapter by saying: "Bharata (the son of Nabhi, who gave his name to Bharata-Varsha or India) consigned the Kingdom to his son Sumati . . . . and abandoned his life at Salagrama. He was afterwards born again as a religious Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics . . . . under these princes (Bharata's descendants) Bharata Varsha was divided into nine portions, and their descendants held successively possession of the country for seventy-one periods of the aggregate of the four ages," or the reign of a Manu, representing a Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years.
But having said so much, Parasara suddenly explains that "this was the creation of Swayambhuva Manu, by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varaha," i.e., the boar incarnation, or Avatar. Now every Brahmin knows that it is only with Vaivasvata Manu that our Humanity began on this Earth (or Round). And if the Western reader turns to the sub-section on "The Primeval Manus of Humanity," he will see that Vaivasvata is the seventh of the fourteen Manus who preside over our planetary chain during its life cycle: i.e., that representing or standing in every Round for two Manus of the same name (a Root and a Seed Manu), he is the Root Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only "an incongruity" (see his Vishnu Purana, vol. II., p. 108, footnote), and speculates that "the patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas," and thus "have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods." It is nothing of the kind.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 322 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
But as Orientalists know nothing of the secret teaching, they will take everything literally, and then turn round and abuse the writers of that which they do not comprehend!
These genealogies embrace a period of three and a half Rounds; they speak of pre-human periods, and explain the descent into generation of every Manu -- the first manifested sparks of the ONE Unity -- and show, furthermore, each of these human sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first, the Pitars, the human ancestors, then by human Races. No being can become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human cycles. Therefore the Sloka says, "Happy are those who are born, even from the (latent) condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-varsha; as that is the way to . . . final liberation." In
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Jambu-dwipa, Bharata is considered the best of its divisions, because IT IS THE LAND OF WORKS. In it alone "it is that the succession of four Yugas (ages), the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and Kali take place"; when, therefore, Parasara, asked by Maitreya "to give him the descriptions of the Earth," returns again to the enumeration of the same Dwipas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Swayambhuva Manvantara -- it is simply a blind, yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub-divisions, islands, and continents, some of which were called by the names of celestial lokas, and by those of other globes. Hence the confusion.
All these are called by the Orientalists "mythical" and "fabulous" islands and lands.* Very true, some are not of this earth, but they still exist. The "White Island" and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since the latter was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the Fifth Race to the land of Sin -- Atlantis, in general, not to Plato's island alone; and since the former was (a) the Sveta-
dwipa of theogony, and (b) Saka-dwipa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions) in its beginnings. This was when it yet had its "seven holy rivers that washed away all sin," and its "seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue," as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas -- that caste which even the Brahmins acknowledged as not inferior to their own -- and which was
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In a lecture, Professor Pengelly, F.R.S., quoting Professor Oliver, makes him say "that the present Atlantic islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World," but himself adds 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. Moreover, surely the argument for the existence of Atlantis does not rest on Botany alone.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 323 THE MAGIS IN THE DAYS OF KRISHNA.
the nursery of the first Zaratushta. The Brahmins are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on Narada's advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun in the temple built by Samba (the reputed) son of Krishna, who in reality had none. In this the Puranas are historical --allegory notwithstanding -- and Occultism is stating facts.
The whole story is told in Bhavishya Purana. It is stated that, having been cured by Surya (the Sun) of leprosy, Samba, having built a temple dedicated to the Sun, was looking for pious Brahmins to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God. But Narada (this virgin ascetic whom one finds in every age in the Puranas) advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brahmins to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Samba to Gauramukha (white face), the Purohita or family priest of Hgrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed Samba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Surya, to discharge the duty. Ignorant of the place they lived in, it is Surya, the Sun himself, who
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directs Samba to Sakadwipa beyond the salt water. Then Samba performs the journey, using Garuda (Vishnu's and Krishna's vehicle, the great Bird) who lands him among the Magas, etc.
Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Narada, who is found reborn in every cycle (or race), besides Garuda -- the symbol esoterically of the great cycle -- show the allegory; yet the Magas are the Magi of Chaldea, and their class and worship were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Saka-dwipa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Saka-dwipa are the forefathers of the fire-
worshipping Parsis. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing hundreds of thousands to a few centuries this time: they carry the event -- Narada and Samba notwithstanding -- to the days of the flight of the Parsis to Gujerat, which is simply absurd, as that was in the VIIIth cent. of our era. Though the Magas in the Bhavishya Purana are credited with still living in Saka-dwipa in the day of Krishna's Son, yet the last of it -- Plato's "Atlantis" -- had perished 6000 years before. They were Mag "late of" Saka-Dwipa, and lived in those days in Chaldea. This is an intentional confusion, again.
The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet the human Asuras and the Rakshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the future continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the Ocean floors. "Lemuria," as we have called the continent of the Third Race, was then a gigantic land.* It covered
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* As shown in the Introduction, it stands to reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost continents, but have been adopted by us for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name given to those [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 324 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the whole area of space from the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean, not only beyond Rapa-nui (Teapy, or Easter Island) which now lies in latitude 26 S., and longitude 110 W. (See Addenda to this Book II., Section, "Proofs of the Submerged Continents.") This statement seems corroborated by Science, -- even if only partially; as, when discussing continental trends, and showing the infra-Arctic masses trending generally with the Meridian, several ancient continents are generally mentioned, though inferentially. Among such the "Mascarene continent," which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, is spoken of, and the existence of another ancient continent running "from Spitzbergen to the Straits of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom," is taught.* The latter corroborates, then, the Occult teaching which shows the (now) polar regions as the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity, and as the tomb of the bulk of the mankind of that region during the Third Race, when the gigantic continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the
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Commentary, to a decrease of velocity in the earth's rotation: --
"When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities (the poles) agree with its middle circle (equator), when it runs slower and tilts in every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth. The waters flow toward
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] 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 the "Poseidon" (another substitute or rather a translation of the real name) -- was the last of it some 11,000 years ago. Most of the correct names of the countries and islands of both continents are given in the Puranas; but to mention them specially, as found in other more ancient works, such as the Surya Siddhanta, would necessitate too lengthy explanations. If, in earlier writings, the two seem to have been too faintly disconnected, this must be due to careless reading and want of reflection. If ages hence, Europeans are referred to as Aryans, and a reader confuses them with the Hindus and the latter with the Fourth Race, as they live (some of them) in ancient Lanka -- the blame will not fall on the writer.
* See Professor Dana's article, "American Journal of Science, " III, v. 442-3; Prof. Winchell's "World Life "; and other geological works.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 325 ATLANTIS -- OCEAN FLOOR.
the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle belt (equatorial lands), while those at the ends are subject to pralayas by submersion . . . ."
And again: --
. . . "Thus the wheel (the Earth) is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon, for the breath of its waters (tides). Toward the close of the age (Kalpa) of a great (root) race, the regents of the moon (the Pitar fathers, or Pitris) begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the wheel about its belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the extremities (poles) new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in."
We have but to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very clearly. Scientists (modern Specialists) have ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planets, and the shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically.* Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward to the periods of the earth's first incrustation. (See "American Naturalist, " XVIII., 15 et seq.); therefore it seems easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statements. We propose to treat of this at greater length in the Addenda. ( Vide § § V. and VI.)
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It is asked by some Theosophists: "What will Atlantis be like when raised?" they understanding from a few words in "Esoteric Buddhism " that "old continents" that have been submerged will reappear. Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were the same identical lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would, indeed, be barren for ages. Because the Atlantic sea-bottom is covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming -- a new "cretaceous formation" of strata, in fact -- is no reason why, when the time for a new continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion and upraising of the sea bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the surface. The racial cataclysms are not a Noah's deluge of forty days -- a kind of Bombay monsoon.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Speaking on periodical elevation and subsidence of the equatorial and polar regions, and ensuing changes of climate, Mr. Winchell (professor of Geology at 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' 're-apparitions' and other faunal dislocations in the vertical and horizontal distributions of fossil remains. These phenomena are well known to the student of geology." ("Effects of Astronomical Changes .")
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 326 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
That the periodical sinking and re-appearance of the mighty continents, now called Atlantis and Lemuria by the modern writers, is no fiction, will be demonstrated in the Section in which all the proofs of the same have been collated together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dwipas) are mentioned in the Surya Siddhanta, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out re-incarnated in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these "sacred islands" Atlantean -- as done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Swayambhuva Manu, to his seven sons -- was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose continent had been submerged in its turn. When originally mentioned by Parasara ( Vishnu Purana) the seven refer to an esoteric doctrine which is explained further on. Of all the seven islands, Jambu-dwipa is the only one that is terrestrial, for it is our globe. In the Puranas every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region; which, when the magnolia blossomed there where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a continent again. Science speaks of an ancient continent which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse-shoe-
like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi-circle. This continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of
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the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains re-appeared again on the face of the Oceans. Therefore, though it can be said without departing from truth that Atlantis is included in the Seven great insular continents, since the Fourth Race Atlanteans got some of the Lemurian relics, and, settling on the islands, included them among their lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on that remnant of Lemuria only to perish thereon, when destroyed in one day by its volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain geographers and geologists; to the Occul-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 327 ON FOOT ACROSS THE OCEANS.
tists it is history. What does Science know to the contrary? "Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India . . . . . Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, were connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre-historic ages . . . . was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the 'Brahmans of Upper India' stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached -- hardly wetting his feet -- the Alaskan peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America." (But see "Five years of Theosophy," art. "Leaflets from Esoteric History, " pp. 338 and 340.) This was written from the words of a MASTER -- a rather doubtful authority for the materialists and the sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather -- Ernest Haeckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost verbatim: . . . . "It would seem that the region on the earth's surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the CLOSELY RELATED CATARRHINE APES (! !) took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished -- H.P.B.] or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, which, lying to the South of the Asia of to-
day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa." (See supra and compare "The Pedigree of Man," p. 80-81.)
In the epoch we are treating of, the Continent of "Lemuria," had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. There was, nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe in those days, all these slumbering yet on the Ocean floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the cis-Himalayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond this stretched the "lotus leaves" of Sveta-dwipa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc., etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Isle, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilisation of the Third
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 328 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Race. Submerged with the rest, a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the Ocean floor, raised the small relic of the Archaic ages untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of northern polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race.
In this we are again corroborated to a degree by materialistic Science. Haeckel, when speaking of Blumenbach's brown or Malay race and the Australians and Papuans, remarks: -- "There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island-world, that seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent." ("Pedigree of Man, " p. 82. But see footnote supra and the Addenda. )
It certainly was, since it stretched, during the Third Race, east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie, and since the present Australia is but a portion of it, as are also a few surviving islands sown hither and thither on the face of the Pacific and a large bit of California, which belonged to it. Funnily enough, Haeckel, in his fantastic "Pedigree of Man," considers "the Australians of to-day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged (? !), of that second branch of the primitive human race. . . that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man's infancy, and seems to have been the parent of all the other straight-haired races of men. . . . The one, woolly-haired, migrated in part, westwards" . . . (i.e., to Africa and northwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no existence as yet) . . . "the other, straight-haired, was evolved farther to the north in Asia . . . . and peopled Australia . . . " (p. 81). "Behold," writes a MASTER, "the relics of that once great nation (Lemuria of the Third Race) in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia" ("Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 65). But they belong to the last remnants of the Seventh Sub-race of the Third. Prof. Haeckel must also have dreamt a dream and seen for once a true vision!
It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the Ancestors of those, who are termed by us the most ancient peoples of the world -- now called respectively the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phoenicians on the other. These were governed by the DIVINE DYNASTIES, i.e., kings and rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from spheres higher and more celestial than our own sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is useless of course to attempt to force their existence on sceptics. Their greatest pride consists in proving their patronymic denomination as catarrhinides; which fact they try to demonstrate on the alleged
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 329 CHANGES OF CLIMATE.
authority of the Coccyx appended to their os sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if they only had it long enough, they would wag in joy and for ever, in honour of its eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their ape-ancestors as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets right on this point theosophists and students of Occult Sciences.
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If we regard the Second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Haeckel's surmise that "the evolution of the primitive men took place . . . . in either Southern Asia or . . . . Lemuria" -- Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of question -- is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, in the same way that the evolution of the First Race (from the bodies of the pitars ) took place on seven distinctly separated regions of the (then) only Earth at the arctic pole -- so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur: it began in those northern regions, which have just been described a few pages back as including Behring's Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic regions and most adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when: --
"The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over the heads of that portion of the SWEAT BORN; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish REMAINED AS HALF-GROWN BABES* IN SIZE AND INTELLECT. This was the third pralaya of the races.**
Which means again, that our globe is subject to seven periodical entire changes which go pari passu with the races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial pralayas, three occasioned by the change in the inclination of the earth's axis. It is a law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic law. In Occultism this inexorable law is referred to as "the great ADJUSTER." Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and such changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes; nor does it seem so sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared rather to deny the axial phenomena altogether, than admit the intelligent Karmic hand and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Half-grown babes" in comparison with their giant Brethren on other zones. So would we now.
** Relates to Lemuria.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 330 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
law which alone could reasonably explain such sudden changes and their results. It has tried to account for them by various more or less fantastic speculations; one of which would be the sudden, and as imaginary, collision of our earth with a comet (De Boucheporn's hypothesis), as the cause of all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding to our esoteric explanation, since FOHAT is as good as any comet, having, in addition, universal intelligence to guide him.
Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu's Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four such axial disturbances; when the old continents -- save the first one -- were sucked in by the oceans, other
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lands appeared, and huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the survival of the fittest nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones -- the failures -- were disposed of by being swept off the earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.
The Sub-races are subject to the same cleansing process, as also the side-branchlets (the family-Races). Let one, well-acquainted with astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight and shadows of the Past. Let him observe, take notes of what he knows of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles -- especially with the Sidereal year, equal to 25,868 of our solar years.* If the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, then will he find how the weal and woe of nations is intimately connected with the beginning and close of this sidereal cycle. True, the non-occultist has the disadvantage that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing, through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he may find consolation in the knowledge or -- if he so prefers -- speculation on the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of -- about 16,000 years hence.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* There are other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles -- and this is just that 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 fifty minutes ten seconds, 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 eleven minutes twenty-four seconds, annually," (see the article on Astronomy in Encyclopaedia Britannica), "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, sixty-one minutes thirty-four seconds, and hence the equinox returns to the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years." We have mentioned this cycle in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 331 PRE-HISTORIC STATUES.
Our meaning is very clear. Every sidereal year the tropics recede from the pole four degrees in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator rounds through the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every astronomer knows, at present the tropic is only twenty-three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the equator. Hence it has still 2 1/2 degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal year; which gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years.*
After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) --
"Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and Pigmies (the dwarfed races of the Poles) . . . Many acquired DIVINE, more -- UNLAWFUL knowledge, and
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followed willingly the LEFT PATH." (Commentary xxxiii.)
Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods it took to accomplish this fourth destruction? Who can tell. . . . But we are told that --
-------
(44.) THEY (the Atlanteans) BUILT GREAT IMAGES, NINE YATIS HIGH (27 feet) -- THE SIZE OF THEIR BODIES (a). LUNAR FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS (the Lemurians). WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH (Race) (b).
(a) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged continent -- as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages -- are all between 20 and 30 feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all twenty-seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders. (See § "Stones, Witnesses to Giants," at the end of this Stanza.) The writer is well aware that the modern archaeologists have decided now that "these statues are not very old," as declared by one of the high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of those arbitrary decisions of modern science which does not carry much weight.
We are told that it is after the destruction of "Lemuria" by subterranean fires that men went on steadily decreasing in stature -- a process already commenced after their physical FALL -- and that finally, some millions of years after, they reached between six and seven feet, and are now dwindling down (as the older Asiatic races) to nearer five than
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See at the end of this Stanza "On the Duration of Ages and Cycles."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 332 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub-race of the Fourth Root Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family (Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders) are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo-
Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub-races, the others to the very last and transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow.
(b) Now, how could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac is denied to the Hindus by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Aryan Hindus knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled-for slander was so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear evidence of facts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptians have on their Zodiacs (See Denon's "Voyage en
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Egypte " Vol. II.) irrefutable proofs of records having embraced more than three-and-a-half sidereal years -- or about 87,000 years -- the Hindu calculations cover nearly thirty-three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad, "These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the (last local) Flood (in Asia), or Age of Horror, " in the latitude of India. And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Aryan historical memory -- that which submerged the last portions of Atlantis, 850,000 years ago. The floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.
The sinking and transformation of Lemuria beginning nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), the Third Race ended its career in Lanka, or rather on that which became Lanka with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lanka, while the enormous island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic continent described a few pages back. As a MASTER says (See "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 65): -- "Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them . . . . there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 333 THE OLD CONTINENTS.
been several times already submerged, and had the time to re-appear again and bear their new groups of mankind and civilisations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?"
Not the same identical continents, of course.
But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern "Lemuria." The prolongation of that great continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round "South Africa" (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden -- which every geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river -- is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary Age. The former reality of this river is a fact of science -- will its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, which their data demand? Professor Berthold Seeman not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent -- thus corroborating the whole "horse-shoe" doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the ELEVATED RIDGE in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes
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towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a SOUTH-EASTERLY line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d'Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-
shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean. (Cf. chart adapted from the "Challenger" and "Dolphin " soundings in Mr. Donnelly's, "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, " p. 47.)
The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis. The latter, indeed, must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria, than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race-evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth Race
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 334 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and became ultimately the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest "occult" authority, that "Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America." ("Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 58.)
The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded by it as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. Discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claims of the Asiatic philosophers, who maintain that Sciences -- Geology, Ethnology, and History included --were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived an untold number of ages ago. Future finds will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Aryans of India, Chaldeans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations during "myriads of centuries";* and the latter points to the fact that, "Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature."** To this Professor R. Owen adds that, "Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes"; and Winchell ("Pre-Adamites," p. 120), that "at the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books."
This is quite natural if we have to believe the statements of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii.), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, its tremendous antiquity,
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notwithstanding. The complete records of the growth, development, social, and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "History of English Literature, " p. 23.
** Quoted in "Atlantis, " etc., p. 132.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 335 HOW TO READ SYMBOLS.
secret annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the seven sciences; which sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the secret records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints --
1. The Realistic plane of thought;
2. The Idealistic;
3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.
The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely mythical element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For, it is either symbolical (archaic mode of thought), emblematical (a later though very ancient mode of thought), parabolical (allegory), hieroglyphical, or again logo-grammical -- the most difficult method of all, as every letter, as in the Chinese language, represents a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the Vedas, the "Book of the Dead," or the Bible (to a degree), is composed of such logograms. No one who is not initiated into the mystery of the occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say -- i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of Solar-myth and sexual-worship -- shall penetrate into the arcana. behind the veil. One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern mythologists.
Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah, etc., etc. -- all the head-figures of the world-deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological -- all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such deluges are based on events that took place in nature, and stand as historical records, therefore, whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical, of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we
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believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 336 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
To speak of a race nine yatis, or 27 feet high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than "Jack the Giant-Killer," is a somewhat unusual proceeding. "Where are your proofs?" the writer will be asked. In History and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Danavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim (Numbers xiii. 33). Moses speaks of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide (Deut. iii. 11), and Goliath was "six cubits and a span in height" (or 10 ft. 7 in.). The only difference found between the "revealed Scripture" and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., etc., is this: While the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that geology and archaeology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants have to be given up. (But see Part III., Addenda, the closing chapter.)
Of still standing witnesses to the submerged continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archaeology claims several such on this globe, though beyond wondering "what these may be" -- it never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Besides the Easter Island statues mentioned already, to what epoch do the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian, belong? Archaeology assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity (as usual), and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science. In "The Countries of the World," by Robert Brown, in Vol. IV., page 43, it is stated that --
"Teapi, Rapa-nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the South American coast. . . . In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four . . . and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their activity remains. . . .
" . . . But who made the great stone images (p. 44, etc.) which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? No one knows " -- says the reviewer. "It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants (a handful of Polynesian savages) arrived. . . . Their workmanship is
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 337 THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND.
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of a high order . . . . and it is believed that the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America. . . Even at the date of Cook's visit, some of the statues, measuring 27 feet in height and eight across the shoulders were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen broad. . . . all built of hewn stone in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, or the ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru" (vol. iii., pp. 310, 311).
"THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT ANY OF THE STATUES HAVE BEEN BUILT UP, BIT BY BIT, BY SCAFFOLDING ERECTED AROUND THEM" -- adds the journal very suggestively -- without explaining how they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. One of the best of these colossal images is now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka -- the only ones now found erect -- are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like the head of a man asleep. Their types, though all are long-headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths and chins differ greatly in form, their head-dress, moreover -- a kind of flat cap with a back piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head --showing that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked -- "Who made them?" -- but it is not archaeology nor yet geology that is likely to answer, though the latter recognizes in the Island a portion of a submerged continent.
But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world, for Bartholdi's "Statue of Liberty" (now at New York) is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain "all honeycombed with gigantic cells," with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from Shoo-King) the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled the earth"; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. "Masses of enormous human bones" were found "in America, near Misorte," a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 338 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters (See "De La Vega," Vol. ix., ch. ix.).*
Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal-warriors of Nadir-Shah? Bamian is a
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small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Kobhibaba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian (or Hindu-Kush) chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis-Khan in the XIIIth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their viharas. Such viharas are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock-cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. It is at the entrance of some of these that five enormous statues, of what is regarded as Buddha, have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, as the famous Chinese traveller, Hiouen-Thsang, speaks of, and saw them, when he visited Bamian in the VIIth century.
