chapter xvii

, with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,” or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the first _to all and every exoteric_ Churchianity—“ceremonial magic” of old, with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce of ritualistic worship. The “mystery” of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul‐killing Churchianity and of Superstition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was when:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English _Bible_ and read