chapter iv

of _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 occupied the place of Adam,”(902) and the _Talmud_ adding that “the evil Spirit, Satan, and Samael, the angel of Death, are the same”(903)—it becomes easy to see that Jehovah (mankind, or Jah‐hovah) and Satan (therefore the tempting Serpent) are one and 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.(904) 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 to be 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 brother 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.(905) They taught that Iurbo and Adonai were names of Iao‐Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda‐baoth.(906) This, in their language, amounted to saying what the Rabbins expressed in a more veiled way, by stating that “Cain had been generated by Samael or Satan.”

The Fallen Angels, in every ancient system, are made 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 Thrætaona and Azhi‐dahaka, the destroying Serpent, ends on Earth, according to Burnouf, in the battle of pious men against the power of Evil, “of the Iranians with the Âryan Brâhmans of India.” And the conflict of the Gods with the Asuras is repeated in the Great War—the Mahâbhârata. 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 were Isis, or Ceres, the Kabiria, or again the Kabiri, who taught men agriculture; but it is very important to prevent fanatics from monopolizing 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 has now been discovered and proven, Cain is Mars, the God of _power and generation_, and of the first (sexual) bloodshed.(907) Tubal‐ Cain is a Kabir, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron”; or—if this will please better—he is one with Hephæstus or Vulcan. Jabal again 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 Cronus and the trident for Poseidon.(908)

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 in the third chapter of _Genesis_; 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?

The Telchines are simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They are the Atlanteans also. Says Decharme:

Like Lemnos and Samothrace, Rhodes, the birth‐place of the Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation.(909)

The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after having been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like the Samothrace of the Kabiri, it is connected by 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, in poetized form, all the later fables about the Patriarchs, who are all sidereal, cosmic, and numerical symbols and signs. The attempt to disconnect the two genealogies of Seth and Cain,(910) and the further equally futile attempt to show them as _real_, _historical_ men, has only led to more serious enquiries 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 Cronus‐Saturn is also proved.

That it is so may be easily demonstrated. It is not denied by any of the Christian writers. Bryant(911) concurs with all those who are of opinion that Sydic, or Sadic, was the Patriarch Noah, and also Melchizedek; and that the name by which he is called, Sadic, corresponds with the character given him in _Genesis_.(912)

He was צדיק, 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.(913)

Now it is Sanchuniathon, who informs the world that the Kabiri were the Sons of Sydic or Zedek (Melchi‐zedek). True enough, as this information has descended to us through the _Preparatio Evangelica_ of Eusebius, it may be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, as it is more than likely that he dealt with Sanchuniathon’s works as he has with Manetho’s Synchronistic Tables. But let us suppose that the identification of Sydic, Cronus, 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 most high God,” after “his own order”;(914) and finally, having seen what they all were spiritually, astronomically, psychically and cosmically, let us now see what they became rabbinically and kabalistically.

In speaking of Adam, Cain, 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 comprised under our English word ARTS. He was the _primal principle_, disintegrating into the modification of _two opposites for production_. Astronomically, too,(915) 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_,(916) or _Pater Sadic_, or _Melchizadek_, he was lord of the _ecliptic_, or _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 Sadic, _The Just or Right One_, was Lord of the eighth, which was _Mater Terra_.(917)

This makes their functions, after they had been degraded, plain enough, and establishes the identity.

The Noachian Deluge, as described in its dead‐letter and within the period of biblical chronology, 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 Cabiri, the first consisting of Ham and Mizraim, whom he conceives to be Jupiter and Dionusus of Mnaseas; the second, of the children of Shem, who are the Cabiri of Sanchoniatho, while their father Sydyk is consequently the scriptural Shem.(918)

The Kabirim, the “Mighty Ones,” are identical with our primeval Dhyân Chohans, with the corporeal and the incorporeal Pitris, and with all the Rulers and Instructors of the primeval races, who 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 unrecognizable 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 admit of such coincidence being due to simple chance. This has been well proven by Bailly. Let us pause for a moment to examine these traditions from every available source, in order to the better compare 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:

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

Here we recognize the Atlantean Giants and the Âryans, or the Râkshasas of the _Râmâyana_ and the children of Bharata‐varsha, or India; the Ante‐ and the Post‐diluvians of the _Bible_.

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

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

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

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

In the _Timæus_ Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Âryans were 200,000 years old when the first great “Island,” or Continent, was submerged, there seems hardly any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldæa and Persia through whose exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, we find the Hebrews calling a week “seven days,” and speaking of a “week of years” when each of its days represents 360 solar years, and the whole “week” is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years, in the secret calculations of their Sods. We of the present times call an age a “century.” They of Plato’s day, the initiated writers, at any rate, by a millennium meant not 1,000 but 100,000 years; while the Hindûs, more independent than any, have never concealed their chronology. Thus, for 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years, during which space of time—_i.e._, from the first appearance of the Âryan Race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began gradually sinking(922) and other continents to appear on the surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato’s small island of Atlantis—the Âryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the Kali Yuga, and was the Mahâbhârata, or Great War, so famous in Indian history. Such blending of events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years that have elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures. The latter event had never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because of their isolation; being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our era.