When it is maintained that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, the fact is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the "Statue of Liberty" now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 metres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is only 120 feet (15 feet taller than the said "Liberty").** The third statue is only 60 feet high -- the two others still smaller, the last one being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga; M. de Nadeylac thinks (See infra) that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, point out undeniably that Buddha was meant to be represented. But the above proves nothing. Notwithstanding the fact
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See also "Pneumatologie des Esprits " Vol. III., p. 55, de Mirville.
** The first and second have, in common with Bartholdi's Statue, an entrance at the foot, leading by a winding staircase cut in the rock up into the heads of the statues. The eminent French archeologist and anthropologist, the Marquis de Nadeylac, justly remarks in his work that there never was in ancient or in modern times a sculptured human figure more colossal than the first of the two.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 339 THE ANTEDILUVIAN BUDDHAS.
that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samadhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. "The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance": --says a Stanza. Gautama Buddha was an Aryan Hindu, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort them artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore Hiouen Thsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that
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"the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue" in his day "dazzled one's eyes," but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The very drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, cut out in the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. Whom does it represent in such case, it may be asked?
Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments -- which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting -- are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, like some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent, in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.
The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 340 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second -- 120 feet high -- represents the sweat-born; and the third -- measuring 60 feet -- immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter. (See the following sub-section on "Cyclopean Ruins, and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.")
These are, then, the "Giants" of antiquity, the ante- and post-diluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as "grasshoppers" in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years.
In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear the wise words of Montaigne in his mind. Saith the great French philosopher: --
" . . . It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or truth: which is an ordinarie fault in those who
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persuade themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort.
" . . . But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage to have the bounds and limits of God's will, and the power of our common Mother Nature tied to his sleeve, and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie.
"If we term those things monsters or miracles to which our reason cannot attain, how many doe such daily present themselves unto our sight? Let us consider through what cloudes, and how blinde-folde we are led to the knowledge of most things that passe our hands; verily we shall finde it is rather custome than Science that receiveth, the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things, were they newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them as much or more unlikely and incredible than any other." (Essays, chap. xxvi.)
A fair-minded scholar should, before denying the possibility of our history and records, search modern History, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is found scattered about and buried even in the British Museum alone. The
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
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CYCLOPEAN RUINS AND COLOSSAL STONES AS WITNESSES TO GIANTS.
In his enormous works -- Memoires addressees a l'Academie des Sciences -- de Mirville, carrying out the task of proving the reality of the devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of "historical evidence" that in the days of miracle -- Pagan and Biblical -- the stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sung. That finally, "Christ-stone," or Christ-Rock, "the spiritual Rock" that followed "Israel" (I Corinth. x. 4) "became a Jupiter lapis, " swallowed by his father Saturn, "under the shape of a stone."* We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of Biblical metaphors, simply for the sake of proving the Satanism of idols, though a good deal might be said** on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence on hand, to show that (a) had there been no giants to move about such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany) and other such Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as MAGIC, there could never have been so many witnesses to oracular and speaking stones.
In the Achaica (p. 81) we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid "for worshipping stones." But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: "I have changed my way of thinking." Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same -- a crime Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans with, as they do likewise -- one may be allowed to believe in what so many great philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an "idiot" by modern Pausaniases.
The reader is referred to Volume VI. of the Academie des Inscriptions (Memoires, p. 518, et seq.) if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of Magic and psychic powers. In a poem on Stones attributed to Orpheus, those stones are divided into ophites and siderites, "serpent-stones" and "star-stones." "The 'Ophite'
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Pierres Animees et parlantes., p. 283. Theologie de la Pierre, 270.
** Saturn is Kronos -- "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 Kronos is as sure "to swallow it" one day, as he has swallowed Jupiter-lapis and still greater characters.
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is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has the gift of speech; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound similar to the cry of a child. It is by means of this stone that Helanos foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland . . " etc. (Falconnet.)
Sanchoniathon and Philo Byblius, in referring to these betyles, call them "Animated Stones." Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. The latter (Eusebius) never parted with his ophites, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from them, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling.* Arnobius (a holy man who, "from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church," Christians tell their readers) confesses he could never meet on his passage with one of such stones without putting it questions, "which is answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice." Where is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan ophites, we ask?
It is also known that the famous stone at Westminster was called liafail -- "the speaking stone," -- which raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry (Monuments Celtiques) says he saw it when it still bore the inscription: --**
"Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem."
Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heraclius, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which "ran away when a hand approached them." (See Dictionnaire des Religions par l'abbe Bertrand; art. on words Heraclius and Betyles.)
De Mirville -- who seeks to justify the Bible -- inquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior-gaur (from Cor, "dance," whence chorea, and gaur, a GIANT), or the dance of giants? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop of St. Gildas. But the authors of the Voyage dans le Comte
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The same, of course, as the "small voice" heard by Elijah after the earthquake at the mouth of the cave. (I Kings xix. 12.)
** The rocking, or Logan, stones bear various names. The Celts had their clacha-brath, the "Destiny or judgment-stone"; the divining-stone, or "stone of the ordeal" and the oracle stone; the moving or animated stone of the Phoenicians; 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 in North America. (See Hodson's "Letters from North America, " Vol. II., p. 440.) Pliny speaks of several in Asia (Hist. Nat. Lib. I., c. 96), and Apollonius
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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 and from a distance.
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de Cornouailles, sur les traces des giants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,* Carnac and West Hoadley, give far better and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions -- true forests of rocks -- immense monoliths are found, "some weighing over 500,000 kilograms" (Cambry). These "hinging stones" of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, nor giants. Who then, if not giants, could ever raise such masses (especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley), range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, are set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, and would yet resist the efforts of twenty men who should attempt to displace them.
We say, that most of these stones are the relics of the last Atlanteans. We shall be answered that all the geologists claim them to be of a natural origin. That, a rock when "weathering," i.e., losing flake after flake of its substance under influence of weather, assumes this form. That, the "tors" in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this cause. That, finally, as all scientists consider the "rocking stones to be of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in layers" -- our statement will be justly denied, especially as " we see this process of rock-modification in progress around us to-day." Let us examine the case.
But read what Geology has to say, and you will learn that often these gigantic masses do not even belong to the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those regions and to be found only far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke (French trans., Sepulture des Tartares. Arch. VII, p. 222), speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that there, where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have been brought over "from immense distances and with prodigious efforts." Charton ( Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes, Vol. I., p. 230) speaks of a specimen of such rock "from Ireland," which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin, "most probably African."
This is a strange coincidence, as Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular stones to a Sorcerer who brought them from Africa. De Mirville sees in that sorcerer "an accursed Hamite. " We see in him a
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See, among others, "History of Paganism in Caledonia, " by Dr. Th. A. Wise, F.R.A.S., etc.
** Ham was no more a Titan or Giant than Shem and Japhet. They are either all Arkite Titans, as Faber shows them, or myths.
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dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands -- GIANTS in every and any case.*
"Men," says Cambry, naively, "have nothing to do with it . . . for never could human power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has accomplished it all (!!) and Science will demonstrate it some day" (!!) (p. 88). Nevertheless, it is a human, though gigantic power, which has accomplished it, and no more "nature" alone than god or devil.
"Science," having undertaken to demonstrate that even the mind and Spirit of man are simply the production of blind forces, is quite capable of accepting the task. It may come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that nature alone has marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds flying from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland!
It is true that Cambry recanted later on. "I had believed for a long time," he says, "that Nature alone could produce those wonders . . . . but I recant . . . . chance is unable to create such marvellous combinations . . . . and those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau. . . . ." Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author "Antiquites Celtiques ," p. 99, says, when speaking of the moving rocks, or Rocking-
Stones situated on the slope of Golcar (the "Enchanter"): "The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to gods." . . . .
In "Stonehenge" (Flinders Petrie) it is said that "Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or 'sarsen' stone, locally called 'grey wethers.' But some of the stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably the North of Ireland."
To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in 1850 in the Revue Archeologique (p. 473), are worthy of being quoted. Says the paper, concerning the rocking stones: --
"Every stone is a block whose weight would try the most powerful machines. There are, in a word, scattered throughout the globe, masses, before which the word materials seems to remain inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded, and that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Diodorus Siculus asserts that in the days of Isis, all men were of a vast stature, who were
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denominated by the Hellenes Giants. [Gk chars] "[Oi d'en Aiguptoi muthologousi kata ten Isidos helikian gegonenai tinas polusomatous]."
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things themselves. Besides which, these immense rocking stones, called sometimes routers -- placed upright on one of their sides as on a point, their equipoise being so perfect that the slightest touch is sufficient to set them in motion . . . betray a most positive knowledge of statics. Reciprocal counter-motion, surfaces, plane, convex and concave, in turn . . . all this allies them to Cyclopean monuments, of which it can be said with good reason, repeating after de La Vega that 'the demons seem to have worked on them more than men.' "*
For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, applied to masses weighing millions of pounds, can be the work of Palaeolithic savages, of cave-men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is no use for our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking-stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place, every effort made to keep it elsewhere notwithstanding. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far bigger one and had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. . . The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. . . And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytanea "whence it ran away several times, which forced them to lead it" (Nat. Hist., XXXVI., p. 592) . . . Here we have immense stones stated by all antiquity to be "living, moving, speaking and self-perambulating." They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they have been called routers ("to put to flight," to rout) and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "It is difficult," writes Creuzer, "not to suspect in the structures of Tiryns and Mycenae planetary forces supposed to be moved by celestial powers, analogous to the famous Dactyles." (Pelasges et Cyclopes). To this day Science is ignorant on the subject of the Cyclopes. They are supposed to have built all the so-called "Cyclopean" works whose erection necessitated several regiments of Giants, and -- they were only seventy-seven in all (about one hundred, Creuzer thinks). They are called "Builders," and Occultism calls them the INITIATORS, who, 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. p. 54). Raoul Rochette found that Palaemonius, the Cyclops, to whom a sanctuary was raised, "was the Tyrian Hercules." Anyhow, he was the builder of the sacred columns of Gadir, covered with mysterious characters to which Apollonius of Tyana was the only one in his age to possess the key; and with figures which may still be found on the walls of Ellora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Viswakarma, "the builder and artificer of the Gods."
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called mad stones (see his, "Dieu et les Dieux, " p. 587). "The rocking-stone is accepted in Science. Why did it rock, why was it made to do so? One must be blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and that they were called for this very reason 'the stones of truth.' " (de Mirville, "Fetichisme ")*
This is history, the Past of prehistoric times, warranting the same in later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the moon and the serpent, were the more ancient "Rocks of Destiny" of older nations, whose motion, or rocking, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this ancient reading. Vormius and Olaius Magnus show that it was according to the orders of the oracle, "whose voice spoke through the immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of ancient giants," that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. "In India and Persia," says Pliny, "it is she (the Persian Oitzoe) whom the magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns" (Nat. Hist., lxxxvii., chap. LIV.); and he describes (in chap. XXXVIII., 1. ii.) a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that "a single finger
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Messrs. Richardson and Barth are said to have been amazed at finding in the Desert of Sahara the same trilithic and raised stones they had seen in Asia, Circassia, Etruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr. Rivett-Carnac, B.C.S., of Allahabad, the distinguished Archaeologist, shows the same amazement in 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 betyles, 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 the "Archaeological Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India, etc.," will find in it the most primitive style of marking or recording; something of the sort having been adopted by the American inventors of the Morse code of telegraphic writing, which reminds us of the Ahgam 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, the Runic characters having followed the cup-marks and long and short strokes. In "Johannes Magnus' Infolio" one sees the representation of the demi-god, the giant Starchaterus (Starkad, the pupil of Kroszharsgrani, the Magician) who holds under each arm a huge stone covered with Runic characters; and 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. ")
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can move it, while the weight of the whole body makes it resist." Why then should not the rocking stones of Ireland, or those of Brinham, in Yorkshire, have served for the same mode of divination or oracular communications? The hugest of them are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller ones, such as Brinham Rocks, with some revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more ancient lithoi. Had not the bishops of the middle ages destroyed all the plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know more of these.* As it is, we know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and MAGIC. E. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in his Antiquites de France, Vol. ix., an article showing the Chatam peramba (the Field of Death, or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical with the old tombs at Carnac -- "a prominence and a central tomb." . . . "Bones are found in them (the tombs)," he says, "and Mr. Hillwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives (of Malabar) calling the tombs the dwellings of Rakshasas (giants)." Several stone circles, "considered the work of the Panch Pandava (five Pandus), as all such monuments are in India, so numerous in that country," when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, "were found to contain human bones of a very large size." (T. A. Wise, in "History of Paganism in Caledonia, " p. 36).
Again, de Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to "great natural geological commotions" (Charlton), and "are the work of Nature" (Cambry) is now exploded, his remarks are very just. "Before the impossibility of such a theory is asserted, we advise Science to reflect . . . . and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends: for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking stones will oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to see clearer and realise once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity" ("Fetichisme, " p. 288).
It is just what we can never repeat too often, though the voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediaeval theology in its interpretations of the so-called Revelation. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape -- a transformation requiring millions of years -- and yet fears to make mankind older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of species,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Charton, the Author of "Voyageurs anciens et modernes," quoted by de Mirville.
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natural selection and evolution from the lowest form to the highest; from mollusc to fish, from reptile
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to bird and mammalian. Yet it refuses to man, who physiologically is only a higher mammal and animal, such transformation of his external form. But if the monstrous iguanodon of the Wealden may have been the ancestor of the diminutive iguana of to-day, why could not the monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man -- the link between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this "theory," than in that of refusing to man any spiritual immortal Ego, making of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, as a distinct genus in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific than the present exact Sciences, they are withal more logical and consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and natural affinities of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal; but it requires more than a mere interplay between certain material aggregates and their environment, to call to life a fully conscious man ; even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two "poor cousins" of the Quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Haeckel that (objective) life on our globe "is a logical postulate of Scientific natural history," but add that the rejection of a like Spiritual involution, from within without, of invisible subjective Spirit-life -- eternal and a Principle in Nature -- is more illogical, if possible, than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by blind forces inherent in matter, without any external help.
Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being in the following manner. First, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in Space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named organic PROTEIN. Then, under the influence of incident forces, those states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into and resulted in new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind-pipes and bellows. After which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart's Requiem. This was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad infinitum; its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. . . . . What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown.
Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of
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species, what he says in it applies to our doctrine. "Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations on a pre-existing kind of being." ("Essays on Physiology, " Subj. p. 144.) Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a modification on a pre-existent and pre-historical kind of man, even supposing for argument's sake that there is nothing within him to last longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is not so! For, when we are told that "organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call artificial evolution" (Appendix to "Principles of Biology, " p. 482), we answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great adepts have done as much, and, indeed, far more, before the chemists ever attempted to "build out of dissociated elements complex combinations." The Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in
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Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein will have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no chemist, or Alchemist either, will ever endow such a "Frankenstein's Monster" with more than animal instinct, unless indeed he does that which the "Progenitors" are credited with, namely, if he leaves his own physical body, and incarnates in the "empty form." But even this would be an artificial, not a natural man, for our "Progenitors" had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become gods before they became men.
The above digression, if one, is an attempt at justification before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this. But this accounts also for the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or theology; and why they prefer any such "psychic craze" to the dogmatic assertions of both, neither of the two having anything better to offer than blind faith in their respective infallibility. Universal tradition is indeed the far safer guide in life. And universal tradition shows primitive man living for ages together with his Creators and first instructors -- the Elohim -- in the World's "Garden of Eden," or "Delight." We shall treat of the Divine Instructors in Stanza XII.
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45. THE FIRST GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS (a).
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46. ALL HOLY SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE ANIMALS PRODUCED FROM THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (b).
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(a) As this subject -- the fourth great deluge on our globe in this Round -- is fully treated in the chapters that follow the last Stanza, to say anything more at present would be mere repetition. The seven great islands (Dwipas) belonged to the continent of Atlantis. The secret teachings show that the "Deluge" overtook the Fourth, giant Race, not on account of their depravity, or because they had become "black with sin," but simply because such is the fate of every continent, which -- like everything else under our Sun -- is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was when the Fifth Race was in its infancy.
(b) Thus the giants perished -- the magicians and the sorcerers, adds the fancy of popular tradition, but "all holy saved," and alone the "unholy were destroyed." This was due, however, as much to the prevision of the "holy" ones, who had not lost the use of their "third eye," as to Karma and natural law. Speaking of the subsequent race (our Fifth Humanity), the commentary says: --
"Alone the handful of those Elect, whose divine instructors had gone to inhabit that Sacred Island -- from whence the last Saviour will come' ' -- now kept mankind from becoming one-half the
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exterminator of the other [as mankind does now -- H.P.B.]. It (mankind) became divided. Two-thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one-third remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race -- the divine Incarnates. When the Poles moved (for the fourth time) this did not affect those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like the Lemurians -- alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and 'were seen no more . . . . ."
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 351 THE "GREAT DRAGONS" AND SERPENTS.
STANZA XII. THE FIFTH RACE AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
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§§ (47) The remnants of the first two races disappear for ever. Groups of the various Atlantean races saved from the Deluge along with the Forefathers of the Fifth. (48) The origins of our present Race, the Fifth. The first divine Dynasties. (49) The earliest glimmerings in History, now pinned to the allegorical chronology of the Bible, and "universal" History slavishly following it. -- The nature of the first instructors and civilizers of mankind.
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47. FEW (men) REMAINED. SOME YELLOW, SOME BROWN AND BLACK, AND SOME RED, REMAINED. THE MOON-COLOURED (of the primitive Divine Stock) WERE GONE FOR EVER (a) . . . .
48. THE FIFTH RACE PRODUCED FROM THE HOLY STOCK (remained). IT WAS RULED BY HER FIRST DIVINE KINGS.
49. THE "SERPENTS" WHO RE-DESCENDED; WHO MADE PEACE WITH THE FIFTH (Race), WHO TAUGHT AND INSTRUCTED IT (b) . . . .
(a) This verse (47) relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with it, but living and ever-
recurring tradition does. History -- or what is called history -- does not go further back than the fantastic origins of our fifth sub-race, a "few thousands" of years. It is the sub-divisions of this first sub-
race of the Fifth Root-Race which are referred to in the sentence, "Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red, remained." The "moon coloured" (i.e., the First and the Second Races) were gone for ever -- ay, without leaving any traces whatever; and that, so far back as the third "Deluge" of the Third Lemurian race, that "Great Dragon," whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this is the true meaning of the Verse in the COMMENTARY which says:
"The GREAT DRAGON has respect but for the 'SERPENTS' of WISDOM, the Serpents whose holes are now under the triangular stones," i.e., "the Pyramids, at the four corners of the world."
(b) This tells us clearly that which is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the Commentaries;
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namely, that the Adepts or "Wise" men of the three Races (the Third, Fourth and the Fifth) dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind of pyramidal structure, if not
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 352 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
actually under a pyramid. For such "pyramids" existed in the four corners of the world and were never the monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though until found scattered all over the two Americas, under and over ground, beneath and amidst virgin forests, as in plain and vale, they were supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If the true geometrically correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular, pyramidal and conical menhirs in the Morbihan, and Brittany generally; many of the Danish tumuli and even of the "giant tombs" of Sardinia with their inseparable companions, the nuraghi, are so many more or less clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first settlers on the newly-born continent and isles of Europe, the -- "some yellow, some brown and black, and some red" -- races that remained after the submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands (850,000 years ago), with the exception of Plato's Atlantean island, and before the arrival of the great Aryan races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East. Those who can hardly accept the antiquity of the human race so far back as the 57,000 years assigned by Dr. Dowler to the skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi, will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken some day. It is the foolish self-glorification of the Arcadians who styled themselves [[proselenoi ]] -- older than the moon -- and of the people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the sun appeared in heaven, that we may disparage, not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the mammoth and mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the mammalians, man is the only one whom science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames, from the giant homo diluvii to the creature between 5 and 6 feet that he is now.
But the "Serpents of Wisdom" have preserved their records well, and the history of the human evolution is traced in heaven as it is traced on underground walls. Humanity and the stars are bound together indissolubly, because of the intelligences that rule the latter.
Modern symbologists may scoff at this and call it "fancy," but "it is unquestionable that the Deluge has (ever) been associated in the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the constellations," writes Mr. Staniland Wake ("The Great Pyramid "). The "Old Dragon" is identical with the "great Flood," says Mr. Proctor (in "Knowledge, " Vol. I., p. 243): "We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples . . . the Dragon would be the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 353 THE ASTRONOMICAL DRAGON.
uppermost or ruling constellation . . . it is singular how closely the constellations . . . correspond in
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sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded respecting the (Biblical) Flood."
The reasons for this singularity have been made clear in this work. But it shows only that there were several Deluges mixed up in the memories and traditions of the sub-races of the Fifth Race. The first great "Flood" was astronomical and cosmical, while several others were terrestrial. Yet, this did not prevent our very learned friend Mr. Gerald Massey -- an Initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still only a Self-initiate -- from declaring and insisting that the Atlantean submersion and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people; and that Atlantis was no better than an astronomical allegory. Nevertheless, the great Zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and one can hardly interfere with the other; and it stands also to reason that every student of Occultism knows what that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of it. Its "twelve cantos" refer to the "annual course of the Sun through the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac"; the eleventh canto being "consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and of rain, and harmonizes with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac -- Aquarius, or the Waterman" (Nineteenth Century, 1882, p. 236). But even this is preceded in the old records by the pre- astronomical Cosmic FLOOD, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above Zodiacal or Noah's Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the Great Dragon (the constellation), the "Dragons of Wisdom," or the great Initiates of the Third and Fourth Races, and the Floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the Third Sub-race of the Fourth Root-race or the Atlanteans. When was it? Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of the Zodiacal calculations in Egypt, the poles have been thrice inverted.
We will presently return once more to this statement. Such symbols as are represented by the Signs of the Zodiac -- a fact which offers a handle to materialists upon which to hang their one-sided theories and opinions -- have too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too important to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to consider the meaning of that other statement which mentions (verse 48) the first divine Kings, who are said to have "redescended," guided and instructed our Fifth Race after the last deluge!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 354 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
We shall consider this last claim historically in the sections that follow, but must end with a few more details on the subject of "Serpents."
The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediaeval, and modern works that have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of the weird symbol -- so often referred to and suggestive of the "tempter of man" in the orthodox light of the church -- can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every available proof at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been
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invariably made out by our theologians and some pious symbologists as indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called devil, and every proof to the contrary has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored; therefore, the occultist must neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander. It is proposed to divide the subjects involved in these three last verses into several groups, and examine them in this final chapter as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine -- the bulk of which will be found in Part II. on Symbology.
-------
SERPENTS AND DRAGONS UNDER DIFFERENT SYMBOLISMS.
The name of the Dragon in Chaldea was not written phonetically, but was represented by two monograms, probably meaning, according to the Orientalists, "the scaly one." "This description," very pertinently remarks G. Smith, "of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a serpent, or a fish," and we may add: "It applies in one case to Makara, the tenth Zodiacal sign, meaning in Sanskrit a non-
descript amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, and really signifying something else. ( Vide Part II., "The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.") This, then, is a virtual admission that the Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of the "Dragon" in ancient Chaldea, whence the Hebrews got their symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians, who made of the "Scaly one" a living entity and a maleficent power.
A specimen of Dragons, "winged and scaled," may be seen in the British Museum. Representing the events of the Fall according to the same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a tree, and holding out their hands to the "apple," while at the back of the "Tree"
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 355 THE NAASENIAN GNOSTICS.
is the Dragon-Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two "Chaldees" ready for initiation, the Serpent symbolising the "Initiator"; while the jealous gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane clergy. Not much of the literal "Biblical event" there, as any occultist can see.
"The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom," says the Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures and the "Serpent."
"The Serpents who redescended . . . . who taught and instructed" the Fifth Race. What sane man is capable of believing in our day that real serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess, now become almost an axiom with the men of science, that those who wrote in antiquity upon various sacred Dragons and Serpents either were superstitious and credulous people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the profane.
"Terrible are the gods when they manifest themselves" -- those gods whom men call Dragons. And
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AElianus, treating in his "De Natura Animalium " of these Ophidean symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he understood well the nature of this most ancient of symbols. Thus he most pertinently explains with regard to the above Homeric verse -- "For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of which it is better (for others?) to remain in ignorance" (Book xi., ch. 17).
This "Dragon" having a septenary meaning, the highest and the lowest may be given. The former is identical with the "Self-born," the Logos (the Hindu Aja). He was the second person of the Trinity, the SON, with the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent-Worshippers. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.* Its seven "stars" are the seven stars held in the hand of the "Alpha and Omega" in Revelation. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term "Dragon" was applied to the Wise men.
This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that it can hardly escape, all civilization notwithstanding, being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished Christian dogmas, the subject of which required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.
Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* As shown by H. Lizeray in the "Trinite Chretienne Devoilee" -- placed between the immutable Father (the Pole, a fixed Point) and mutable matter, the Dragon transmits to the latter the influences received by him from the Pole, whence his name -- the Verbum.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 356 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Heaven originate with St. John, and in his Revelation? Emphatically we answer -- No. His "Dragon" is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean magic.
To demonstrate the negation the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects.
-------
THE SIDEREAL AND COSMIC GLYPHS.
Every astronomer -- besides Occultists and Astrologers -- knows that, figuratively, the astral light, the milky way, and also the path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the circles of the Sidereal or Tropical year, were always called "Serpents" in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the adepts.
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This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a "Dragon": "Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune" (Peratae Gnostics); the "Good and Perfect Serpent," the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.
But one ought to discriminate between the characters of this symbol. For instance: Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine; and when, as an example, we read in the Vendidad complaints uttered against the "Serpent," whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana-Vaego, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, at the same time as mental and psychic consumption, every occultist knows that the Serpent alluded to is the north pole, as also the pole of the heavens.* The latter produces the seasons according to the angle at which it penetrates the centre of the earth. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaego by the good river Daitya had disappeared, and "the Aryan Magi had to emigrate to Sagdiani" -- say the exoteric accounts. But the esoteric teaching states that the pole had passed through the equator, and that the "land of bliss" of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo-Aryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognise the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood, and conversed with the pure "Yazathas" (celestial Spirits of the Elements), whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein (Revue Archeologique, 8th year, 1885), "the Vendidad seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara-Korum chain."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Symbolized by the Egyptians under the form of a Serpent with a hawk's head.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 357 THE TWO MYSTIC POLES.
The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who for once (and for a wonder) wrote the truth, symbolised Kosmos by a large fiery circle, representing a serpent with a hawk's head lying across its diameter. "Here we have the pole of the earth within the plane of the ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac in 25,000 (odd) years, must have reddened with the solar blaze, and each sign must have been vertical to the polar region." (See Mackey's "Sphinxiad.")
Meru -- the abode of the gods -- was placed, as before explained, in the North Pole, while Patala, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Patala have one significance and represent localities; while astronomically, they have another, and mean "the two poles," which meanings ended by their being often rendered in exoteric sectarianism -- the "Mountain" and the "Pit," or Heaven and Hell. If we hold at present only to the astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the ancients knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern astronomers; they had reasons, and good ones for naming one the "Mountain " and the other the "Pit. " As the author just quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same: "Heli-on is the Sun in the highest"
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(Helios, Heli-on, the "most high"); "and Acheron is 32 deg. above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded the southern pole, being therefore called the PIT, while observing, toward the Northern pole that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared above the horizon -- they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of the Gods, these were said to ascend and descend periodically; by which (astronomically) the Zodiacal gods were meant, the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the heaven." "In that age," adds the author of that curious work, the "Sphinxiad" and of "Urania's Key to the Revelations " -- "at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the North Pole to the north horizon; crossing the eight coils of the Serpent (eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years), which would seem like an imaginary ladder with eight staves reaching from the earth up to the pole, i.e., the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, i.e., the signs of the Zodiac, ascended and descended. (Jacob's ladder and the angels) . . . . It is more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder." . . . .
This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 358 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and especially theological character. As just said, the Christian trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning, which made Rutilius say -- of those who euhemerized it -- "Judaea gens, radix stultorum. "
But the profane, and especially the Christian fanatics, ever in search of scientific corroboration for their dead-letter texts, will persist in seeing in the celestial pole the true Serpent of Genesis, Satan, the Enemy of mankind, instead of what it is -- a cosmic metaphor. When the gods are said to forsake the earth, it does not only mean the gods, protectors and instructors, but also the minor gods -- the regents of the Zodiacal signs. Yet, the former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as much as in the Hindu Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura-Mazda, the "Lord of Wisdom," is the synthesis of the Amshaspends (or Amesha-Spenta -- "Immortal Benefactors"),* the "Word," however, or the Logos and its six highest aspects in Mazdyanism. These "Immortal Benefactors" are described in Zamyad yasht as the "Amesha-Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great, helpful . . . . imperishable and pure which are all seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike . . . . which are the creators and destroyers of the creatures of Ahura-Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers . . . ."
These few lines alone indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspends, our Dhyan-
Chohans or the "Serpents of Wisdom." They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura-
Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians -- the Stary-azatas of the Zoroastrians -- or again the seven planets (including the sun) of every religion.** The epithet -- "the shining having efficacious eyes" -- proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the divine powers of Ahura-Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the "Builders," the "watchers," the Pitar (fathers), and the first Preceptors of mankind.
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When mortals shall have become sufficiently spiritualised, there will be no more need of forcing them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men will know then, that there never yet was a great World-reformer, whose name has passed into our generation, who (a) was not a direct emanation of the LOGOS (under whatever name known to us), i.e., an essential incarnation of one of "the seven," of the "divine Spirit who is sevenfold"; and (b) who had not appeared before, during the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Also translated as "blissful Immortals" by Dr. W. Geiger; but the first is more correct.
** These "seven" became the eight, the Ogdoad, of the later materialized religions, the seventh, or the highest principle, being no longer the pervading Spirit, the Synthesis, but becoming an anthropomorphic number, or additional unit.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 359 GOD AND NATURE ANTHROPOMORPHIZED.
past Cycles. They will recognise, then, the cause which produces in history and chronology certain riddles of the ages; the reason why, for instance, it is impossible for them to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the Dabistan ; why the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up in their numbers and individualities; why Krishna and Buddha speak of themselves as re-incarnations, i.e., Krishna is identified with the Rishi Narayana, and Gautama gives a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being "the very supreme Brahma," is yet called Amsamsavatara -- "a part of a part" only of the Supreme on Earth. Finally, why Osiris is a great God, and at the same time a "prince on Earth," who reappears in Thoth-Hermes, and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognised, cabalistically, in Joshua, the Son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The esoteric doctrine explains it by saying that each of these (as many others) had first appeared on earth as one of the seven powers of the LOGOS, individualized as a God or "Angel" (messenger); then, mixed with matter, they had re-appeared in turn as great sages and instructors who "taught the Fifth Race," after having instructed the two preceding races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of mankind, and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had become truly only "the parts of a part" on earth, though de facto the One Supreme in Nature.
This is the metaphysics of Theogony. And, as every "Power" among the SEVEN has (once individualized) in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules over it,* hence the many meanings in every symbol, which, unless interpreted according to the esoteric methods, generally lead to an inextricable confusion.
Does the Western Kabalist -- generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist -- require a proof? Let him open Eliphas Levi's Histoire de la Magic," p. 53, and carefully examine his "Grand Symbole Kabalistique " of the Zohar. He will find, on the engraving given, a white man standing erect and a black woman upside down, i.e., standing on her head, her legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and protruding behind his shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on each side.
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Eliphas Levi makes of it, God and Nature; or God, "light," mirrored inversely in "Nature and Matter," darkness. Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as emblematical cosmogony goes. Nor has he invented the symbol any more
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* These elements are: -- The cosmic, the terrene, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, the aqueous, and finally the human -- in their physical, spiritual, and psychic aspects.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 360 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
than the Kabalists have: the two figures in white and black stone have existed in the temples of Egypt from time immemorial -- agreeably to tradition; and historically -- ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them. Therefore the symbol must have been in existence since nearly 2,500 years ago. This, at the very least, for that Persian sovereign, who was a son of Cyrus the Great, succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two Kabiri personifying the opposite poles. Herodotus (Thalia, No. 77) tells posterity that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he went into an inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought a man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate "the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the Heaven," as perceived by Mackey.* But they represented also the poles inverted, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, bringing each time as a result the displacement of the Oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and vice versa. These Kabirim were the "Deluge" gods.
This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same gods, and classes of gods. Faber showed already, at the beginning of this century, the identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes,** Titans, and Aletae with the KABIRI. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis and our Dhyan Chohans, who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri-Titans were seven great gods: cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Who adds that the Egyptians had various ways of representing the angles of the Poles. Also in Perry's View of the Levant there is "a figure representing the South Pole of the Earth in the constellation of the Harp," in which the poles appear like two straight rods, surmounted with hawks' wings, but they were also often represented as serpents with heads of hawks, one at each end.
** Faber and Bishop Cumberland would make them all the later pagan personifications, as the former writer has it, of "the Noetic Ark, and no other than the Patriarch (Noah) and his family" (!) See his "Kabiri, " Vol. I., 136; because, we are told, "after the Deluge in commemoration of the event, the
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pious Noachidae had established a religious festival, which was, later on, corrupted by their impious descendants; demons or hero-gods; and at length unblushing obscenity usurped the name and garb of religion" ( Vol. I., p. 10.). Now this is indeed putting an extinguisher upon the human reasoning powers, not only of antiquity, but even of our present generations. Reverse the statement, and explain after the words "Noah and his family" that what is meant by that patriarch and family is simply the Jewish version of a Samothracian mystery, of Saturn, or Kronos-Sadic and his Sons, and then we may say Amen.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 361 WHO WERE ENOCH AND THE OTHERS?
(a) with At-al-as "the divine Sun," and (b) with tit "the deluge." But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe-inspiring great gods -- the Dioscuri,* the deities surrounded with the darkness of occult nature -- become the Idei (or Idaeic finger) with the adept-healer by metals. The true etymology of the name lares (now signifying "ghosts") must be sought in the Etruscan word "lars," "conductor," "leader." Sanchoniathon translates the word Aletae as fire worshippers, and Tabor believes it derived from Al-Orit, "the god of fire." Both are right, as in both cases it is a reference to the Sun (the highest God), toward whom the planetary gods "gravitate" (astronomically and allegorically) and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber's etymology, who says that "lar" is a contraction of "El-Ar, " the solar deity, is not very correct. They are the "lares," the conductors and leaders of men. As Aletae, they were the seven planets -- astronomically; and as Lares, the regents of the same, our protectors and rulers -- mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic worship, as also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, their attributes being recognised in these two capacities by the name of the temples to which they respectively belonged, and those of their priests. They all belonged, however, to the Septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyan Chohans. The Sabeans, who worshipped the "regents of the Seven planets" as the Hindus do their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes (Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the planetary gods. Seth and Enos were borrowed from the Sabeans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but the truth can still be traced about them even in Genesis.** Seth is the "progenitor" of those early men of the Third Race in whom the "Planetary" angels had incarnated -- a Dhyan Chohan himself, who belonged to the informing gods; and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch) or Hermes, was said to be his son -- because it was a generic name for all the early Seers ("Enoichion"). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabeanism; and therefore that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idris (Hermes or Enoch), (See Vyse, "Operations," Vol. II., p. 358); that thither Sabeans proceeded
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Who became later on, with the Greeks, limited only to Castor and Pollux. But in the days of Lemuria, the Dioscuri, the "Egg-born," were the Seven Dhyan Chohans (Agnishwatta-Kumara) who incarnated in the Seven Elect of the Third Race.
** Clement of Alexandria recognized the astronomical significance of chapter xxv. et seq. of Exodus.
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According to the Mosaic doctrine, he says that the seven planets help in the generation of terrestrial things. The two cherubs standing on the two sides of the sacred tetragrammaton represent the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 362 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
on pilgrimage, and chanted prayers seven times a day, turning to the North (the Mount Meru, Kaph, Olympus, etc., etc.) (See Palgrave, Vol. II., p. 264). Abd Allatif says curious things about the Sabeans and their books. So does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote 200 years later. While the latter maintains "that each pyramid was consecrated to a star" (a star regent rather), Abd Allatif assures us "that he had read in Sabean books that one pyramid was the tomb of Agathodaemon and the other of Hermes" ( Vyse, Vol. II., p. 342). "Agathodaemon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes was his son," adds Mr. Staniland Wake in "The Great Pyramid," p. 57.
Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples they were the great Cosmic Gods (the seven and the forty-nine Sacred Fires), in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, therefore to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were 3 and 4, or 7 -- the male and female principles -- (the crux ansata); this division showing why some classical writers held that they were only three, while others named four. And these were -- the Kabiri -- Axieros (in his female aspect, Demeter); Axio-
Kersa (Persephone)*; Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kadmilos (Hermes -- not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus (II. 51) but "he of the sacred legend," explained only during the Samothracian mysteries). This identification, due, according to the Scholiast Apollon (Rh. I. 217), to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is none at all, as names alone do not reveal much. There were still others again who maintained, being as right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. The two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial, and the pole of the heavens -- astronomically, as also the physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus, the Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read esoterically to understand the allegory. The parts played in the event by the fire, water, earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how "the father of the gods"
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* It is a curious idea -- yet one not very far from the truth, perhaps -- that speculation of Mackey, the self-made Adept of Norwich, found in his "Mythological Astronomy." He says that the Kabiri named Axieros and Axiokersa derived their names (a) from Kab or Cab, a measure, and from Urim, the heavens: the Kabirim being thus "a measure of the heavens"; and (b) that their distinctive names, implying the principle of generation, referred to the sexes. For, "the word sex was formerly understood by aix; which has now settled . . . . into sex." And he refers to "Encyclopaedia Londinus" at the word "aspiration." Now if we give the aspirated sound to Axieros, it would be Saxieros; and the other pole would be Saxiokersa. The two poles would thus become the generators of the other powers of nature -- they would be the parents: therefore the most powerful gods.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 363 THE POLES, THE "HEAVENLY MEASURE."
and the "merry God of the wine" were also made to personify the two terrestrial Poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In astronomy, the poles are indeed the "heavenly measure" (vide note supra); and so are the Kabiri Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri-
Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the invention of fire* and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias shows that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus. (I. ix. p. 751.)
But the fact that, astronomically, the Titans-Kabirim were also the generators and regulators of the seasons, and cosmically the great Volcanic Energies, the gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works, does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason. They are pre-eminently in every theogony -- especially in the Hindu -- the sacred divine fires, 3, 7, or 49, according as the allegory demands it. Their very names prove it, as they are the Agni-putra (Sons of the Fire) in India, and the genii of the fire under numerous names in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name Kabeiron meaning "the powerful through fire," from the Greek word [[kaio]] "to burn." The Semitic Kabirim, "the powerful, the mighty, and the great," answering to the Greek [[megaloi dunatoi]], are later epithets. They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phoenicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with fire; their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to Chthonian divinities. Therefore Christianity has made of them infernal gods.
They are truly "the great, beneficent and powerful Gods," as Cassius Hermone calls them (See Macrob. Sat. I., iii., c. 4, p . 376). At Thebes, Kore and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary (Pausan. IX. 22; 5), and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter their holy precincts (Herodotus I. ii., c. 37). But we must not lose sight, at the same time, of the fact that the title of Kabiri was a generic one; that the Kabiri (the mighty gods as well as mortals), were of both sexes, as also terrestrial, celestial and kosmic. That, while in their later capacity of the Rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon (as it is now
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The word "guebra" comes from Kabiri, gabiri, and means Persian ancient fire-worshippers, or Parsis. Kabiri became gabiri and then remained as an appellation of the Zoroastrians in Persia. (See Hyde's "De Religio Persarum, " cap. 29.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 364 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
regarded) was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the rulers of mankind. When incarnated as Kings of the "divine Dynasties," they gave the first impulse to civilizations, and directed the mind with which they had endued men to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as
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such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To them -- the Kabiri or Titans -- is ascribed the invention of letters (the Devanagari, or the alphabet and language of the gods), of laws and legislature; of architecture, as of the various modes of magic, so-called; and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those demi-gods and heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers -- too zealous for plain truth --would force posterity to see only pagan copies of one and sole prototype, named Noah -- are all generic names.
It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed, by producing corn or wheat, the great boon of agriculture. What Isis-Osiris, the once living Kabiria, has done in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class.
That the Serpents were ever the emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by the caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the god of wisdom, with Hermes, and so on. The two serpents, entwined around the rod, are phallic symbols of Jupiter and other gods who transformed themselves into snakes for purposes of seducing goddesses -- but only in the unclean fancies of profane symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the adept, and of his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury in his psychopompic character, conducting and guiding with the caduceus the souls of the dead to Hades and even raising the dead to life with it, is simply a very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret Wisdom: the black and the white magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding the Soul after death, and its power to call to life that which is dead -- a very deep metaphor if one thinks over its meaning. Every people of antiquity reverenced this symbol, with the exception of Christians, who chose to forget the brazen Serpent of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and prudence of the Serpent by Jesus himself, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves." The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate successors of the "Serpents" or Initiates, who ruled the early races of the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor's throne is the "Dragon's Seat," and his dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 365 THE VARIOUS NOAHS.
Dragon. The aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the "Dragon" is a human, albeit divine, Being. Speaking of the "Yellow Dragon," the chief of the others, the Twan-ying-
t'u, says: "His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable . . . he does not go in company and does not live in herds (he is an ascetic). He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree (Karma); at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains (invisible).". . . And Kon-fu-tyu is made to say by Lu-lan, "The Dragon feeds in the pure water of Wisdom and sports in the clear waters of Life."
-------
OUR DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan isle are not the only record that is left of the deluge. China has also her
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tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma-li-ga-si-ma, and which Kaempfer and Faber spell "Maurigosima," for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kaempfer, in his "Japan " (Appendix, p. 13), gives the tradition: The island, owing to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiru-un, the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the divine dynasties of Kings as much as those of any other nations.
At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even multigeneric evolution -- spiritual, psychic, intellectual and physical -- of human beings, just as given in the present work. A few of these claims have now to be considered.