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

Behind the chapel ... is the tomb of One, _whose name I consider it impious to divulge_.... In the enclosure stand large obelisks and there is a _lake_ near, surrounded with a stone wall formed _in a circle_.... In this lake they perform by night, that person’s adventures, which the Egyptians call _Mysteries_: on these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the

## particulars of them, _I must observe a discreet silence_.(924)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_In the first beginnings of [human] life, the only dry land was on the right end_(_938_)_ of the Sphere, where it [the Globe] is motionless._(_939_)_ The whole Earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid.... There, man was born on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara._(_940_)_ There was eternal spring in darkness. [But] that which is darkness to the man of to‐day, was light to the man of his dawn. There, the Gods rested, and Fohat_(_941_)_ reigns ever since.... Thus the wise Fathers say that man is born in the head of his Mother [Earth], and that her feet at the left end generated [begot] the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon ... Between the First and Second [Races] the Eternal Central [Land] was divided by the Water of Life._(_942_)

_It flows around and animates her [Mother Earth’s] body. Its one end issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet [the Southern Pole]. It gets purified [on its return] to her heart—which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah, which then [in the beginnings] was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man’s dwelling [the Earth] that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes._(_943_)_ During the First and Second [Races] the belt was covered with the great waters. [But] the great __ Mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head‐gear [the cap]. She travailed harder for the Third [Race] and her waist and navel appeared above the water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the World._(_944_)_ She broke toward the setting Sun from her neck_(_945_)_ downward [to the South‐West], into many lands and islands, but the Eternal Land [the cap] broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the World. All these perished [in their turn]. Then appeared the abode of the wicked [the Atlantis]. The Eternal Land was now hid, for the waters became solid [frozen] under the breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon’s mouth, etc._

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

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

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

Western Speculations, Founded On The Greek And Paurânic Traditions.

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

Three‐quarters of a century have already elapsed since Wilford brought forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the “White Island,” the Atala of the _Purânas_. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala is one of the seven Dvîpas, or Islands, belonging to the nether Lokas, one of the seven regions of Pâtâla (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford(947) shows, the _Purânas_ place it “on the seventh zone or seventh climate”—rather, on the seventh measure of heat—which thus locates it between the latitudes of 24° and 28° North. It is then to be sought on the same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between the latitudes of 50° and 60°. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis, the White Island. Its enemy is called the “White Devil,” the Demon of Terror, for he says:

In their [the Hindû and Persian] romances, we see Cai‐caus going to the mountain of _Az‐burj_, or _As‐burj_, _at the foot of which_ the sun sets, to fight the _Div‐sefid_, or white devil, the _Târa‐ daitya_ of the _Purânas_, and whose abode was on the _seventh stage_ of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the Bauddhists; ... or, in other words, to the White Island.(948)

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

The two countries north and south of Meru are _shaped like a bow_, ... [and that] one half of the surface of the earth is on the south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru—_beyond which is half of Pushkara_.

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

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

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

As we find certain difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests, Plato, and even Homer, all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala—a nether region located at the Southern Pole—we prefer holding to the statements given in the Secret Books. We believe in the seven Continents, four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future. We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,(954) refers to the geographical names given (i) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole Earth during the period of a Root‐Race, in general; (ii) to what remained of these after a geological Race Pralaya, as Jambu, for instance; and (iii) to those localities which will enter, after future cataclysms, into the formation of new universal Continents, Peninsulas, or Dvîpas(955)—each Continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever “jumble” the nomenclature of these may represent to the profane, there is none, in fact, to him who has the key.

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

On the banks of the Nîlâ(957) there were frequent contests between the Devatâs [Divine Beings, Demi‐gods] and the Daityas [Giants]: but the latter tribe having prevailed, their king and leader, Shankhâsura, who resided in the ocean, made frequent incursions ... in the night.(958)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But another proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindû Âryans who described the last surviving island of Atlantis, or rather of that remnant of the Eastern portion of that Continent which had perished soon after the upheaval of the two Americas(963)—the two Varshas of Pushkara. And they described what they knew, for they had once dwelt on it. This may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by an Adept who criticizes Wilford. Recalling what that Orientalist had brought forward concerning the Mount Ashburj “at the foot of which the sun sets,” where was the war between the Devatâs and the Daityas,(964) he says:

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

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

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

_At the time when the summer tropical __“__colure__”__ passed through the Pleiades, when Cor Leonis would be upon the equator, and when Leo_ was vertical _to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the island of Atlantis at noon_.