Our races -- they all show -- have sprung from divine races, by whatever name they are called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese Chim-nang and Tchan-gy -- their "divine man" and demi-gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul-lil -- the creative god and the "Gods of the ghost-world"; with the Egyptian Isis-Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew Elohim, or again with Manco Capac and his Peruvian progeny -- the story varies nowhere. Every nation has Amshaspends* (six exoterically), ten and seven Chaldean Anedots,
[[Footnote continued]]---------------------------------
* The Amshaspends are six -- if Ormazd, their chief and Logos, is excluded. But in the secret doctrine he is the seventh and highest, just as Phtah is the seventh Kabir among the Kabiri.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 366 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ten and seven Sephiroth, etc., etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyan-Chohans of the Esoteric doctrine, or the "Builders" of the Stanzas (Book I.). From Manu, Thot-Hermes, Oannes-
Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato and Panadores, all tell us of seven divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven primitive and dual gods who descend from their celestial abode* and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as "gods" and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as "divine-Kings and Rulers." But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Bosuage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that science flourished in their country only since Isis-Osiris, whom they continue to adore as gods, "though they had become Princes in human form." And he adds of Osiris-Isis (the divine androgyne: -- "It is said that this Prince (Isis-Osiris) built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry."
When Abul-Feda says in his "Historia Anteislamitica " (Fleisher, p. 16) that the Sabean language was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch) -- he means by "Sabean language" astronomy. In the "Melelwa Nohil" (MS. 47 in Nic. Cat.) Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodaemon. And in another account (See Col. Vyse's 2nd Vol. of the "Pyramids of Ghizeh," p. 364, MS. 785, Uri's Cat.) Agathodaemon is mentioned as a "King of Egypt. " Celepas Geraldinus gives curious traditions about Henoch. He calls
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him the "divine giant." In the "Book of the various names of the Nile," the same author (the historian Ahmed-Ben-Yusouf Eltiphas) tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth (become later the Egyptian Typhon, Set), had been one of the seven angels (or Patriarchs in the Bible): then he became a mortal and Adam's son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris) "the author of thirty books, was Sabaean by origin" (i.e., belonging to the Saba, "a Host"); "having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed 140 cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King." Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes -- or rather one, who appeared -- as some Manus and Rishis did -- in several different characters. In the Burham-i-Kati he is mentioned as "Hormig," a name of the planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednes-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In the Purana it is identified with Vishnu's or Brahma's Sveta Dwipa of Mount Meru.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 367 HERMES IN ASTRONOMY AND ELSEWHERE.
day was sacred both to Hermes and Thot. The Hermes of Oriental tradition, worshipped at Phineata and said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, civilized it under the name of Thoth. But under whichever of these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the sciences from latent to active potency, i.e., with having been the first to teach magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna Graecia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.
Not only Herodotus -- the "father of History" -- tells us of the marvellous dynasties of gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the dynasties of demi-gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole series of classics support him; Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., etc., repeat the same, and never vary the order given.
"It is, indeed," as Creuzer shows: --
"From the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres." "In the system of the ancient priests (Hierophants and Adepts) all things without exception, gods, the genii, manes (souls), the whole world, are conjointly developed in Space and duration. The pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of Spirits. . . . "*
There were more efforts made by the modern historians (French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly) to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never be more unwilling than was Eratosthenes 260 years B.C. to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to recognise its truth. For this, the great astronomer is treated with great contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho became with them "a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying priests of Heliopolis" (Freret). "All those historians and priests," justly remarks the demonologist, de Mirville, "so veracious when repeating stories of human kings and men, suddenly become extremely suspicious no sooner do
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they go back to their gods." . . . But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (Manetho's above all), and that of Ptolemy. In the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of all, in the words of the Egyptologist, de Rouge: --
". . . Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the whole truth. . . . It was the remains of a list of dynasties embracing the furthest mythoic times, or the REIGN OF THE GODS AND HEROES. . . . At the very outset of this curious
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Ch. iv. of "Egypt, " p. 441.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 368 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
papyrus we have to arrive at the conviction that so far back already as the period of Ramses, those mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of Egypt, the gods Seb, Osiris, Horus, Thoth-Hermes, and the goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign of each of these." (Ann. de Philologie Chretienne, Vol. XXXII., p. 442).
The synchronistic tables of Manetho, besides the fact that they were disfigured by Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology of the divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and was kept secret from the profane multitudes.
Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before Europe did; nevertheless it appeared later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. That the whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea, was known firstly through Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and all the Greeks; and, secondly, through geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island; and the Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their gods from the North-east.
When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, which records the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between the Lion and Libra, has found its OEdipus, who understood the riddle of these signs, and justified the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus that: -- (a) The poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided; and (b) That even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic, as the Initiates taught.
Bailly had not sufficient words at his command to express his surprise at the sameness of all such traditions about the divine races. "What are finally," he exclaims, "all those reigns of Indian Devas and Persian Peris? . . . . Or, those reigns and dynasties of the Chinese legends; those Tien-hoang or the
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Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti-hoang, the Kings on Earth, and the Gin-hoang the King's men, a distinction which is in perfect accord with that other one made by the Greeks and the Egyptians, in enumerating their dynasties of Gods, of demi-gods, and of mortals."*
"Now," says Panadoras, "it is before that time (Menes), that the reign of the seven gods who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those benefactors of humanity descended on Earth and taught
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Histoire de l'Astronomie Ancienne.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 369 WHAT THE PRIESTS TOLD HERODOTUS.
men to calculate the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic."
Nearly five hundred years before the actual era, Herodotus was shown by the priests of Egypt the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs-piromis (the archi-prophets or Maha-Chohans of the temples), born one from the other (without the intervention of woman) who had reigned before Menes, their first human King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and forty-
five in number, each of which had his name, his history and his annals. And they assured Herodotus* (unless the most truthful of historians, the "Father of History," is now accused of fibbing, just in this instance) that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the three dynasties that preceded the human -- namely, the DYNASTIES OF THE GODS, that of demi-gods, and of the Heroes, or giants. These "three dynasties" are the three Races.**
Translated into the language of the Esoteric doctrine, these three dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of Kimpurushas, and of Danavas and Daityas -- otherwise gods, celestial spirits, and giants or Titans. "Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-Varsha!" exclaim the incarnated gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bharata is India, but in this case it symbolized the chosen land in those days, and was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu-
dwipa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence ; the land of initiation and of divine knowledge.
Can one fail to recognise in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, being almost unacquainted with the Aryan Hindu philosophies, little known in his day, he wrote: --
"We modern Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the Spirits of the Sun, Moon, etc. But we repeat again, the natural good sense and the upright
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See also Memoires a l'Academie, etc., of de Mirville, Vol. III., for a mass of evidence.
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** In Vishnu-Purana, Book II., chap. 3, 4, et seq., may be found many corroborations of the same, if one reads carefully. The reigns of gods, lower gods, and men are all enumerated in the descriptions of the seven Islands, seven seas, seven mountains, etc., etc., ruled by Kings. Each king is said invariably to have seven sons, an allusion to the seven sub-races. One instance will do. The King of Kusa dwipa had seven sons (follow names) . . . "after whom the seven portions (Varsha) of the island were called. There reside mankind along with Daityas and Danavas, as well as with spirits of Heaven (Gandharvas, Yakshas, Kimpurushas, etc.) and gods." (Chapter iv.) There is but one exception in the case of King Priyavrata, the son of the first Manu, Swayambhuva -- who had ten sons. But of these, three -- Medha, Agnibahu, and Putra -- became ascetics, and refused their portions. Thus Priyavrata divided the earth again into seven continents.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 370 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
judgment of the ancient peoples, quite foreign to our entirely material ideas upon celestial mechanics and physical sciences . . . could not see in the stars and planets only that which we see: namely, simple masses of light, or opaque bodies moving in circuits in sidereal space, merely according to the laws of attraction or repulsion; but they saw in them living bodies, animated by spirits as they saw the same in every kingdom of nature. . . . This doctrine of spirits, so consistent and conformable to nature, from which it was derived, formed a grand and unique conception, wherein the physical, the moral, and the political aspects were all blended together . . . " ("Egypte, " pp. 450 to 455.)
It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct conclusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the universe -- of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without such a psychological link, and the feeling of its presence, no science can ever progress, and the realm of knowledge must be limited to the analysis of physical matter only.
Occultists believe in "spirits," because they feel (and some see) themselves surrounded on every side by them.* Materialists do not. They live on this earth, just as, in the world of insects and even of fishes, some creatures live surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without seeing, or so much as sensing them.**
Plato is the first sage among the classics who speaks at length of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* As a general rule, now that the very nature of the inner man has become as blind as his physical nature, man is situated on this globe as the Amphioxus is in the Ocean. Surrounded by shoals and millions of various other fishes and creatures that see it, the Amphioxus species --having neither brain nor any of the senses possessed by the other classes -- sees them not. Who knows whether, on the Darwinian theory, these "Branchiostoma" are not the direct ancestors of our Materialists.
** The Occultists have been accused of worshipping gods or devils. We deny this. Among the
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numberless hosts of spirits -- men that were, and those who will be men -- there are those immeasurably superior to the human race, higher and holier than the highest Saint on Earth, and wiser than any mortal without exception. And there are those again who are no better than we are, as some are far worse and inferior to the lowest savage. It is the latter classes that command the readiest communication with our earth, who perceive and sense us, as the clairvoyants perceive and sense them. The close proximity of our respective abodes and planes of perception are in favour of such inter-
communication unfortunately, as they are ever ready to interfere with our affairs for weal or woe. If we are asked how it is that none but sensitive hysterical natures, neuro- and psycho-pathic persons see and occasionally talk with "Spirits," we answer the question by several other queries. We ask: "Do you know the nature of hallucination, and can you define its psychic process? How can you tell that all such visions are due merely to physical hallucinations? What makes you feel so sure that mental and nervous diseases, while drawing a veil over our normal senses (so-called) do not reveal at the same time vistas unknown to the healthy man, by throwing open doors usually closed against your scientific perceptions (?): or that a psycho-spiritual faculty does not forthwith replace the loss, or the temporary atrophy, of a purely physical sense? It is disease, or the exuberance of nervous fluid which produces mediumship and visions --hallucinations, as you call them. But what does Science know even of mediumship?" Truly were the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 371 A UNIVERSAL CORROBORATION.
divine Dynasties, and locates them on a vast continent which he calls Atlantis. Bailly was not the first nor last to believe the same, and he had been preceded and anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher. This learned Jesuit writes in "OEdipus AEgyptiacus" (Vol. I., p. 70): --
"I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this (dynasties and the Atlantis) as pure fables (meras nugas) to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all those legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth. . . . ."
As de Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his Meropis, made the priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as the priests of Sais did when they revealed to Solon the history and fate of Atlantis. According to Theopompus, it was a unique continent of an indefinite size, and containing two countries inhabited by two races -- a fighting, warrior race, and a pious, meditative race,* which Theopompus symbolizes by two cities.** The pious "city" was continually visited by the gods; the belligerent "city" was inhabited by various beings invulnerable to iron, liable to be mortally wounded only by stone and wood."*** De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of Theopompus ("Peuple Primitif, " vol. iii. 157) and even sees a fraud (supercherie) in the assertion of the Saitic priests. This was denounced by the "Demonologists" as illogical. In the words of De Mirville: -- "A supercherie which was based on a belief, the product of faith of the whole antiquity; a supposition which yet gave its name to a whole mountain chain (the Atlas); which specified with the greatest precision a topographical region (by placing some of its lands at a small distance from Cadiz and the strait of Calpetus), which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, the great trans-oceanic land situated beyond that Atlantis and which "is reached" it said -- "by the islands not of the blessed, but of the good spirits [[eudaimonia]] (our 'Iles Fortunees') -- such a supposition can never be an universal chimera." (A word on "Atlantis, " p. 29.)
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It is certain that, whether "chimera" or reality, the priests of the whole world had it from one and the same source: the universal tradition
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] modern Charcots to pay attention to the delirium of their patients from a more psychic standpoint, Science, and physiology especially, might be more benefited than they are now, and truth have a wider field of fact in its knowledge.
* These were the early Aryans and the bulk of the Fourth Root Races -- the former pious and meditative (yoga -contemplation), the latter -- a fighting race of sorcerers, who were rapidly degenerating owing to their uncontrolled passions.
** The Northern and Southern Divisions of Lemuria-Atlantis. The Hyperborean and the Equatorial lands of the two continents. (See Sections about Lemuria and Atlantis in History.)
*** This is Occult and refers to the property of iron which, attracted by magnetic elements, is repelled by others, which are made, by an occult process, as impervious to it as water to a blow.
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about the third great continent which perished some 850,000 years ago.* A continent inhabited by two distinct races; distinct physically and especially morally; both deeply versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets of nature; mutually antagonistic in their struggle, during the course and progress of their double evolution. Whence even the Chinese teachings upon the subject, if it is but a fiction? Have they not recorded the existence once upon a time of a holy island beyond the sun (Tcheou), and beyond which were situated the lands of the immortal men? (See de Rougemont, ibid.) Do they not still believe that the remnants of those immortal men -- who survived when the holy island had become black with sin and perished -- have found refuge in the great desert of Gobi, where they still reside invisible to all, and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits?
"If one has to lend ear to traditions," writes the very unbelieving Boulanger, ("Regne des Dieux, " Introduction) . . . "the latter place before the reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and demi-gods; and still earlier and beyond they place the marvellous reign of the gods and all the fables of the golden age. . . . One feels surprised that annals so interesting should have been rejected by almost all our historians. And yet the ideas communicated by them were once universally admitted and revered by all the peoples; not a few revere them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such considerations seem to necessitate a less hurried judgment. . . . The ancients, from whom we hold these traditions, which we accept no longer because we do not understand them now, must have had motives for believing in them furnished by their greater proximity to the first ages, and which the distance that separates us from them refuses to us . . . . Plato in his fourth book of Laws, says that, long before the construction of the first cities, Saturn had established on earth a certain form of government under which man was very happy. As it is the golden age he refers to, or to that reign of gods so celebrated in
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ancient fables . . . . let us see the ideas he had of that happy age, and what was the occasion he had to introduce this fable into a treatise on politics. According to Plato, in order to obtain clear and precise ideas on royalty, its origin and power, one has to turn back to the first principles of history and tradition. Great changes, he says, have occurred in days of old, in heaven and on earth, and the present state of things is one of the results (Karma). Our traditions tell us of many marvels, of changes that have taken place in the course of the Sun, of Saturn's reign, and of a thousand other matters that remained scattered about in human memory; but one never hears anything of the EVIL which has
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The first continent, or island, if so preferred, "the cap of the North Pole," has never perished; nor will it to the end of the Seven Races.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 373 WHEAT BROUGHT DOWN BY THE GODS.
produced those revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them. Yet . . . . that Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able to treat of royalty and the origin of power. . . ."
That evil, Plato seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the natures of the rulers and the ruled, for he says that long before man built his cities, in the golden age, there was naught but happiness on earth, for there were no needs. Why? Because Saturn, knowing that man could not rule man, without injustice filling forthwith the universe through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal to obtain power over his fellow creatures. To do this the god used the same means we use ourselves with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or a ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd, i.e., a being of a species quite different from their own and of a superior nature. It is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and placed to rule over it no mortal King or prince but -- "Spirits and genii [[daimones]] of a divine nature more excellent than that of man."
It was god, the Logos (the synthesis of the Host) who thus presiding over the genii, became the first shepherd and leader of men.* When the world had ceased to be so governed and the gods retired, "ferocious beasts devoured a portion of mankind." "Left to their own resources and industry, inventors then appeared among them successively and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them . . . ."("De Legibus " 1, iv.; in Crit. and in Politic).
And mankind was right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of nature, the first and chief property of matter that was revealed to man.
"Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the 'Lords of Wisdom' for the benefit of those they ruled -- from other lokas (spheres). . . " say the Commentaries. Now: "The earliest inventions (?) of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made. . . The first use of fire, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses (?) -- these are all discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare. They are all unknown to history -- all lost in the light of an EFFULGENT DAWN." ("Unity
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of Nature," Argyll.)
This will be doubted and denied in our proud generation. But if it is asserted that there are no grains and fruits unknown to earth, then we may remind the reader that wheat has never been found in the wild state: it is not a product of the earth. All the other cereals have been traced to their primogenital forms in various species of wild grasses, but wheat has
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The Secret Doctrine explains and expounds that which Plato says, for it teaches that those "inventors" were gods and demi-gods (Devas and Rishis) who had become -- some deliberately, some forced to by Karma -- incarnated in man.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 374 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
hitherto defied the efforts of botanists to trace it to its origin. And let us bear in mind, in this connection, how sacred was that cereal with the Egyptian priests; wheat being placed even with their mummies, and found thousands of years later in their coffins. Remember: -- "The servants of Horus glean the wheat in the field of Aanroo. . . . wheat seven cubits high." ("Book of the Dead, " chap. xcix., 33; and clvi., 4.)* The reader is referred to Stanza VII., Verse 3, Book I., wherein this verse is explained in another of its meanings, and also to the "Book of the Dead, " chap. cix., v. 4 and 5.
"I am the Queen of these regions," says the Egyptian Isis; "I was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. . . . I am she who rises in the constellation of the dog . . . (Dog-star) . . . . Rejoice, O Egypt! thou who wert my nurse." (Book I., chap. XIV.**
Sirius was called the dog-star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha, called the great instructor of mankind, before other Buddhas.
The book of the Chinese Y-King, attributes the discovery of agriculture to "the instruction given to men by celestial genii."
"Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. . . . They are all blind*** since they remain ignorant how much the world is full of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places" (Zohar, Part I., col. 177.)
The "Sons of God" have existed and do exist. From the Hindu Brahmaputras and Manasaputras (Sons of Brahma and Mind-born sons) down to the B'ne-aleim of the Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This is a direct reference to the esoteric division of man's principles symbolised by the divine wheat. The legend which inscribes the third Registrar of the papyrus (Chap. cx. of the "Book of the Dead ")
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states: "This is the region of the Manes (disembodied men) seven cubits high -- to wit: those just translated and supposed to be still sevenfold with all their principles, even the body represented astrally in the Kama-loka or Hades, before their separation . . . . . " and, there is wheat three cubits high for mummies in a state of perfection" (i.e., those already separated, whose three higher principles are in Devachan "who are permitted to glean it." This region (Devachan) is called "the land of the re-
birth of gods," and shown to be inhabited by Scheo, Tefnant, and Seb. The "region for the manes seven cubits high," (for the yet imperfect mummies), and the region for those "in a state of perfection" who "glean wheat three cubits high," is as clear as possible. The Egyptians had the same esoteric philosophy which is now taught by the cis-Himalayan adepts, who, when buried, have corn and wheat placed over them.
** There are Egyptologists who have tried to identify Osiris with Menes, which is quite erroneous. Bunsen assigns to Menes an antiquity of 5867 years B.C., and is denounced for it by Christians. But "Isis-Osiris" reigned in Egypt before the Dendera Zodiac was painted on the ceiling of that temple, and that is over 75,000 years ago!
*** In the text, "corked up" or "screwed up."
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universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value is independent criticism so called, or "internal evidence" (based usually on the respective hobbies of the critics), in the face of the universal testimony, which never varied throughout the historical cycles? Read esoterically the sixth chapter of Genesis, which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, only changing slightly its form, and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the Zohar. "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that when 'the Sons of God' (b'ne-aleim) "came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown" (or giants).*
What does this sentence "and also after that" signify unless it means when explained: "There were giants in the earth BEFORE, i.e., before the sinless sons of the Third Race; and also after that when other sons of God, lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on earth (as Daksha did, when he saw that his Manasaputras would not people the earth)"? And then comes a long break in this chapter vi. of Genesis, between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the "mighty men" . . . . men of renown, among whom is placed Nimrod the "mighty hunter before the Lord," that "god saw that the wickedness of man was great," nor in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.
And if we are taken to task by theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse was ever a dilemma, not alone for the men of science and Biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Peronne puts it: -- "Either they (the B'ne-aleim) were good angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad
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(angels) and in this case could not be called b'ne-aleim, the "sons of God." (Praelectiones theol. ch. ii.) This Biblical riddle -- "the real sense of which no author has ever understood," as candidly confessed by Fourmont** -- can only be explained by the Occult doctrine, through the Zohar to the Western, and the Book of Dzyan to the Eastern. What the former says we have seen; what the Zohar tells us is this: B'ne-aleim was a name common to the Malachim (the good Messengers) and to the Ischin ("the lower angels") (Rabbi Parcha).
We may add for the benefit of the demonologists that their Satan,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Genesis vi., v. 4.
** Reflections critiques sur l'origine des anciens peuples.
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"the adversary," is included in Job among the sons of God or b'ne-aleim who visit their father." (Chapter i.) But of this later on.
Now the Zohar says that the Ischin, the beautiful B'ne-aleim, were not guilty, but mixed themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so. (Book of Ruth and Schadash ; fol. 63, col. 3; Amsterdam edition). Elsewhere the same volume shows these b'ne-aleim belonging to the tenth sub-
division of the "Thrones" (Zohar, part iii., col. 113. But see also 1st vol. 184). It also explains that the Ischin, "men-spirits," viri spirituales, now that men can see them no longer, help magicians to produce, through their science, homunculi which are not small men but "men smaller (in the sense of inferiority) than men." Both show themselves under the form that the Ischin had then, i.e., gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.
But Azazel, whom the Church dogma will associate with Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a mystery, as explained elsewhere, and it is so expressed in Maimonides, "In More Nevochim " (chapter xxvi., p. 8). "There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel." And so there is, as Lanci, a librarian to the Vatican and one who ought to know, says -- we have quoted him before -- that "this venerable divine name (nome divino e venerabile) has become through the pen of Biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a mountain, and a he-goat" (Sagra Scrittura). Therefore it seems foolish to derive the name as Spencer does, from Ajal (separated) and El (god), hence "one separated from God," the DEVIL. In the Zohar, Azazel is rather the Sacrificial victim than the "formal adversary of Jehovah," as Spencer would have it (II., pp. 14, 29).
The amount of malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on that "Host" by various fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his "host" are simply the Hebrew "Prometheus," and ought to be viewed from the same standpoint. The Zohar shows the Ischin chained on the mountain in the desert, allegorically; thus simply alluding to those "spirits" as being chained to the earth during the cycle of incarnation. Azazel (or Azaziel) is one of the chiefs of the "transgressing" angels in Enoch, who
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descending upon Ardis, the top of Mount Armon, bound themselves by swearing loyalty to each other. It is said that Azaziel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, to fabricate mirrors (?) to make one see what is behind him (viz., "magic mirrors"). Amazarak taught all the sorcerers and dividers of roots; Amers taught the solution of magic; Barkayal, astrology; Akibeel, the meaning of portents and signs; Tamial, astronomy; and Asaradel taught the motion of the moon. "These seven were the first instructors of the Fourth man" (i.e., of the Fourth Race). But why should allegory be always understood as meaning all that its dead-letter expresses?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 377 THE FALLACIES OF THE TWO CHURCHES.
It is the symbolical representation of the great struggle between divine wisdom, nous, and its earthly reflection, Psuche, or between Spirit and Soul, in Heaven and on Earth. In Heaven --because the divine MONAD had voluntarily exiled itself therefrom, to descend, for incarnating purposes, to a lower plane and thus transform the animal of clay into an immortal god. For, as Eliphas Levi tells us, "the angels aspire to become men; for the perfect man, the man-god, is above even angels." On Earth -- because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was strangled in the coils of matter.
Strange to say, the Occult teaching reverses the characters; it is the anthropomorphous archangel with the Christians, and the man-like God with the Hindus, which represent matter in this case; and the Dragon, or Serpent, Spirit. Occult symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery; theological symbolics conceal it still more. For the former explains many a saying in the Bible and even in the New Testament which have hitherto remained incomprehensible; while the latter, owing to its dogma of Satan and his rebellion, has belittled the character and nature of its would-be infinite, absolutely perfect god, and created the greatest evil and curse on earth -- belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is opened with the key to its metaphysical symbolism now restored; while that of theological interpretation shows the gods and the archangels standing as symbols for the dead letter or dogmatic religions, and as arrayed against the pure truths of Spirit, naked and unadorned with fancy.
Many were the hints thrown out in this direction in "Isis Unveiled," and a still greater number of references to this mystery may be found scattered throughout these volumes. To make the point clear once for all: that which the clergy of every dogmatic religion -- pre-eminently the Christian -- points out as Satan, the enemy of God, is in reality, the highest divine Spirit -- (occult Wisdom on Earth) -- in its naturally antagonistic character to every worldly, evanescent illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions included. Thus, the Latin Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who do not choose to be its slaves; the Church which calls itself the bride of Christ, and the trustee at the same time of Peter, to whom the rebuke of the Master "get thee behind me Satan" was justly addressed; and again the Protestant Church which, while calling itself Christian, paradoxically replaces the New Dispensation by the old "Law of Moses" which Christ openly repudiated: both these Churches are fighting against divine Truth, when repudiating and slandering the Dragon of esoteric (because divine) Wisdom. Whenever anathematizing the Gnostic Solar Chnouphis -- the Agathodaemon -- Christos, or the theosophical Serpent of Eternity, or even the Serpent of Genesis -- they
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are moved by the same Spirit of dark fanaticism that moved the Pharisees to curse Jesus by saying to him "Say we not well thou hast a devil?"
Read the account about Indra (Vayu) in the Rig-Veda, the occult volume par excellence of Aryanism, and then compare it with the same in the Puranas -- the exoteric version thereof, and the purposely garbled account of the true Wisdom religion. In the Rig Veda Indra is the highest and greatest of the Gods, and his Soma-drinking is allegorical of his highly spiritual nature. In the Puranas Indra becomes a profligate, and a regular drunkard on the Soma juice, in the terrestrial way. He is the conqueror of all the "enemies of the gods" -- the Daityas, Nagas (Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent-gods, and of Vritri, the Cosmic Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindu Pantheon -- the chief of the militant Host. Turning to the Bible, we find Satan, one of the "Sons of God" (Job. i. 6), becoming in exoteric interpretation the Devil, and the Dragon in its infernal, evil sense. But in the Kabala ("Book of Numbers ") Samael, who is Satan, is shown to be identical with St. Michael, the slayer of the Dragon. How is this? For it is said that Tselem (the image) reflects alike Michael and Samael who are one. Both proceed, it is taught, from Ruach (Spirit), Neschamah (Soul) and Nephesch (life). In the "Chaldean Book of Numbers" Samael is the concealed (occult) Wisdom, and Michael the higher terrestrial Wisdom, both emanating from the same source but diverging after their issue from the mundane soul, which on Earth is Mahat (intellectual understanding, or Manas (the seat of Intellect). They diverge, because one (Michael) is influenced by Neschamah, while the other (Samael) remains uninfluenced. This tenet was perverted by the dogmatic spirit of the Church; which, loathing independent Spirit, uninfluenced by the external form (hence by dogma), forthwith made of Samael-
Satan (the most wise and spiritual spirit of all) -- the adversary of its anthropomorphic God and sensual physical man, the DEVIL!
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Contents
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
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THE ORIGIN OF THE SATANIC MYTH.
Let us then fathom this creation of the Patristic fancy still deeper, and find its prototype with the Pagans. The origin of the new Satanic myth is easy to trace. The tradition of the Dragon and the Sun is echoed in every part of the world, both in its civilized and semi-savage regions. It took rise in the whisperings about secret initiations among the profane, and was established universally through the once universal heliolatrous religion. There was a time when the four parts of the world were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the Dragon;
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 379 THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON.
but the cult is now preserved mostly in China and the Buddhist countries, "Bel and the Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the priest of the Ophite religion as uniformly assuming the name of his God" ("Archaeology, " Vol. xxv., p. 220, London). In the religions of the past, it is in Egypt we have to seek for its Western origin. The Ophites adopted their rites from Hermes Trismegistus, and heliolatrous worship crossed over with its Sun-gods into the land of the Pharaohs from India. In the gods of Stonehenge we recognise the divinities of Delphi and Babylon, and in those of the latter the devas of the Vedic nations. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Krishna and Kaliya, Osiris and Typhon are all one under many names -- the latest of which are Michael and the Red Dragon, and St. George and his Dragon. As Michael is "one as God," or his "Double," for terrestrial purposes, and is one of the Elohim, the fighting angel, he is thus simply a permutation of Jehovah. Whatever the Cosmic or astronomical event that first gave rise to the allegory of the "War of Heaven," its earthly origin has to be sought in the temples of Initiation and archaic crypts. The following are the proofs: --
We find (a) the priests assuming the name of the gods they served; (b) the "Dragons" held throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality and Wisdom, of secret Knowledge and of Eternity; and (c) the hierophants of Egypt, of Babylon, and India, styling themselves generally the "Sons of the Dragon" and "Serpents"; thus the teachings of the Secret Doctrine are thereby corroborated.
There were numerous catacombs in Egypt and Chaldea, some of them of a very vast extent. The most renowned of them were the subterranean crypts of Thebes and Memphis. The former, beginning on the western side of the Nile, extended towards the Lybian desert, and were known as the Serpent's catacombs, or passages. It was there that were performed the sacred mysteries of the kuklos anagkes, the "Unavoidable Cycle," more generally known as "the circle of necessity"; the inexorable doom
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imposed upon every soul after the bodily death, and when it has been judged in the Amenthian region.
In de Bourbourg's book, Votan, the Mexican demi-god, in narrating his expedition, describes a subterranean passage which ran underground, and terminated at the root of the heavens, adding that this passage was a snake's hole, "un agujero de colubra"; and that he was admitted to it because he was himself "a son of the snakes," or a serpent. ("Die Phoinizier," 70.)
This is, indeed, very suggestive; for his description of the snake's hole is that of the ancient Egyptian crypt, as above mentioned. The hierophants, moreover, of Egypt, as of Babylon, generally styled them-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 380 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
selves the "Sons of the Serpent-god," or "Sons of the Dragon," during the mysteries.
"The Assyrian priest bore always the name of his god," says Movers. The Druids of the Celto-
Britannic regions also called themselves snakes. "I am a Serpent, I am a Druid," they exclaimed. The Egyptian Karnak is twin brother to the Carnac of Bretagne, the latter Carnac meaning the serpent's mount. The Dracontia once covered the surface of the globe, and these temples were sacred to the Dragon, only because it was the symbol of the sun, which, in its turn, was the symbol of the highest god -- the Phoenician Elon or Elion, whom Abraham recognised as El Elion.* Besides the surname of serpents, they were called the "builders," the "architects"; for the immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was such that even now the pulverised remains of them "frighten the mathematical calculations of our modern engineers," says Taliesin.**
De Bourbourg hints that the chiefs of the name of Votan, the Quetzo-Cohuatl, or Serpent deity of the Mexicans, are the descendants of Ham and Canaan. "I am Hivim," they say. "Being a Hivim, I am of the great race of the Dragon (snake). I am a snake myself, for I am a Hivim." ("Cartas," 51; "Isis Unveiled," Vol. I., 553, et seq.)
Furthermore, the "War in Heaven" is shown, in one of its significations, to have meant and referred to those terrible struggles in store for the candidate for adeptship, between himself and his (by magic) personified human passions, when the inner enlightened man had to either slay them or fail. In the former case he became the "Dragon-Slayer," as having happily overcome all the temptations; and a "Son of the Serpent" and a Serpent himself, having cast off his old skin and being born in a new body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality in Eternity. (See Part II. on the Satanic Myth.)
Seth, the reputed forefather of Israel, is only a Jewish travesty of Hermes, the God of Wisdom, called also Thoth, Tat, Seth, Set, and Satan. He is also Typhon -- the same as Apophis, the Dragon slain by Horus; for Typhon was also called Set. He is simply the dark side of Osiris, his brother, as Angra Mainyu is the black shadow of Ahura-mazda. Terrestrially, all these allegories were connected with the trials of adeptship and initiation. Astronomically, they referred to the Solar and Lunar eclipses, the mythical explanations of which we find to this day in India and Ceylon, where any one can study the allegorical narratives and traditions which have remained unchanged for many thousands of years.
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Sanchoniathon in "Eusebius," Pr. Ev. 36; Genesis xiv.
** "Society of Antiquaries of London," vol. xxv. p. 220.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 381 THE THEFT OF RAHU.
Rahu, mythologically is a Daitya -- a giant, a Demi-god, the lower part of whose body ended in a Dragon or Serpent's tail. During the churning of the Ocean, when the gods produced amrita -- the water of Immortality -- he stole some of it, and drinking, became immortal. The Sun and Moon, who had detected him in his theft, denounced him to Vishnu, who placed him in the stellar spheres, the upper portion of his body representing the Dragon's head and the lower (Ketu) the Dragon's tail; the two being the ascending and descending nodes. Since then, Rahu wreaks his vengeance on the Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them. But this fable had another mystic meaning, since Rahu, the Dragon's head, played a prominent part in the mysteries of the Sun's ( Vikarttana's) initiation, when the candidate and the Dragon had a supreme fight.
The caves of the Rishis, the abodes of Tiresias and the Greek seers, were modelled on those of the Nagas -- the Hindu King-Snakes, who dwelled in cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Sesha, the thousand-headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Python, the dragon serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of the myth. In India we find the fact mentioned in the earliest Puranas. The children of Surasa are the "mighty Dragons." The Vayu Purana replacing "Surasa" (of Vishnu Purana) by Danayas or Danavas -- the descendants of Danu by the sage Kasyapa -- and those Danavas being the giants (or Titans) who warred against the gods, they are thus shown identical with the "Dragons" and "Serpents" of Wisdom.
By simply comparing the Sun-gods of every country, one may find their allegories agreeing perfectly with one another; and the more the allegorical symbol is occult the more its corresponding symbol in other systems agrees with it. Thus, if from three systems widely differing from each other in appearance -- the old Aryan, the ancient Greek, and the modern Christian schemes -- we select several Sun-gods and dragons at random, these will be found copied from each other.
Let us take Agni the fire-god, Indra the firmament, and Karttikeya from the Hindus; the Greek Apollo; and Mikael, the "Angel of the Sun," the first of the AEons, called by the Gnostics "the saviour" -- and proceed in order.
(1) Agni -- the fire-god -- is called in the Rig-Veda Vaiswanara. Now Vaisvanara is a Danava -- a giant-
demon,* whose daughters Puloma and Kalaka are the mothers of numberless Danavas (30 millions), by
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* He is thus named and included in the list of the Danavas in Vayu Purana; the Commentator of
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Bhagavata Purana calls him a son of Danu, but the name means also "Spirit of Humanity."
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Kasyapa,* and live in Hiranyapura, "the golden city," floating in the air. Therefore, Indra is, in a fashion, the step-son of these two as a son of Kasyapa; and Kasyapa is, in this sense, identical with Agni, the fire-god, or Sun (Kasyapa-Aditya). To this same group belongs Skanda or Karttikeya (god of War, the six-faced planet Mars astronomically), a Kumara, or virgin-youth, born of Agni** for the purpose of destroying Taraka, the Danava Demon, the grandson of Kasyapa by Hiranyaksha, his son,*** whose (Taraka's) yogi austerities were so extraordinary that they became formidable to the gods, who feared such a rival in power.**** While Indra, the bright god of the Firmament, kills Vritra (or Ahi), the Serpent-Demon -- for which feat he is called Vritra-han, "the destroyer of Vritra"; he also leads the hosts of Devas (Angels or gods) against other gods who rebel against Brahma, for which he is entitled Jishnu, "leader of the celestial Host." Karttikeya is found bearing the same titles. For killing Taraka, the Danava, he is Taraka-Jit, "Vanquisher of Taraka,"***** "Kumara Guha, " "the mysterious Virgin-youth" "Siddha-Sena" -- "the leader of the Siddhas"; and Saktidhara -- "Spear-holder."
(2.) Now take Apollo, the Grecian sun-god, and by comparing the mythical accounts given of him, see whether he does not answer both
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Kasyapa is called the Son of Brahma, and is the "Self-Born" to whom a great part of the work of creation is attributed. He is one of the seven Rishis; exoterically, the son of Marichi, the son of Brahma; while Atharva-veda says, "The Self-born Kasyapa sprang from Time"; and esoterically -- Time and Space are forms of the One incognizable Deity. As an Aditya, Indra is son of Kasyapa, as also Vaivasvata Manu, our progenitor. In the instance given in the text, he is Kasyapa-Aditya, the Sun, and the Sun-god, from whom all the "Cosmic" Demons, Dragons (nagas), Serpent, or Snake-gods, and Danavas, the giants, are born. The meaning of the allegories given above is purely astronomical and cosmical, but will serve to prove the identity of all.
** All such stories differ in the exoteric texts. In the Mahabharata, Karttikeya, "the six-faced Mars," is the son of Rudra or Siva, Self-born without a mother from the seed of Siva cast into the fire. But Karttikeya is generally called Agnibhu, "fire born."
*** Hiranyaksha is the ruler or king of the fifth region of Patala, a Snake-god.
**** The Elohim also feared the knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam, and therefore are shown as expelling him from Eden or killing him spiritually.
***** The story told is, that Taraka (called also Kalabhana), owing to his extraordinary Yoga-powers, had obtained all the divine knowledge of yoga-vidya and occult powers of the gods, who conspired against him. Here we see the "obedient" Host of Archangels or minor gods conspiring against the (future) Fallen angels, whom Enoch accuses of the great crime of disclosing to the world all "the
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secret things done in heaven." It is Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Surgal and Uriel who denounced to the Lord God those of their Brethren who were said to have pried into the divine mysteries and taught them to men: by this means they themselves escaped a like punishment. Michael was commissioned to fight the Dragon, and so was Karttikeya, and under the same circumstances. Both are "leaders of the Celestial Host," both Virgins, both "leaders of Saints," "Spear-holders" (Saktidhara), etc., etc. Karttikeya is the original of Michael and St. George, as surely as Indra is the prototype of Karttikeya.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 383 THE GODS, THE FACETS OF ONE GEM.
to Indra, Karttikeya, and even Kasyapa-Aditya, and at the same time to Michael (as the Angelic form of Jehovah) the "angel of the Sun," who is "like," and "one with, God." Later ingenious interpretations for monotheistic purposes, elevated though they be into not-to-be questioned Church dogmas, prove nothing, except the abuse of human authority and power, perhaps.
Apollo is Helios (the Sun), Phoibus-Apollo ("the light of life and of the World"*) who arises out of the golden-winged cup (the sun); hence he is the sun-god par excellence. At the moment of his birth he asks for his bow to kill Python, the Demon Dragon, who attacked his mother before his birth,** and whom he is divinely commissioned to destroy -- like Karttikeya, who is born for the purpose of killing Taraka, the too holy and wise demon. Apollo is born on a sidereal island called Asteria -- "the golden star island," the "earth which floats in the air," which is the Hindu golden Hiranyapura ; "he is called the pure, [[agnos]], Agnus Dei (the Indian Agni , as Dr. Kenealy thinks), and in the primal myth he is exempt "from all sensual love" ("Book of God," p. 88). He is, therefore, a Kumara, like Karttikeya, and as Indra was in his earlier life and biographies. Python, moreover, the "red Dragon," connects Apollo with Michael, who fights the Apocalyptic Dragon, who wants to attack the woman in child-birth (See Revelation xii.), as Python attacks Apollo's mother. Can any one fail to see the identity? Had the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who prides himself on his Greek scholarship and understanding of the spirit of Homer's allegories, ever had a real inkling of the esoteric meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey, he would have understood St. John's "Revelation, " and even the Pentateuch, better than he does. For the way to the Bible lies through Hermes, Bel, and Homer, as the way to these is through the Hindu and Chaldean religious symbols.
The repetition of this archaic tradition is found in ch. xii. of St. John's Revelations, and comes from the Babylonian legends without the smallest doubt, though the Babylonian story had its origin in the allegories of the Aryans. The fragment read by the late George Smith (See "The Chaldean account of Genesis," p. 304) is sufficient to disclose the source of the xii. chapter of the Apocalypse. Here it is as given by the eminent Assyriologist:
"Our . . . fragment refers to the creation of mankind, called Adam; as (the man) in the Bible, he is made perfect . . . but afterwards joins
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The "life and the light" of the material physical world, the delight of the senses -- not of the soul. Apollo is pre-eminently the human god, the god of emotional, pomp-loving and theatrical Church
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ritualism, with lights and music.
** See chap. xii. in Revelation where we find Apollo's mother persecuted by that Python, the Red Dragon, who is also Porphyrion, the scarlet or red Titan.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 384 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with the dragon of the Deep, the animal of Tiamat, the Spirit of Chaos, and offends against his god, who curses him, and calls down on his head all the evils and troubles of Humanity."*
"This is followed by a war between the dragon and the powers of evil, or chaos on one side and the gods on the other."
"The gods have weapons forged for them,** and Merodach (the archangel Michael in Revelation) undertakes to lead the heavenly host against the dragons. The war, which is described with spirit, ends, of course, in the triumph of the principles of Good. . . . ."***
This war of gods with the powers of the Deep, refers also, in its last and terrestrial application, to the struggle between the Aryan adepts of the nascent Fifth Race and the Sorcerers of Atlantis, the Demons of the Deep, the Islanders surrounded with water who disappeared in the Deluge. (See the last pages of Vol. I., "Isis Unveiled, " Atlantis.)
The symbols of the dragons and "War in Heaven" have, as already stated, more than one significance; religious, astronomical and geological events being included in the one common allegory. But it had also a Cosmological meaning. In India the Dragon story is repeated in one of its forms in the battles of Indra with Vritra. In the Vedas this Ahi-Vritra is referred to as the Demon of Drought, the terrible hot Wind. Indra is shown to be constantly at war with him; and with the help of his thunder and lightning the god compels Ahi-Vritra to pour down in rain on Earth, and then slays him. Hence, Indra is called the Vritra-Han or "the slayer of Vritra," as Michael is called the Conqueror and "Slayer of the Dragon." Both these "Enemies" are then the "Old Dragon" precipitated into the depths of the Earth, in this one sense.
The Zend-Avestic Amshaspends are a Host with a leader like St. Michael over them, and seem identical with the legions of Heaven, when one reads the Vendidad. Thus in Fargard XIX., ii. 13 (42), Zarathustra is told by Ahura Mazda to "invoke the Amesha Spenta who rule over the seven Karshvares **** of the Earth"; which Karshvares in their seven
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* No "god" who curses his (supposed) own work, because he has made it imperfect, can be the one infinite absolute wisdom, whether called Bel or Jehovah.
** In the Indian allegory of Tarakamaya, the war between the gods and the Asuras headed by Soma
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(the moon, the King of Plants), it is Viswa-Karma, the artificer of the gods, who forges, like Vulcan (Tubal-Kain), their weapons for them.