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

_The sacred bull Nandi was brought from Bhârata to Shankha to meet Rishabha [Taurus] every Kalpa. But when those of the White Island [who descended originally from Shveta‐dvîpa],_(_965_)_ who had mixed with the Daityas [Giants] of the land of iniquity, had become black with sin, then Nandi remained for ever in the White Island [or Shveta‐dvîpa].... Those of the Fourth World [Race] lost AUM._

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

_The __“__fire‐vomiting Monster__”__ survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate island._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Curse” From A Philosophical Point Of View.

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

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

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

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

Seeing, they saw in vain; Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams, Through the long time all things at random mixed.

Our Saviours, the Agnishvâtta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of Wisdom”—personified by the Greeks in Prometheus(970)—may well be left unrecognized and unthanked, in the injustice of the human heart. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora’s gift; but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, as the Evil Ones, is too heavy a Karma for “Him” who, when Zeus “ardently desired” to quench the entire human race, “dared alone” to save that “mortal race” from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is make to say:

From sinking blasted down to Hades’ gloom. For this by these dire tortures I am bent, Grievous to suffer, piteous to behold, I who did mortals pity....

The chorus remarking very pertinently:

Vast boon was this thou gavest unto mortals!

Prometheus answers:

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

CHORUS: Have now these short‐lived creatures flame‐eyed fire?

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

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

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

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

Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an _original_ sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The _crucified_ Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name (_Pro_‐me‐_theus_, “he who sees before him” or futurity) shows(973)—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanus:

Of prophecies the various modes I fixed, (492) And among dreams did first discriminate The truthful vision ... and mortals guided To a mysterious art.... All arts to mortals from Prometheus came....

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

The subject of Æschylus’ trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to all cultured readers. The Demi‐god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their secret—the mystery of the _Creative Fire_. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by Cronus(974) and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind intellectually, and animal‐like; a _Personal_ Deity, which will not see Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light‐giver,” is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—

E’en he the fore‐ordained cannot escape....

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

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

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

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

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

And, portent past belief, the speaking oaks By which full clearly, in no riddling phrase, Wast hailed _as the illustrious spouse of Zeus_ ... (853) ... stroking thee With _touch alone of unalarming hand_; Then thou _dark Epaphos_ shalt bear, whose name Records his sacred gendering ... (870).

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

... such marriage he prepares Which from his throne of power to nothingness Shall hurl him down; so shall be all fulfilled His father Kronos’ curse.... .... Then let him sit Confiding in his lofty thunder‐peals, And wielding with both hands the fiery bolt; For _these shall not avail, but fall he shall,_ _A fall disgraceful_, not to be endured.... (980).

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

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

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

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

When thou hast crossed the flood, limit betwixt Two continents, fronting the burning East.... (810)—

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

Pluto’s gold‐abounding flood.... (825).

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

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

To these [Arimaspi and Grypes] approach not; a far border land Thou next shalt reach, where dwells a swarthy race Near the Sun’s founts, whence is the Æthiop river; Along its banks proceed till thou attain The mighty rapids, where from Bybline heights Pure draughts of sacred water Neilos sends.

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

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

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

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

The race of Io, the “cow‐horned maid,” is then simply the first pioneer race of the Æthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile, which received its name in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India.(978) Therefore Prometheus says to Io(979) that the sacred Neilos—the God, not the river—shall guide her “to the land, _three‐ cornered_,” namely, to the Delta, where her sons are foreordained to found “that far‐off colony.” (833 _et seqq._)

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

Fifty in number shall return to Argos.

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

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

But from this seed shall dauntless heroes spring, Bow—famous, who shall free me from these ills.

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

This, to set forth at large needs lengthy speech.

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

That the subject formed part of the Sabasian Mysteries is made known by several ancient writers; among others by Cicero(980) and by Clemens Alexandrinus.(981) The latter writers are the only ones who attribute the fact of Æschylus being charged by the Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death to its true cause. They say that being himself uninitiated, Æschylus had profaned the Mysteries by exposing them in his Trilogies on a public stage.(982) But he would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated; which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a Daimon to reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical Drama of Initiation. At all events, it is not the “father of the Greek tragedy” who invented the prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was revealed by the priests during the Mysteria of the Sabasia.(983) The latter was one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras, the Sun, called Sabasius on some old monuments, with Jupiter and Bacchus. It was never, however, the property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A god ... in fetters, anguish fraught; The foe of Zeus, in hatred held of all—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what is written in one passage:

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

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

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

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

Such are the facts given in the Archaic Records. Collating and comparing them with some modern theories of evolution, _minus_ Natural Selection,(992) these statements appear quite reasonable and logical. Thus, while the Âryans are the descendants of the _yellow_ Adam, the gigantic and highly civilized Atlanto‐Âryan race, the Semites—and the Jews along with them—are those of the _red_ Adam, and thus both De Quatrefages and the writers of the Mosaic _Genesis_ are right. For, could