*** We have said elsewhere that the "woman with child" of Revelation (xii.) was Aime, the great mother, or Binah, the third Sephiroth, "whose name is Jehovah"; and the "Dragon," who seeks to devour her coming child (the Universe), is the Dragon of absolute Wisdom -- that Wisdom which, recognising the non-separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the Absolute ALL, sees in it no better than the great Illusion, Mahamaya, hence the cause of misery and suffering.
**** The "Seven Karshvares of the Earth" -- the seven spheres of our planetary chain, [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 385 THE BUILDERS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD.
applications refer equally to the seven spheres of our planetary chain, to the seven planets, the seven heavens, etc., according to whether the sense is applied to a physical, supra-mundane, or simply a sidereal world. In the same Fargard (ii. and iii.), in his invocation against Angra Mainyu and his Host, Zarathustra appeals to them in these words: "I invoke the seven bright Sravah with their sons and their flocks" (42 Vendid. Saddh). The "Sravah" -- a word which the Orientalists have given up as one "of unknown meaning" -- means the same Amshaspends, but in their highest occult meaning. The "Sravah" are the noumenoi of the phenomenal Amshaspends, the souls or spirits of those manifested Powers; and "their sons and their flock" refers to the planetary angels and their sidereal flock of stars and constellations. "Amshaspend" is the exoteric term used in terrestrial combinations and affairs only. Zarathustra addresses Ahura Mazda constantly as "thou, the maker of the material world." Ormazd is the father of our earth (Spenta Armaiti), and she is referred to, when personified, as "the fair daughter of Ahura Mazda" (Fargard, XIX. ii.), who is also the creator of the Tree (of occult and spiritual knowledge and wisdom) from which the mystic and mysterious Caresma is taken. But the occult name of the bright God was never pronounced outside the temple.
Samael or Satan, the seducing Serpent of Genesis, and one of the primeval angels who rebelled, is the name of the "Red Dragon." He is the Angel of Death, the Talmud saying that "the Angel of Death and Satan are the same," and, killed by Michael, he is once more killed by St. George, who also is a Dragon Slayer; but see the transformations of this. Samael is identical with the Simoom, the hot wind of the desert, or again with the Vedic demon of drought, as Vritra; "Simoom is called Atabutos " or -- Diabolos, the devil.
Typhon, or the Dragon Aphophis -- the Accuser in the "Book of the Dead" -- is worsted by Horus, who pierces his opponent's head with a spear; and Typhon is the all-destroying wind of the desert, the rebellious element that throws everything into confusion. As Set -- he is the darkness of night, the murderer of Osiris, who is the light of day and the sun. Archaeology demonstrates that Horus is identical with Anubis,* whose effigy was discovered upon an Egyptian monument, with a cuirass and a spear, like Michael and St. George. Anubis is also represented
[[Footnote(s) continued from previous page]] ------------------------------------------------- §
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the seven worlds -- also mentioned in the Rig-Veda -- are fully referred to elsewhere. There are six rajamsi (worlds) above prithivi -- the earth, or "this" (idam), as opposed to that which is yonder (the six globes on the three other planes). (See Rig-Veda, I., 34; III., 56; VII., 10411, and V., 60, 6. See § on Chronology.)
* Verse 62, chap. xvii., "Book of the Dead": Anubis is Horus who melts in him who is eyeless.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
as slaying a dragon, that has the head and tail of a serpent. (See Lenoir's "Du Dragon de Metz.")
Cosmologically, then, all the Dragons and Serpents conquered by their "Slayers" are, in their origin, the turbulent confused principles in Chaos, brought to order by the Sun-gods or creative powers. In the "Book of the Dead" those principles are called "the Sons of Rebellion." (See also "Egyptian Pantheon, " pp. 20, 23.) "In that night, the oppressor, the murderer of Osiris, otherwise called the deceiving Serpent (Verse 54) . . . . calls the Sons of Rebellion in Air, and when they arrive to the East of Heavens, then there is War in Heaven and in the entire World" (v. 49, "Book of the Dead, " xvii.).
In the Scandinavian Eddas the "War" of the Ases with the Hrim-thurses (frost-giants), and of Asathor with the Jotuns, the Serpents and Dragons and the "wolf" who comes out of "Darkness" --- is the repetition of the same myth. The "evil Spirits,"* having begun by being simply the emblems of Chaos, became euhemerized by the superstition of the rabble, until they have finally won the right of citizenship in the most civilized and learned races of this globe -- since its creation as alleged -- and became a dogma with Christians. As George Smith has it: "The evil principles (Spirits) emblems of Chaos" (in Chaldea and Assyria as in Egypt, we see) . . "resist this change and make war on the Moon, the eldest son of Bel, drawing over to their side the Sun, Venus and the atmospheric god Vul." ("Assyrian Discoveries," p. 403.) This is only another version of the Hindu "War in Heaven," between Soma, the moon, and the gods -- Indra being the atmospheric Vul; which shows it plainly to be both a Cosmogonical and an astronomical allegory, woven into and drawn from the earliest theogony as taught in the Mysteries.
It is in the religious doctrines of the Gnostics that the real meaning of the Dragon, the Serpent, the Goat, and all those symbols of powers now called Evil, can be seen the best; as it is they who divulged the esoteric nature of the Jewish Substitute for AIN-SOPH in their teachings; of the true meaning of which, while the Rabbins concealed it, the Christians, with a few exceptions, knew nothing. Surely Jesus of Nazareth would have hardly advised his apostles to show themselves as wise as the serpent, had the latter been a symbol of the Evil one ; nor would the Ophites, the learned Egyptian Gnostics of "the Brotherhood of the Serpent," have reverenced a living snake in their ceremonies as the emblem of WISDOM, the divine Sophia (and a type of the all-good, not the all-bad), were that reptile so closely connected with Satan. The fact is, that even as a common ophidian it has ever been a dual symbol; and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
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* These "evil Spirits" can by no means be identified with Satan or the Great Dragon. They are the Elementals generated or begotten by ignorance -- Cosmic and human passions -- or Chaos.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 387 WHO FIRST CREATED WOMAN?
as a Dragon it had never been anything else than a symbol of the manifested Deity in its great Wisdom. The Draco volans, the flying Dragon of the early painters, may be an exaggerated picture of the real extinct antediluvian animal; but those who have faith in the Occult teachings believe that in the days of old there were such creatures as flying Dragons, or a kind of Pterodactyl, and that it is those gigantic winged lizards that served as the prototypes for the Seraph of Moses and his great Brazen Serpent.* The Jews had worshipped the latter idol themselves, but, after the religious reforms brought about by Hezekiah, turned round, and called that symbol of the great or Higher God of every other nation -- a Devil, and their own usurper -- the "One God."**
The appellation Sa'tan, in Hebrew satan, "an adversary" (from the verb shatana, "to be adverse," to persecute) belongs by right to the first and cruelest "adversary of all the other gods" -- Jehovah, not to the Serpent, which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom, and is at the worst, even in the dogma, "the adversary of men." This dogma, based as it is on chapter iii. of Genesis, is as illogical and unjust as it is paradoxical. For who was the first to create that original and hence-forward universal tempter of man -- the woman? Not the serpent surely, but the "Lord God" himself, who, saying: -- "It is not good that the man should be alone" -- made woman, and "brought her unto the man" (18-22). If the unpleasant little incident that followed was and is still to be regarded as the "original sin," then it exhibits the Creator's divine foresight in a poor light indeed. It would have been far better for the first Adam (of chap. 1.) to have been left either "male and female," or "alone." It is the Lord God, evidently, who was the real cause of all the mischief, the "agent provocateur," and the Serpent -- only a prototype of Azazel, "the scapegoat for the sin of (the God of) Israel," the poor Tragos having to pay the penalty for his Master's and Creator's blunder. This, of course, is addressed only to those who accept the opening events of the drama of humanity in Genesis in their dead-letter sense. Those who read them esoterically, are not reduced to fanciful
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Numbers xxi. 8-9. God orders Moses to build a brazen Serpent "Saraph"; to look upon which heals those bitten by the fiery serpents. The latter were the Seraphim, each one of which, as Isaiah shows (vi. 2), "had six wings"; they are the symbols of Jehovah, and of all the other Demiurgi who produce out of themselves six sons or likenesses -- Seven with their Creator. Thus, the Brazen Serpent is Jehovah, the chief of the "fiery serpents." And yet, in 2 Kings xviii., it is shown that King Hezekiah, who, like as David his father, "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" -- "brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made . . . and called it Nehushtan, " or piece of brass.
** And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel (Chron. xxi. 1.) "The anger of the Lord Jehovah was kindled against Israel," and he moved David to say: "Go, number Israel" (2 Samuel, xxiv. 1). The two are then identical.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
speculations and hypothesis; they know how to read the symbolism therein contained, and cannot err.
There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name. It was a blind created purposely by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them with ten-fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God-name which was their own property.* But the following statement is made. The personage who is named in the first four chapters of Genesis variously as "God," the "Lord God," and "Lord" simply, is not one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the Kabala, Jehovah appearing only in chapter iv., in the first verse of which he is named Cain, and in the last transformed into mankind -- male and female, jah-veh.** The "Serpent," moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one of the Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who, promising the woman that if they ate of the forbidden fruit "ye shall not surely die," kept his promise, and made man immortal in his incorruptible nature. He is the Iao of the mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne creators of men. Chapter iii. contains (esoterically) the withdrawal of the veil of ignorance that closed the perceptions of the Angelic Man, made in the image of the "Boneless" gods, and the opening of his consciousness to his real nature; thus showing the bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of Immortality, and as the "Enlightener"; while the real Fall into generation and matter is to be sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah-Cain, the male part of Adam the dual man, having separated himself from Eve, creates in her "Abel," the first natural woman,* and sheds the Virgin blood. Now Cain, being shown identical with Jehovah, on the authority of the correct reading of verse i. (chapter iv., Genesis), in the original Hebrew text; and the Rabbins teaching that "Kin (Cain), the Evil, was the Son of Eve by Samael, the devil who took Adam's place"; and the Talmud adding that "the evil Spirit, Satan, and Samael, the angel of Death, are the same" --(Babba Battra, 16a) -- it becomes easy to see that Jehovah (mankind, or "Jah-hovah") and Satan (therefore the tempting Serpent) are one and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Dozens of the most erudite writers have sifted thoroughly the various meanings of the name J'hovah (with, and without the masoretic points), and shown their multifarious bearings. The best of such works is the "Source of Measures, the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery."
** In the above-mentioned work (p. 233 App.), verse 26 of the 4th chap. of Genesis is correctly translated "then men began to call themselves Jehovah, " but less correctly explained, perhaps, as the last word ought to be written Jah (male) Hovah (female), to show that from that time the race of distinctly separate man and woman began.
*** See for explanation the excellent pages of appendix vii. of the same work.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 389 JEHOVAH OPHIOMORPHOS.
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the same in every particular. There is no Devil, no Evil, outside mankind to produce a Devil. Evil is a necessity in, and one of the supporters of the manifested universe. It is a necessity for progress and evolution, as night is necessary for the production of Day, and Death for that of Life -- that man may live for ever.
Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in nature.* He is the "adversary," allegorically, the "murderer," and the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole universe that has not two sides -- the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And now the philosophy and the rationale of certain early Christian sects -- called heretical and viewed as the abomination of the times -- will become more comprehensible. We may understand how it was that the sect of SATANIANS came to be degraded, and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future day, since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the CAINITES came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) ISCARIOTES; the true character of the treacherous apostle having never been correctly presented before the tribunal of Humanity.
As a direct consequence, the tenets of the Gnostic sects also become clear. Each of these sects was founded by an Initiate, while their tenets were based on the correct knowledge of the symbolism of every nation. Thus it becomes comprehensible why Ilda-Baoth was regarded by most of them as the god of Moses, and was held as a proud, ambitious, and impure spirit, who had abused his power by usurping the place of the highest God, though he was no better, and in some respects far worse than his brethren Elohim; the latter representing the all-embracing, manifested deity only in their collectivity, since they were the fashioners of the first differentiations of the primary Cosmic substance for the creation of the phenomenal Universe. Therefore Jehovah was called by the Gnostics the Creator of, and one with Ophiomorphos, the Serpent, Satan, or EVIL. (See "Isis Unveiled, " II, 184). They taught that Turbo and Adonai were "names of Jao-Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda Baoth" (Codex Nazaraeus). (See Part II., "The Fallen Angels. ") This amounted in their language to saying what the Rabbins expressed in a more veiled way, by stating that -- "Cain had been generated by Samael or Satan."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In Demonology, Satan is the leader of the opposition in Hell, the monarch of which was Beelzebub. He belongs to the fifth kind or class of demons (of which there are nine according to mediaeval demonology), and he is at the head of witches and sorcerers. But see in the text the true meaning of Baphomet, the goat-headed Satan, one with Azaziel, the scape goat of Israel. Nature is the god PAN.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The fallen Angels are made in every ancient system the prototypes of fallen men -- allegorically, and, those men themselves -- esoterically. Thus the Elohim of the hour of creation became the "Beni-
Elohim," the sons of God, among whom is Satan -- in the Semitic traditions; war in heaven between Thraetaona and Azhi-dahaka, the destroying Serpent, ends on earth, according to Burnouf, in the battle
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of pious men against the power of Evil, "of the Iranians with the Aryan Brahmins of India." And the conflict of the gods with the Asuras is repeated in the Great War -- the Mahabharata. In the latest religion of all, Christianity, all the Combatants, gods and demons, adversaries in both the camps, are now transformed into Dragons and Satans, simply in order to connect EVIL personified with the Serpent of Genesis, and thus prove the new dogma.*
-------
NOAH WAS A KABIR, HENCE HE MUST HAVE BEEN A DEMON.
It matters little whether it is Isis, or Ceres -- the "Kabiria" -- or again the Kabiri, who have taught men agriculture; but it is very important to prevent fanatics from monopolising all the facts in history and legend, and from fathering their distortions of truth, history, and legend upon one man. Noah is either a myth along with the others, or one whose legend was built upon the Kabirian or Titanic tradition, as taught in Samothrace; he has, therefore, no claim to be monopolized by either Jew or Christian. If, as Faber tried to demonstrate at such cost of learning and research, Noah is an Atlantean and a Titan, and his family are the Kabiri or pious Titans, etc. -- then biblical chronology falls by its own weight, and along with it all the patriarchs -- the antediluvian and pre-Atlantean Titans. As now discovered and proven, Cain is Mars, the god of power and generation, and of the first (sexual) bloodshed.** Tubal-
Cain is a Kabir, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron"; or -- if this will please better -- he is one with Hephaestos or Vulcan; Jabal is taken from the Kabiri -- instructors in agriculture, "such as have cattle," and Jubal is "the father of all those who handle the harp," he, or they who fabricated the harp for Kronos and the trident for Poseidon.***
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vide for further details upon the Satanic myth, Part II. on Symbolism, in this volume.
** As he is also Vulcan or Vul-cain, the greatest god with the later Egyptians, and the greatest Kabir. The god of time was Chium in Egypt, or Saturn, or Seth, and Chium is the same as Cain.
*** See Strabo, comparing them to the Cyclopes -- XIV. p. 653 et seq. (Callim in Del., 31 Stat. Silo. IV., 6, 47; etc., etc.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 391 THE FLOOD LEGENDS.
The history or "fables" about the mysterious Telchines -- fables echoing each and all the archaic events of our esoteric teachings -- furnish us with a key to the origin of Cain's genealogy (Genesis, ch. iii.); they give the reason why the Roman Catholic Church identifies "the accursed blood" of Cain and Ham with Sorcery, and makes it responsible for the Deluge. Were not the Telchines -- it is argued -- the mysterious ironworkers of Rhodes; they who were the first to raise statues to the gods, furnish them with weapons, and men with magic arts? And is it not they who were destroyed by a deluge at the command of Zeus, as the Cainites were by that of Jehovah?
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The Telchines are simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They are the Atlanteans also. "Like Lemnos and Samothrace," says Decharme, "Rhodes, the birth-place of the Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation." (Genii of Fire, p. 271.) The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like Samothrace (of the Kabiri) it is connected in the memory of men with the Flood legends. As enough has been said on this subject, however, it may be left for the present.
But we may add a few more words about Noah, the Jewish representative of nearly every pagan God in one or another character. The Homeric songs contain, poetized, all the later fables about the Patriarchs, who are all sidereal, cosmic, and numerical symbols and signs. The attempt to disconnect the two genealogies -- those of Seth and Cain* -- and the further attempt, as futile, to show them real, historical men, has only led to more serious inquiries into the history of the Past, and to discoveries which have damaged for ever the supposed revelation. For instance, the identity of Noah and Melchizedek being established, the further identity of Melchizedek, or Father Sadik, with Kronos-
Saturn is proved also.
That it is so may be easily demonstrated. It is not denied by any of the Christian writers. Bryant (See "Analysis of Ancient Mythology, " Vol. II., p. 760) concurs with all those who are of opinion, that Sydic, or
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Nothing could be more awkward and childish, we say, than this fruitless attempt to disconnect the genealogies of Cain and of Seth, or to conceal the identity of names under a different spelling. Thus, Cain has a Son ENOCH, and Seth a Son ENOCH also (Enos, Ch'anoch, Hanoch; -- one may do what one likes with Hebrew unvowelled names). In the Cainite line Enoch begets IRAD, Irad MEHUJAEL, the latter METHUSAEL, and Methusael, Lamech. In the Sethite line, Enoch begets Cainan, and this one MAHALEEL (a variation on Mehujael), who gives birth to JARAD (or Irad); Jarad to ENOCH (Number 3), who produces Methuselah (from Methusael), and finally Lamech closes the list. Now all these are symbols (Kabalistically) of solar and lunar years, of astronomical periods, and of physiological (phallic) functions, just as in any other pagan symbolical creed. This has been proven by a number of writers.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 392 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Sadic, was the patriarch Noah (as also Melchizedek); and that the name by which he is called, or
Sadic, corresponds to the character given of him in Genesis, chap. vi., 9. "He was , Sadic, a JUST man, and perfect in his generation. All science and every useful art were attributed to him, and through his sons transmitted to posterity." (See New Encyclopaedia by Abraham Rees, F.R.S.)
Now it is Sanchoniathon, who informs the world that the Kabiri were the Sons of Sydic or Zedek (Melchizedek). True enough, this information, having descended to us through Eusebius (Preparatio Evangelica), may be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, as it is more than likely that he dealt with Sanchoniathon's works as he has with Manetho's Synchronistic Tables. But let us suppose that the
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identification of Sydic, Kronos, or Saturn with Noah and Melchizedek, is based on one of the Eusebian pious hypotheses. Let us accept it as such, along with Noah's characteristic as a just man, and his supposed duplicate, the mysterious Melchizedek, King of Salem, and priest of the high god, after "his own order" (See Hebrews, ch. v. 6, and vii. 1, et seq.); and finally, having seen what they all were spiritually, astronomically, psychically and cosmically, let us now see what they became rabbinically and KABALISTICALLY.
Speaking of Adam, Kain, Mars, etc., as personifications, we find the author of "The Source of Measures " enunciating our very esoteric teachings in his Kabalistic researches. Thus he says: --
"Now Mars was the lord of birth and of death, of generation and of destruction, of ploughing, of building, of sculpture or stone-cutting, of Architecture . . . . in fine, of all . . . . ARTS. He was the primeval principle, disintegrating into the modification of two opposites for production. Astronomically, too,* he held the birthplace of the day and year, the place of its increase of strength, Aries, and likewise the place of its death, Scorpio. He held the house of Venus, and that of the Scorpion. He, as birth, was good; as death, was Evil. As good, he was light; as bad, he was night. As good, he was man; as bad, he was woman. He held the cardinal points, and as Cain, or Vulcan,** or Pater Sadic, or Melchizadek, he was lord of the Ecliptic, or
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The AEolian name of Mars was [[Areus ]], and the Greek Ares, [[Ares ]], is a name over the etymological significance of which, philologists and Indianists, Greek and Sanskrit scholars have vainly worked to this day. Very strangely, Max Muller connects both the names Mars and Ares with the Sanskrit root mar, whence he traces their derivation, and from which, he says, the name of Maruts (the storm-gods) comes. Welcker, however, offers more correct etymologies. (See Griech. Gotterlehre, I., 415.) However it may be, etymologies of roots and words alone will never yield the esoteric meaning fully, though they may help to useful guesses.
** As the same author shows: "The very name Vulcain appears in the reading; for in the first words (of chap. iv. Genesis, 5) is to be found V'elcain, or V'ulcain, agreeably to the deepened u sound of the letter vau. Out of its immediate context, it may be [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 393 THE LEGENDS OF IRAN.
balance, or line of adjustment, and therefore was THE JUST ONE. The ancients held to there being seven planets, or great gods, growing out of eight, and Pater Sadik, the Just or Right One, was lord of the eighth, which was Mater Terra. ("Source of Measures," p. 186-70.)
This makes their functions plain enough after they had been degraded, and establishes the identity.
The Noachian Deluge, as described in its dead letter and within the period of Biblical chronology,
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having been shown to have never existed, the pious, but very arbitrary supposition of Bishop Cumberland has but to follow that deluge into the land of fiction. Indeed it seems rather fanciful to any impartial observer to be told that there were "two distinct races of Kabiri," the first consisting of Ham and Mizraim, whom he conceives to be Jupiter and Dionysus of Mnaseas; the second, "of the children of Shem, are the Kabiri of Sochoniston, while their father Sydyk is consequently the Scriptural Shem." (Append. de Cabiris, ap. Orig. gent. p. 364, 376, and the latter statement on p. 357.)
The Kabirim, "the mighty ones," are identical with our primeval Dhyan-Chohans, with the corporeal and the incorporeal Pitris, and with all the rulers and instructors of the primeval races, which are referred to as the Gods and Kings of the divine Dynasties.
-------
THE OLDEST PERSIAN TRADITIONS ABOUT THE POLAR, AND THE
SUBMERGED CONTINENTS.
Legendary lore could not distort facts so effectually as to reduce them to unrecognisable shape. Between the traditions of Egypt and Greece on the one hand, and Persia on the other -- a country ever at war with the former -- there is too great a similarity of figures and numbers to allow such coincidence to be due to simple chance. This was well proven by Bailly. Let us pause for a moment to examine these traditions from every available source, to compare the better those of the Magi with the so-called Grecian "fables."
Those legends have now passed into popular tales, the folklore of Persia, as many a real fiction has found its way into our universal History. The stories of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are also fairy tales to all appearance; yet they are based on facts, and pertain to the History of England. Why should not the folklore of Iran be part and parcel of the history and the pre-historic events of Atlantis? That folklore says as follows:
[[Footnote ]]----------------------------
[[Continued from previous page]] read as "and the god Cain," or Vulcain. If, however, anything is
wanting to confirm the Cain-Vulcain idea, Fuerst says: , Cain, the iron point of a lance, a smith (blacksmith), inventor of sharp iron tools and smith work" (p. 278).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Before the creation of Adam, two races lived and succeeded each other on Earth; the Devs who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who reigned but 2,000, during the existence of the former. The Devs were giants, strong and wicked; the Peris were smaller in stature, but wiser and kinder.
Here we recognize the Atlantean giants and the Aryans, or the Rakshasas of the Ramayana and the
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children of Bharata Varsha, or India; the ante- and the post-diluvians of the Bible.
Gyan (or rather Gnan, true or occult Wisdom and knowledge), also called Gian-ben-Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris.* He had a shield as famous as that of Achilles, only instead of serving against an enemy in war, it served as a protection against black magic, the sorcery of the Devs. Gian-ben-Gian had reigned 2,000 years when Iblis, the devil, was permitted by God to defeat the Devs and scatter them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield, which, produced on the principles of astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments, and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate (or Karma).** They count ten kings in their last metropolis called Khanoom, and make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam. These kings answer to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given by Berosus.
Distorted as those legends are now found, one can hardly fail to identify them with the Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew traditions. The latter, disdaining in its exclusiveness to speak of pre-
adamite nations, yet allows these to be clearly inferred, by sending out Cain -- one of the two only living men on earth -- into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city (Gen. iv.), etc.
Now if we compare the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the 9,000 years, which Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the last Atlantis, a very strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked, but distorted it by his interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may restore the figures to their true meaning. "First of all," we read in "Critias" that "one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed since the war of the nations, which lived above and outside the Pillars of Hercules, and those which peopled the lands on this side."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Some derive the word from Paras which produced Pars, Persia, Pars ; but it may be equally derived from Pitar or Pitris, the Hindu progenitors of the Fifth Race -- the Fathers of Wisdom or the Sons of "Will and Yoga" -- who were called Pitar, as were the divine Pitars of the First Race.
** See for these traditions the "Collection of Persian Legends," in Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Persian; Herbelot's narrative Legendes Persanes, "Bibliotheque Orientale," p. 298, 387, etc., and Danville's Memoires. We give in a condensed narrative that which is scattered in hundreds of volumes in European and Asiatic languages, as well as in oral traditions.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 395 ESOTERIC CHRONOLOGY.
In "Timaeus" Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Aryans were 200,000 years old when the first great "island" or continent was submerged, there hardly seems any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldea and Persia, through whose exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, one finds the Hebrews calling a week "seven days," and "a week of years" when each of its days represents 360 solar years,
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and the whole "week" is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years -- in their secret calculations of the Sods. We of the present times call an age a century. They of Plato's day, the initiated writers, at any rate, meant by a millenium, not a thousand but 100,000 years; Hindus, more independent than any, never concealed their chronology. Thus, when saying 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years, during which space of time -- i.e, from the first appearance of the Aryan race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began gradually sinking* and other continents to appear on the surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato's small island of Atlantis, the Aryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the Kali Yug, and was the Mahabharatean war so famous in Indian History. Such blending of the events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years that had elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures given. The latter event has never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because isolated; for, being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our era.
History, for the first time, catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great mysteries through Herodotus, if we do not take into account the Bible, and its queer chronology.** And how little Herodotus could tell is
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The main continent perished in the Miocene times, as already stated.
** From Bede downwards all the chronologists of the Church have differed among themselves, and contradicted each other. "The chronology of the Hebrew text has been grossly altered, especially in the interval next after the Deluge": -- says Whiston (Old Test., p. 20).
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 396 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
confessed by himself when speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate at Sais, in the sacred precinct of Minerva. There, he says "behind the chapel . . . is the tomb of One, whose name I consider it impious to divulge . . . In the enclosure stand large obelisks and there is a lake near, surrounded with a stone wall formed in a circle. In this lake they perform by night, that person's adventures, which they call Mysteries: on these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I must observe a discreet silence " (ii. 170).
On the other hand, it is well to know that no secret was so well preserved and so sacred with the ancients, as that of their cycles and computations. From the Egyptians down to the Jews it was held as the highest sin to divulge anything pertaining to the correct measure of time. It was for divulging the secrets of the Gods, that Tantalus was plunged into the infernal regions; the keepers of the sacred Sibylline Books were threatened with the death penalty for revealing a word from them. Sigalions (images of Harpocrates) were in every temple -- especially in those of Isis and Serapis -- each pressing
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a finger to the lips; while the Hebrews taught that to divulge, after initiation into the Rabbinical mysteries, the secrets of Kabala, was like eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: it was punishable by death.
And yet, we Europeans accepted the exoteric chronology of the Jews! What wonder that it has influenced and coloured ever since all our conceptions of science and the duration of things!
The Persian traditions, then, are full of two nations or races, now entirely extinct, as some think; whereas, they are only transformed. They are ever speaking of, and describing the mountains of Kaf (Kafaristan?), which contain a gallery built by the giant Argeak, wherein the statues of the ancient men under all their forms are preserved. They call them Sulimans (Solomons), or the wise kings of the East, and count seventy-two kings of that name.* Three among them reigned for 1,000 years each. (Herbelot, p. 829.)
Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, died murdered by his giant brother. The father had a perpetual fire preserved on the tomb which contained his cremated ashes; hence -- the origin of fire-worship, as some Orientalists think.
Then came Huschenk, the prudent and the wise. It was his dynasty which re-discovered metals and precious stones, which had been concealed by the Devs or Giants in the bowels of the earth; how to make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk, again, who is credited with having written the work called
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Thence King Solomon, whose traces are nowhere to be found outside of the Bible, and the description of whose magnificent palace and city dovetail with those of the Persian tales; though they were unknown to all pagan travellers, even to Herodotus.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 397 THE PERSIAN PHOENIX.
"Eternal Wisdom," and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and Ispahan, though they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is built on six other older cities, so these just-named cities may be built on emplacements of other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it can only be inferred from another legend.
In the same tradition that wise prince is credited with having made war against the giants on a twelve-
legged horse, whose birth is attributed to the amours of a crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This dodecaped was found on the "dry island" or new continent; much force and cunning had to be used to secure the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk mounted him, than he defeated every enemy. No giants could withstand his tremendous power. Notwithstanding, this king of kings was killed by an enormous rock thrown at him by the giants from the great mountains of Damavend. *
Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the best of,
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and who kills, the Dragon. He is the great enemy of the Devs who, in his day, dwelled in the mountains of Kaf, and occasionally made raids on the Peris. The old French chronicles of the Persian folklore call him the Dev-bend, the conqueror of the giants. He, too, is credited with having founded Babylon, Nineveh, Diarbek, etc., etc. Like his grand-sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz) also had his steed, only far more rare and rapid -- a bird called Simorgh-Anke. A marvellous bird, in truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious. (See Orient. Collect. ii., 119.) What says that Persian Phoenix? It complains of its old age, for it is born cycles and cycles before the days of Adam (also Kaimurath). It has witnessed the revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the birth and the close of twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied esoterically will give us again 840,000 years.** (Orient. Collect. ii., 119 et seq.) Simorgh is born with the last deluge of the pre-Adamites, says the "romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif"! (Tales of Derbent.)
What says the "Book of Numbers"? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the lunar Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris) and his three Sons -- Ka-yin, Habel, and Seth -- represent the three races, as already explained. Noah-Xisuthrus represents in his turn (in the cosmo-geological key) the 3rd Race separated, and his three sons, its last three races; Ham, moreover, symbolizing that race which uncovered the "nakedness" of the Parent Race, and of the "Mindless," i.e., committed sin.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Orient. Trad., p. 454. See also Bailly's "Lettres sur l'Atlantide. "
** Remember that the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe; that each will last 7,000 years, the total duration being thus 49,000 years (See Rabbi Parcha's "wheel"; also Kenealy's "Book of God, " p. 176). This refers to 7 Rounds, 7 Root-races, and sub-races, the truly occult figures, though sorely confused.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 398 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Tahmurath visits on his winged steed (Ahriman) the Mountains of Koh-Kaf or Kaph. He finds there the Peris ill-treated by the giants, and slays Argen, and the giant Demrusch. Then he liberates the good Peri, Mergiana*, whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the dry island, i.e., the new continent of Europe.** After him came Giamschid, who builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns 700 years, and believes himself, in his great pride, immortal, and demands divine honours. Fate punishes him, he wanders for 100 years in the world under the name of Dhulkarnayn "the two horned." But this epithet has no connection with the "two-horned" gentleman of the cloven foot. The "two-
horned" is the epithet given in Asia, uncivilized enough to know nothing of the attributes of the devil, to those conquerors who have subdued the world from the East to the West.
Then come the usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who vanquishes the former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend. These are followed by many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new dynasty.
Such is the legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. What are the mountains of Kaf to
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begin with?
Whatever they may be in their geographical status, whether they are the Caucasian or Central Asian mountains, it is far beyond these mountains to the North, that legend places the Devs and Peris; the latter the remote ancestors of the Parses or Farses. Oriental tradition is ever referring to an unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which, nevertheless, are situated the Fortunate Islands, wherein bubbles, from the beginning of life on earth, the fountain of life (Herbelot, p. 593 ; Armenian Tales, p. 35). But the legend asserts, moreover, that a portion of the first dry island (continent), having detached itself from the main body, has remained, since then, beyond the mountains of Koh-kaf, "the stony girdle that surrounds the world." A journey of seven months' duration will bring him who is possessed of "Soliman's ring" to that "fountain," if he keeps on journeying North straight before him as the bird flies. Journeying therefore from Persia straight north, will bring one along the sixtieth degree of longitude, holding to the west, to Nova Zemblia; and from the Caucasus to the eternal ice beyond the Arctic circle would land one between 60 and 45 degrees of longitude, or between Nova Zemblia and Spitzbergen. This, of course, if one has the dodecapedian horse of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Mergain, or Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown of Oriental descent.
** Where we find her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the Knights of the Round Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy-hood, if both heroines did not symbolize the same historical event which had passed into a legend?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 399 THE ARCTIC CONTINENT.
Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath (or Taimuraz), upon which to cross over the Arctic Ocean.*
Nevertheless, the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will maintain, to this day, that far beyond the snow-capped summits of Kap, or Caucasus, there is a great continent now concealed from all. That it is reached by those who can secure the services of the twelvelegged progeny of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings**; or by those who have the patience to wait for the good pleasure of Simorgh-anke, who promised that before she dies she will reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once more visible and within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs will build between that portion of the "dry island" and its severed parts.*** This relates, of course, to the seventh race, Simorgh being the Manvantaric cycle.
It is very curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century A.D., should have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt at first in a country beyond the Ocean, a proof of which had been given him in India, by a learned Chaldean (Cosmas Indicopleustes in Collect. nova Patrum, t. ii, p. 188; also see Journ. des Savants, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.) He says: "The lands we live in are surrounded by the ocean, but beyond that ocean there is another land which touches the walls of the sky; and it is
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in this land that man was created and lived in paradise. During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his ark into the land his posterity now inhabits." (Ibid.) The twelve-legged horse of Huschenk was found on that continent named the dry island. (Supra, p. 154.)
The "Christian topography" of Cosmas Indicopleustes and its merits are well known; but here the good father repeats a universal tradition, now, moreover, corroborated by facts. Every arctic traveller suspects a continent or a "dry island" beyond the line of eternal ice. Perhaps now the meaning of the following passage from one of the Commentaries may become clearer.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* To this day the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as Kap-kaz, using the consonant p instead of the usual v (Kavkaz or Caucasus). But their bards say that it requires seven months for a swift horse to reach the "dry land" beyond Kaf, holding north without ever deviating from one's way.
** Bailly thought he saw in this horse a twelve-oared ship. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the early Third Race built boats and flotillas before it built houses. But the "horse," though a much later animal, has, nevertheless, a more occult primitive meaning. The crocodile and the hippopotamus were held sacred and represented divine symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the Mexicans. Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects of that "horse," which is a cycle.
*** The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"In the first beginnings of (human) life, the only dry land was on the Right end * of the sphere, where it (the globe) is motionless.** The whole earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid . . . . There man was born on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara. *** There was eternal spring in darkness. (But) that which is darkness to the man of today, was light to the man of his dawn. There, the gods rested, and Fohat**** reigns ever since . . . . Thus the wise fathers say that man is born in the head of his mother (earth), and that her feet at the left end generated (begot) the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon . . . . Between the first and second (races) the eternal central (land) was divided by the water of life.*****
"It flows around and animates her (mother earth's) body. Its one end issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet (the Southern Pole). It gets purified (on its return) to her heart -- which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah, which then (in the beginnings) was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man's dwelling (the earth) that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes.****** During the first and second (races) the belt was covered with the great waters. (But) the great mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-
gear (the cap). She travailed harder for the third (race) and her waist and navel appeared above the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
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* The two poles are called the right and left ends of our globe -- the right being the North Pole -- or the head and feet of the earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with and influence "right" and "left" hand magic.
** The more one approaches the poles the less rotation is felt; at the poles proper, the diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Thence the expression that the sphere is "motionless."
*** It is averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the North Pole like a skull-cap, is the only one which prevails during the whole Manvantara of our "Round." All the central continents and lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this land will never change.
**** Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestian name of Fohat is Apam-Napat. In the Avesta he stands between the fire-yazatas and the water-yazatas. The literal meaning is "Son of the Waters," but these "waters" are not the liquid we know, but Ether -- the fiery waters of space. Fohat is the "Son of Ether" in its highest aspect, Akasa, the Mother-Father of the primitive Seven, and of Sound or LOGOS. Fohat is the light of the latter. See Book I.
***** This "water" is the blood or fluid of life which animates the earth, compared here to a living body.
****** Occult teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the existence of a fountain of life in the bowels of the earth and in the North Pole. It is the blood of the earth, the electromagnetic current, which circulates through all the arteries; and which is said to be found stored in the "navel" of the earth.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 401 THE UNREACHABLE LAND.
water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world.* She broke toward the setting sun from her neck** downward (to the south west), into many lands and islands, but the eternal land (the cap) broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the world. All these perished (in their turn). Then appeared the abode of the wicked (the Atlantis). The eternal land was now hid, for the waters became solid (frozen) under the breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon's mouth," etc., etc.
This shows that Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its root-continent, so to speak, already existed; that part of the world now known as Asia being only cut off from it in a later age, and divided by the glacial waters.
If, then, the teaching is understood correctly, the first continent which came into existence capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust, and remains so to this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the few arctic travellers who perceived it.
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During the Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a continuation of the "head" from the neck. Beginning on both hemispheres, on the line above the most northern part of Spitzbergen*** on
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Occultism points to the Himalayan chain as that "belt," and maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the globe. The navel is described as situated to the setting sun or to the west of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which mountain is north of the Himalaya. Meru is not "the fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth," but its roots and foundations are in that navel, though it is in the far north itself. This connects it with the "central" land "that never perishes"; the land in which "the day of the mortal lasts six months and his night another six months." As the Vishnu Purana has it: "for the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day in other regions; for Meru is north of all the dwipas and varshas" (islands and countries). (Book II., chap. viii.) Meru is therefore neither on Atlas as Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show, "absolutely in the centre of the globe," only because "relatively with the inhabitants of the several portions, to all of whom the East is that quarter where the sun first appears."
** Even the Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The globe is likened to the body of a woman, "mother earth." From her neck downward, means from the inland sea now beyond the impassable barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parasara says: "is the mother and nurse, augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the comprehender of all the worlds."
*** For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the commentary as a place of no latitude (niraksha) the abode of the gods. As a scholiast says from the Surya-Sidhanta:
"Above this (the Siddha) goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (akshonnati, v. 42). In both directions from these are two pole-stars (dhruvatara), fixed in the midst of the sky; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Mercator's Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the American side, the localities that are now occupied by Baffin's Bay and the neighbouring islands and promontories. There it hardly reached, southward, the 70th degree of latitude; here -- it formed the horse-shoe continent of which the commentary speaks; of the two ends of which, one included Greenland with a prolongation which crossed the 50th degree a little south west, and the other Kamschatka, the two ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the early part of the Third Race -- Lemuria was formed ( Vide supra). When it was destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.
[[This page continued in next section]]
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] to those who are situated in places of no latitude (niraksha) both these have their place in the horizon. Hence there is (on that land) no elevation of the poles, the two pole-stars being situated in their horizon; but their degrees of colatitude (lumbaka) are 90; at Meru the degrees of latitude (aksha) are of the same number." (43 and 44.)
Next Section
Contents
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he Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 402 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
[[This page continued from previous section]]
WESTERN SPECULATIONS,
FOUNDED ON THE GREEK AND PURANIC TRADITIONS.
Thus it becomes natural to find that, on even such meagre data as have reached the profane historian, Rudbeck, a Swedish scientist, tried to prove about two centuries ago that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He thought, even, that he had found in the configuration of ancient Upsala, the situation and measurements given by the Greek sage of the capital of "Atlantis." As Bailly proved, Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly likewise, and still more. For Sweden and Norway had formed part and parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis on the European side, just as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had belonged to it, on the Asiatic. Only, once more, when was it? We can find it out approximately only by studying the Puranas, if we will have nought to do with the Secret teachings.
Three quarters of a century have already elapsed since Captain (now Colonel) Wilford brought forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the "White Island," the Atala of the Puranas. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala is one of the seven dwipas, or islands, belonging to the nether lokas, one of the seven regions of Patala (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford* shows, the Puranas place it "on
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Wilford makes many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Sveta-dwipa (the white Island), the "island in the northern part of Toyambhudi," with England, and then tries to identify it with Atala (a nether region) and Atlantis. Now the former is the abode of Vishnu, exoterically, and Atala is a hell. He also places it in the Euxine or Icshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it, in another place, with Africa and Atlas.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 403 ORIENTALISTS IN THE WRONG BOX.
the seventh zone or seventh climate," -- rather, on the seventh measure of heat: which thus locates it between the latitudes of 24 and 28 degrees north. It is then to be sought on the same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between the 50th and 60th degrees of latitude. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis, the white island. And in vol. viii. of Journal of Asiatic Researches, p. 280, its
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enemy is called the "White Devil," the demon of terror. For he says: "In their (the Hindu and Mahomedan) romances, we see Kai-caus going to the mountain of 'As-burj, at the foot of which the Sun sets,' to fight the Dev-Sefid, or white devil, the Taradaitya of the Puranas, whose abode was on the seventh stage of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the Buddhists, or the White Island."
Now here the Orientalists have been, and are still, facing the Sphinx's riddle, the wrong solution of which will ever destroy their authority, if not their persons, in the eyes of every Hindu scholar, even those who are not initiates. For there is not a statement in the Puranas -- on the conflicting details of which Wilford based his speculations -- which has not several meanings, and does not apply to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. If the old Hindus divided the face of the globe geographically into seven zones, climates, dwipas, and into seven hells and seven heavens, allegorically, that measure of seven did not apply in both cases to the same localities. It is the north pole, the country of "Meru," which is the seventh division, as it answers to the Seventh principle (or fourth metaphysically), of the occult calculation, for it represents the region of Atma, of pure soul, and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara is shown as the seventh zone, or dwipa, which encompasses the Kshira Ocean, or Ocean of milk (the ever-frozen white region) in the Vishnu (and other) Puranas (Book II ch. iv.). And Pushkara, with its two Varshas, lies directly at the foot of Meru. For it is said that "the two countries north and south of Meru are shaped like a bow," . . and that "one half of the surface of the earth is on the south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru -- beyond which is half of Pushkara " (Vishnu Purana, Asiatic Researches, etc.). Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu-dwipa* in the middle of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Every name in the Puranas has to be examined at least under two aspects; geographically, and metaphysically, in its allegorical application; e.g., Nila, the (blue) mountain which is one of the boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sought geographically in a mountain range in Orissa, and again in a mountain quite different from the others (in Western Africa). Jambu-dwipa is Vishnu's dominion -- the world, limited in the Puranas to our globe, the region which contains Meru only, and again it is divided to contain Bharata-varsha (India), its best division, and the fairest, says Parasara. Likewise with Pushkara and all others.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 404 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
which stands Meru, for it is the country inhabited by beings who live ten thousand years, who are free from sickness or failing; where there is neither virtue nor vice, caste or laws, for these men are "of the same nature as the Gods," (Vishnu Purana, Book II. ch. iv.). Wilford is inclined to see Meru in Mount Atlas, and locates there also the Loka-lokas. Now Meru, we are told, which is the Swar-loka, the abode of Brahma, of Vishnu, and the Olympus of Indian exoteric religions, is described geographically as "passing through the middle of the earth-globe, and protruding on either side" (Surya Siddhanta, v. 5, Whitney's trans.). On its upper station are the gods, on the nether (or South pole) is the abode of demons (hells). How can then Meru be Mount Atlas? Besides which, Taradaitya, a demon, cannot be placed on the seventh zone if the latter is identified with the "white" Island, which is Sveta-dwipa, for reasons given in the foot-note. ( Vide infra.)
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Wilford accuses the modern Brahmans "of having jumbled them (islands and countries) all together" (A.R. III. 300); but he jumbled them still more. He believes that as the Brahmanda and Vayu Puranas divide the old continent into seven dwipas, said to be surrounded by a vast ocean, beyond which lie the regions and mountains of Atala (ibid), hence "most probably the Greeks divided the nation of Atlantis, which, as it could not be found after having once been discovered, they conceived to have been destroyed by some shock of nature."
Finding certain difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests, Plato, and even Homer, had all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala -- a nether region located at the Southern pole -- we prefer holding to the statements given in the secret books. We believe in the seven "continents," four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future. We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,* refers to the geographical names given (i.) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole earth during the period of a Root-Race, in general; and (ii.) to what remained of these after a geological (race) Pralaya -- as "Jambu," for instance: and (iii.) to those localities which will enter, after the future cataclysms, into the formation of new universal "continents," peninsulas, or dwipas** -- each continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Jambu, Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka, and Pushkara.
** Such as Saka and Pushkara, for instance, which do not yet exist, but into which will enter such lands as some portions of America, of Africa, and Central Asia, with the Gobi region. Let us bear in mind that Upadwipas means "root" islands, or the dry land in general.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 405 FUTURE CONTINENTS, SYMBOLIZED.
"jumble" the nomenclature of these may represent to the profane, there is none, in fact, to him who has the key.
Thus, we believe we know that, though two of the Puranic "islands" -- the sixth and seventh "continents" -- are yet to come, nevertheless there were, or there are, lands which will enter into the composition of the future dry lands, of new earths whose geographical faces will be entirely changed, as were those of the past. Therefore we find in the Puranas that Saka-dwipa is (or will be) a continent, and that Sankha-dwipa, as shown in the Vayu Purana, is only "a minor island," one of the nine divisions (to which Vayu adds six more) of Bharata Varsha. Because Sankha-dwipa was peopled by "Mlechchhas (unclean foreigners), who worshipped Hindu divinities," therefore they were connected with India.* This accounts for Sankhasura, a King of a portion of Sankha-dwipa, who was killed by Krishna; that King who resided in the palace "which was an ocean shell, and whose subjects lived in shells also," says Wilford.
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"On the banks of the Nile** (?) there were frequent contests between the Devatas (divine beings, demi-
gods) and the Daityas (giants); but the latter tribe having prevailed, their King, Sankhasura, who resided in the Ocean, made frequent incursions in the night" (As. Res., Vol. III. 225.)
It is not on the banks of the Nile, but on the coasts of Western Africa, south of where now lies Morocco, that these battles took place. There was a time when the whole of the Sahara desert was a sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then, only after another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that other wilderness, the desert of Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in Puranic tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said: "The people were between two fires; for, while Sankhasura was ravaging one side of the continent, Krauncha (or Cracacha), King of Kraunch, used to desolate the other; both armies . . . thus changed the most fertile regions into a savage desert."
That not only the last island of Atlantis, spoken of by Plato, but a large continent, first divided, and then broken later on into seven peninsulas and islands (called dwipas), preceded Europe, is sure. It covered the whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as portions of the North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated by Indian Puranas, Greek writers, and Asiatic, Persian, and Mohammedan traditions. Wilford, who confuses sorely the Hindu and the Mussulman legends, shows this, however, clearly. (See Vol. VIII., X. and XI. of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* They were called demons, Asuras, giants, and monsters, because of their wickedness; and thus their country was likened to Atala -- a hell, because of that.
** Not on the river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the Atlas range.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Asiatic Researches.) And his facts and quotations from the Puranas give direct and conclusive evidence that the Aryan Hindus and other ancient nations were earlier navigators than the Phoenicians, who are now credited with having been the first seamen that appeared in the post- diluvian times. This is what is given in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, III., pp. 325, et seq.: --
"In their distress the few nations who survived (in the war between Devatas and Daityas) raised their hands to Bhagavan, 'Let him who can deliver us . . . be our King'; using the word I'T (a magic term not understood by Wilford, evidently) which re-echoed through the whole country."
Then comes a violent storm, the waters of the Kali are strangely agitated, "when there appeared from the waves . . a man, afterwards called I'T, at the head of a numerous army, saying abhayan, no fear" . . . and scattered the enemy. "The King I'T," explains Wilford, "is a subordinate incarnation of M'rira" (Mrida, a form of Rudra, probably?) who "re-established peace and prosperity throughout all Sankha-
dwipa, through Barbaradesa, Hissast'han and Awasthan or Arabia . . " etc., etc.
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Surely, if the Hindu Puranas give a description of wars on continents and islands situated beyond Western Africa in the Atlantic Ocean; if their writers speak of Barbaras and other people such as Arabs -- they who were never known to navigate, or cross the Kala pani (the black waters of the Ocean) in the days of Phoenician navigation -- then their Puranas must be older than those Phoenicians (placed at from 2,000 to 3,000 years B.C.). At any rate those traditions must have been older;* as --
"In the above accounts," writes an adept, "the Hindus speak of this island as existing and in great power; it must, therefore, have been more than eleven thousand years ago."
But another calculation and proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindu Aryans who knew of (because they had once dwelt in it) and described the last surviving island of Atlantis -- or rather of that remnant of the Eastern portion of that continent which had
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Says Wilford of the division of Atlantis and Bharata or India, confusing the two accounts and Priyavrata with Medhatithi: -- "The division was made by Priyavrata. . . . He had ten sons, and it was his intention to divide the whole world. In the same manner Neptune divided Atlantis between his ten sons. . . . One of them had . . . the extremity of the Atlantis" -- which "is probably the old continent. . . . This Atlantis was overwhelmed by a flood. . . . and it seems that by Atlantis we should understand the Antediluvian Earth over which ten princes were born to rule according to the mythology of the West (and of the East, also) but seven only of them sat upon the throne." ( Vol. III. p. 286.) . . Some also are of opinion that of the seven dwipas six were destroyed by a flood ( Vol. VIII. p. 367). Wilford takes it to be "Gades which included Spain," but it was Plato's island -- rather.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 407 THE PUZZLES OF ANTIQUITY.
perished soon after the upheaval of the two Americas* -- the two Varshas of Pushkara. This may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by an adept who criticises Wilford. For recalling what the Orientalist had brought forward concerning the Mount Ashburj "at the foot of which the sun sets," where was the war between the Devatas and the Daityas,** he says: --
"We will consider, then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island, and of the remaining Mount Ashburj. It was on the seventh stage of the world, i.e., in the seventh climate (which is between the latitude of 24 degrees and latitude 28 degrees north) . . . This island, the daughter of the Ocean, is frequently described as lying in the West; and the sun is represented as setting at the foot of its mountain (Ashburj, Atlas, Teneriffe or Nila, no matter the name), and fighting the white Devil of the 'White Island.' "
Now, considering this statement from its astronomical aspect, and knowing that Krishna is the incarnated Sun (Vishnu), a solar God; and that he is said to have killed Dev-Sefid, the white giant -- a possible personification of the ancient inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas -- perchance Krishna may be only a representation of the vertical beams of the Sun? Those inhabitants (the Atlantides) are, we have seen, accused by Diodorus of daily cursing the Sun, and ever fighting his influence. This is an
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astronomical interpretation of course. But it will now be proved that Sankhasura, and Sancha dwipa, and all their history, is also geographically and ethnologically Plato's "Atlantis" in Hindu dress.
It was just remarked that since, in the Puranic accounts, the island is still existing, then those accounts must be older than the 11,000 years elapsed since Sancha dwipa, or the Poseidonis of Atlantis, disappeared. Is it not barely possible that Hindus should have known the island still earlier? Let us turn again to astronomical demonstrations, which make this quite plain if one assumes, according to the said adept, that "at the time when the summer tropical 'colure' passed through the Pleiades, when cor-
Leonis would be upon the equator; and when Leo was vertical to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the island of Atlantis at noon. "
This explains, perhaps, why the Singhalese, the heirs of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* America, the "new" world -- is thus, though not much, older; still it is older than Europe, the "old world."
** If Div or Dev-Sefid's (the Taradaitya's) abode was on the seventh stage, it is because he came from Pushkara, the Patala (antipodes) of India, or from America. The latter touched the walls, so to say, of Atlantis, before the latter sank finally. The word Patala, meaning both the antipodal countries and infernal regions, thus became synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 408 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Rakshasas and Giants of Lanka, and the direct descendants of Singha, or Leo, became connected with Sancha dwipa or Poseidonis (Plato's Atlantis). Only, as shown by Mackey's "Sphinxiad," this must have occurred about 23,000 years ago, astronomically; at which time the obliquity of the ecliptic must have been rather more than 27 degrees, and consequently Taurus must have passed over "Atlantis" or "Sancha dwipa." And that it was so is clearly demonstrated.
"The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bharata to Sancha to meet Rishabha (Taurus) every Kalpa. But when those of the White Island (who descended originally from Sveta dwipa),* who had mixed with the Daityas (giants) of the land of iniquity, had become black with Sin, then Nandi remained for ever in the "White Island" (or Sveta dwipa.) "Those of the Fourth World (race) lost AUM" -- say the Commentaries.
Asburj (or Azburj), whether the peak of Teneriffe or not, was a volcano, when the sinking of the "western Atala" (or hell) began, and those who were saved told the tale to their children. Plato's Atlantis perished between water below and fire above; the great mountain vomiting flames all the while. "The 'fire-vomiting Monster' survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate island."
Do the Greeks, accused of borrowing a Hindu fiction (Atala), and inventing from it another (Atlantis), stand also accused of getting their geographical notions and the number seven from them? (Vide in
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Part II. the several sections on the SEPTENATE in nature.)
"The famous Atlantis exists no longer, but we can hardly doubt that it did once," says Proclus, "for Marcellus, who wrote a history of Ethiopian affairs, says that such, and so great an island once existed, and this is evidenced by those who composed histories relative to the external sea. For they relate that in this time there were seven islands in the Atlantic sea sacred to Proserpine; and besides these, three of immense magnitude, sacred to Pluto . . . Jupiter . . . and Neptune. And, besides this, the inhabitants of the last island (Poseidonis) preserved the memory of the prodigious magnitude of the Atlantic island as related by their ancestors, and of its governing for many periods all the islands in the Atlantic sea. From this isle one may pass to other large
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Neither Atlantis, nor yet Sancha dwipa, was ever called "White Island." When tradition says that "the White Island became black on account of the sins of people" it only means the denizens of the "White Island," or Siddhapura, or Sveta dwipa, who descended to the Atlantis of the Third and Fourth races, to "inform the latter; and who, having incarnated, became black with sin" -- a figure of speech. All the Avatars of Vishnu are said to come originally from the White Island. According to Tibetan tradition the White Island is the only locality which escapes the general fate of other dwipas and can be destroyed by neither fire nor water, for -- it is the "eternal land."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 409 WHAT MARCELLUS SAYS.
islands beyond, which are not far from the firm land, near which is the true sea."
"These seven dwipas (inaccurately rendered islands) constitute, according to Marcellus, the body of the famous Atlantis," writes Wilford himself. . . . . This evidently shows that Atlantis is the old continent. . . . The Atlantis was destroyed after a violent storm (?): this is well known to the Puranics, some of whom assert that in consequence of this dreadful convulsion of nature, six of the dwipas disappeared" . . . (xi., 27).
Enough proofs have now been given to satisfy the greatest sceptic. Nevertheless, direct proofs based on exact science are also added. Volumes might be written, however, to no purpose for those who will neither see nor hear, except through the eyes and ears of their respective authorities.
Hence the teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon, the mount in the land of Mizpeth -- meaning "anathema," "destruction" -- is the same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the "Lord loved well"; and so mixed up are facts and personages in the said scholiasts' brains, that, when the Zohar explains the "birds" which inspired Balaam to mean "Serpents," to wit, the wise men and adepts at whose school he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy -- the opportunity is again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the "winged dragons of Evil, whose chief is Samael" (the Jewish Satan).
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"It is to those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scapegoat of Israel, who assumed the name of one of them (Azaz(y)el), was sent" (Spencer).
We say it is not so. The Zohar has the following explanation on the practice of magic which is called in Hebrew Nehhaschim, or the "Serpents' Works." It says (Part III. col. 302): -- "It is called nehhaschim, because the magicians (practical Kabalists) work surrounded by the light of the primordial serpent, which they perceive in heaven as a luminous zone composed of myriads of small stars" . . . which means simply the astral light, so called by the Martinists, by Eliphas Levi, and now by all the modern Occultists. (Vide Sections about.)
-------
THE "CURSE" FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW.
The foregoing teachings of the SECRET DOCTRINE, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brahmanas and Puranas, the Yathas and other Mazdean Scriptures,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 410 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish Sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane: all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition. Space forbids us from entering, in these two volumes, into further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our Fifth (Aryan) humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one philosopher and scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our Esoteric Doctrine are corroborated by inferential as well as by direct proof in almost every case. That neither the "legendary" giants, nor the lost continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding races, are quite baseless tales. In the Addenda which close this volume, science will find itself more than once unable to reply; they will, it is hoped, finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number in nature, and our figures in general. (Vide §§ on the Septenaries.)
Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete: that of disposing of that most pernicious of all the theological dogmas -- the CURSE under which mankind is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed disobedience of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden.
Creative powers in man were the gift of divine wisdom, not the result of sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour of Jehovah, who first curses Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the supposed committed crime, and then blesses his "chosen people" by saying "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth" (Gen. ix. 1). The curse was not brought on mankind by the Fourth Race, for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the still more gigantic Antediluvians, had perished in the same
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way; hence the Deluge was no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and geological law. Nor was the curse of KARMA called down upon them for seeking natural union, as all the mindless animal-world does in its proper seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the divine gift, and wasting the life-essence for no purpose except bestial personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of Genesis will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and the commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as easy for woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never intended that woman should bring forth her young ones "in sorrow." Since that period, however, during the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 411 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN MAN.
evolution of the Fourth Race, there came enmity between its seed, and the "Serpent's" seed, the seed or product of Karma and divine wisdom. For the seed of woman or lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge, by turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the law of Karma "bruised the heel" of the Atlantean race, by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,* until, from the healthy King of animal creation of the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our race, a helpless, scrofulous being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the globe to constitutional and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all animals!**
This is the real CURSE from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in the Kabalistic esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead of a blessing -- a gift quickened by the "Lords of Wisdom," who have poured on the human manas the fresh dew of their own spirit and essence. The divine Titan has then suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by AEschylus, in his "Prometheus Bound," when, at the close of the first Titanic age (the age that followed that of ethereal man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlocha), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as --
"Seeing, they saw in vain;
Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams,
Through the long time all things at random mixed."
Our Saviours, the Agnishwatta and other divine "Sons of the Flame of Wisdom" (personified by the Greeks in Prometheus***), may well, in
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* How wise and grand, how far-seeing and morally beneficent are the laws of Manu on connubial life, when compared with the licence tacitly allowed to man in civilized countries. That those laws have been neglected for the last two millenniums does not prevent us from admiring their forethought. The Brahmin was a grihasta, a family man, till a certain period of his life, when, after begetting a son, he broke with married life and became a chaste Yogi. His very connubial life was regulated by his
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Brahmin astrologer in accordance with his nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjab, for instance, where the lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of European, licentiousness, has hardly touched the orthodox Aryan castes, one still finds the finest men -- so far as stature and physical strength go -- on the whole globe; whereas the mighty men of old have found themselves replaced in the Deccan, and especially in Bengal, by men whose generation becomes with every century (and almost with every year) dwarfed and weakened.
** Diseases and over-population are facts that can never be denied.
*** In Mrs. Anna Swanwick's volumes, "The Dramas of AEschylus," it is said of "Prometheus Bound" (Vol. II., pp. 146, 147), that Prometheus truly appears in it "as [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 412 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the injustice of the human heart, be left unrecognized and unthanked. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora's gift: but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, the EVIL ONES, is too heavy a Karma for "Him" "who dared alone "-- when Zeus "ardently desired" to quench the entire human race -- to save "that mortal race" from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is made to say: --
"From sinking blasted down to Hades' gloom.
For this by the dire tortures I am bent,
Grievous to suffer, piteous to behold,
I who did mortals pity! . . . . "
The chorus remarking very pertinently: --
"Vast boon was this thou gavest unto mortals . . . ."
Prometheus answers: --
"Yea, and besides 'twas I that gave them fire.
CHORUS: Have now these short-lived creatures flame-eyed fire? PROM.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn. . . . . "
But, with the arts, the fire received has turned into the greatest curse: the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.* It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect; "the restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law."**
Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's "Protagoras," with that "wisdom which
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ministers to physical well-being," but the lower aspect of manas of the animal (Kama) having remained unchanged,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] the champion and benefactor of mankind, whose condition . . . . is depicted as weak and miserable in the extreme. . . . Zeus, it is said, proposed to annihilate these puny ephemerals, and to plant upon the earth a new race in their stead." We see the Lords of Being doing likewise, and exterminating the first product of nature and the sea, in the Stanzas (V, et seq.). . . . Prometheus represents himself as having frustrated this design, and as being consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to the most agonising pain, inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of Zeus. We have, thus, the Titan, the symbol of finite reason and free will (of intellectual humanity, or the higher aspect of Manas), depicted as the sublime philanthropist, while Zeus, the supreme deity of Hellas, is portrayed as the cruel and obdurate despot, a character peculiarly revolting to Athenian sentiment." The reason for it is explained further on. The "Supreme Deity" bears, in every ancient Pantheon -- including that of the Jews -- a dual character, composed of light and shadow.
* The animal world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its seasons of procreation, and the sexes become neutralized during the rest of the year. Therefore, the free animal knows sickness but once in its life -- before it dies.
** Introduction to "Prometheus Bound, " p. 152.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 413 THE TRAVESTY OF PROMETHEUS.
instead of "an untainted mind, heaven's first gift" (AEschylus), there was created the eternal vulture of the ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair coupled with "the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals" (p . 556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.
Now Christians -- Roman Catholics especially -- have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true theosophist, the pursuer of divine wisdom and worshipper of ABSOLUTE perfection -- the unknown deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah -- will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never was an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence -- the psychic being guided by the animal, and both putting out the light of the spiritual. He will say, "All ye who can read between the lines, study ancient wisdom in the old dramas -- the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the one just mentioned, one enacted on the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago, namely 'Prometheus Bound' " The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor AEschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it "is older than the Hellenes themselves," for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The Crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the "Host," and of the "Lords of Wisdom" or the HEAVENLY MAN, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name Pro-me-theus, meaning "he who sees before him" or futurity, shows* -- in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanos: --
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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 12 c
"Of prophecies the various modes I fixed,
And among dreams did first discriminate
The truthful vision . . . and mortals guided
To a mysterious art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All arts to mortals from Prometheus came. . ."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* From [[pro metis ]] pro metis , "forethought." "Professor Kuhn," we are told in the above-named volumes of "The Dramas of AEschylus," "considers the name of the Titan to be derived from the Sanskrit word Pramantha, the instrument used for kindling fire. The root mand or manth, implies rotatory motion, and the word manthami (used to denote the process of fire kindling) acquired the secondary sense of snatching away; hence we find another word of the same stock, pramatha , signifying theft." This is very ingenious, but perhaps not altogether correct; besides, there is a very prosaic element in it. No doubt in physical nature, the higher forms may develop from the lower ones, but it is hardly so in the world of thought. And as we are told that the word manthami passed into the Greek language and became the word manthano, to learn; that is to say, to appropriate knowledge; whence prometheia, fore-knowledge, fore-thought; we may find, in searching, a more poetical origin for the "fire-bringer" than that displayed in its Sanskrit origin. The Svastica, the sacred sign and the instrument for kindling sacred fire, may explain it better. "Prometheus, the fire-bringer, is the Pramantha personified," goes on the author; "he finds his prototype in the Aryan [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 414 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early races, this will be no real digression.
The subject of AEschylus' drama (the trilogy is lost) is known to all cultured readers. The demi-god robs the gods (the Elohim) of their secret -- the mystery of the creative fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by KRONOS* and delivered unto Zeus, the FATHER and creator of a mankind which he would wish to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a personal deity, which will not see MAN "like one of us." Hence Prometheus, "the fire and light-giver," is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus: --
"E'en he the fore-ordained cannot escape. . . "
-- ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus --
"Ay, a son bearing stronger than his sire" (787)
. . . . . . . . . .
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