Chapter iii

of _Genesis_. Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of _animals_ on Earth into a potential God, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence, also, the _curse_ pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah‐ Ilda‐baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never‐dying, singeing fire and flames of an inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a refined torture; a “Fire‐producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος (_Phósphoros_), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne _Phosphor_ kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a _conscious_, and hence a _responsible_ entity.(562) The curse of life is great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) _incorporeal_ Being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “Night’s” Rest. For, to quote from an able article by one(563) who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim thereto:

Satan [or Lucifer] represents the _Active_, or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the “Centrifugal” Energy of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is _Pain_, which is the Reaction of the _Pleasure_ of Action, and _Death_—which is the Revolution of _Life_—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the Eternal Inertia of the _Passive_ Energy of the Kosmos—the inexorable “_I am_”—the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly ... are he and his adherents ... consigned to the “Sea of Fire”—because _it is_ the Sun [in one sense only in the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life in _our_ system, where they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—that _Sun_ which, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at once the _Home_ and the _Source_ of the Mundane Satan....

Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac’s general theory [in _Le Diable et Satan_] cold is known to have a “Centripetal” effect. Under the influence of Cold everything contracts.... Under it Life _hybernates_, or dies out, Thought congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire‐Sea—it is only in the “Nifl‐Heim” [the cold Hell of the Scandinavian _Eddas_] of the “_I am_” that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of _Immortal_ Existence in Nifl‐Heim, and that Existence must be _Painless_ and _Peaceful_, because it is _Unconscious_ and _Inactive_. In the Kingdom of _Jehovah_ [if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him] there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no _Individual Consciousness_.(564) All is absorbed in the spirit of the Most Powerful. _It is emphatically a Kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the __“__Arch‐Rebel__”__ is one of War and Revolution...._ It [the former] is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that Separation from the Primal Source _having once occurred_, Reünion can only be achieved by _Will‐Effort_—which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.(565)

It _is_ “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man _to become his own creator_ and an immortal God—that men can reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace.

To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire‐Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin‐Angels,” (to whom the Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called by the all‐materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived”—preferred the _curse_ of _incarnation_ and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if _unconscious_, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their Brethren, through the semi‐passive energy of their _too spiritual_ Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to _humanize_ Self,”(566) to do so, he must be born _human_ not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god‐like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was _Knowledge_ and _Love_, has been construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth. Hindû Philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an _intermediate state_, in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.

Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have, _after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One_, thrown themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.(567)

And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the _Zohar_ or any other book of the _Kabalah_ in its right interpretation—for the latter is the same as our own—but only with the gross, _pseudo_‐esoteric explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists.

Says the Commentary:

_Our earth and man [are] the products of the three Fires._

The names of these three answer, in Sanskrit, to the “Electric Fire,” the “Solar Fire,” and the “Fire produced by Friction.” Explained on the cosmic and human planes, these three Fires are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root Groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and—according to their applications—become the Upâdhis and the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimânin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Svâhâ, one of Daksha’s(568) daughters. In the metaphysical sense, the “Fire by Friction” means the union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth “principle,” which thus are united or cemented together, the fifth merging

## partially into and becoming part of the Monad; in the physical, it relates

to the “creative spark,” or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Shuchi, were condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, “to be born over and over again.”(569) This is clear enough.

Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpatis, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumâras,(570) etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root‐Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric Doctrine they are generally named Asuras, or the Asura Devatâ or Pitar Devatâ (Gods), for, as said, they were first Gods—and the highest—before they became “_No_‐Gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of Earth(571)—_exoterically_, note well, in orthodox dogma.

No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpatis, the Manus, and the Rishis, or the direct connection of these—their correlation rather—with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all nations originally had in common. All these Gods and Demi‐gods are found reborn on Earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, _having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause_.

Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as may be seen, absolutely necessary to show that the Sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure, if not more pure, than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the Churches. The “Old Book” also goes into various details of Astral Life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It must, therefore, be left for later explanation, and the First and Second Races will now receive only bare notice. Not so the Third Race—the Root‐Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason; men evolving _pari passu_ with the Globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred millions of years before the first human sub‐race had yet begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it:

_The Inner Man [the Conscious Entity] was not._

This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases _is_, the very essence and _esse_ of the high Intelligences, condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reïncarnate in this Manvantara.

(_b_) Shloka 39 relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, Esoteric Philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its Forefathers or “Creators” were all Divine Beings—though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy—it teaches that men were nevertheless born at seven different centres of the Continent of that period. Though all were of one common origin, yet, for reasons given, their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.(572) As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in _Linga Purâna_. The Kumâras—the Rudra Gods, so called—are described as incarnations of Shiva, the Destroyer (of _outward forms_), called also Vâmadeva. The latter, as a Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin Youth, springs from Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human Races, as regards complexion and type—and the three chief variations of these. Thus in the twenty‐ninth Kalpa—in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form, which Shiva ever destroys and remodels periodically down to the great Manvantaric turning point, about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race—in the twenty‐ninth Kalpa, Shiva, as Shvetalohita, the Root‐Kumâra, from moon‐coloured becomes _white_; in his next transformation, he is _red_ (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric Teaching); in the third, _yellow_; in the fourth, _black_.

Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval Races—as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and a hardly objective, though colossal, form. The evolution of these Races, their formation and development, proceeded on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of these zones. The Esoteric Teaching names three great divisions, namely, the _red‐yellow_, the _black_, and the _brown‐ white_.(573) The Âryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red‐brown‐yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are nevertheless all of one and the same stock, the Fifth Root‐Race, and spring from one single Progenitor, called in Hindû _exotericism_ by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu; the latter, remember, being that Generic Personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago—at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the Great Continent of Atlantis,(574) and who is said to live even now in his mankind.(575) The light yellow is the colour of the first _solid_ human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root‐Race—after its fall into generation, as just explained—bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Shiva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red‐yellow, of which the red Indians and the Mongolians are the descendants, and finally into brown‐white races—which now, together with the yellow races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in _Linga Purâna_ is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.

When reading of the “last transformation,” which is said to have taken place 18,000,000 years ago, let the reader at this juncture, consider how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage. And if Man, in his gradual consolidation, developed _pari passu_ with the Earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race. For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state. The Archaic Teachings, moreover, tell us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro‐Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of Man, the Earth, Man, and everything on the Globe, were of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi‐gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that have intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our “dematerialization,” as the Spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then—aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some Theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15 or 20,000,000 years ago, “does not square with Geology,” which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc.; that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by Geology to these “oldest palæozoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves—of “carbonic acid” apparently, as Science seems to imply—break on the shore, on an Earth semi‐astral, _i.e._, viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily, in Occult phraseology, mean as thin as smoke, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: “How could an astral Earth have affected the other Planets in this System? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one Planet were suddenly removed?” The objection is evidently invalid, since our System is composed of older and younger Planets, some dead—like the Moon—others in process of formation, for all that Astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our System have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis‐Himâlayan Secret Teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindû Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is 18,000,000 and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as _physical_ or approximately physical, Man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root‐Race. Beyond that period _Man_, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300,000,000 years, for all we know; _since we are not taught figures_ which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in _Esoteric Buddhism_. Moreover, whereas the Hindû _Purânas_ speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one.

We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man.

Archaic Teachings In The “Purânas” And “Genesis.” Physical Evolution.

The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and Anthropogony above described actually existed, that its records _are_ preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of ancient Scriptures.

The _Purânas_ on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, if read Esoterically and expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes is, that the _Purânas_, giving as much, and perhaps more, attention to causes than to effects, allude to the pre‐cosmic and pre‐genetic periods rather than to those of so‐called “creation,” whereas the _Bible_, after saying only a few words on the former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while almost skipping the Pre‐Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race.

Now, whatever the onslaught made on the “order of creation” in _Genesis_—and its dead‐letter account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism(576)—the Hindû _Purânas_, notwithstanding their allegorical exaggerations will be found quite in accordance with Physical Science.

Even what, on the face of it, appears to be the perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahmâ assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds a perfectly scientific explanation in the Secret Commentaries, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, the constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our Globe; for Science teaches us now that nine‐ tenths of the stratified formations of the Earth’s crust have been gradually constructed beneath the water at the bottom of the seas. The ancient Âryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of Natural History, Geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand, proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the _Bible_, to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism “earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the _less philosophical and more immoral religions_ (!!) of the ancient world.”(577) Only, while in biblical Esotericism, we find physiological sexual mysteries symbolized, and very little more, something for which _very little real Philosophy_ is requisite—in the _Purânas_ one can find the most scientific and philosophical “dawn of creation,” which, if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy‐tale‐like allegories, would show that modern Zoology, Geology, Astronomy, and nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in ancient Science, and were known to ancient Philosophers in their general features, if not in such detail as at present.

Paurânic Astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, has been shown even by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindû astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation of nebulæ, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms for chronological and other purposes—far more correct than Europeans have even now—were known in India to perfection.

If we turn to Geology and Zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajâpatis, of their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Âryans—the authors of the most perfect philosophical system of transcendental Psychology, of codes of Ethics, of such a grammar as Pânini’s, of the Sânkhya and Vedânta systems, of a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Müller the most perfect on earth—were the Âryans such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing “fairy tales,” such as the _Purânas_ now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the “fable,” the genealogy and origin of Kashyapa, with his twelve wives by whom he had a numerous and diversified progeny of serpents (Nâgas), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of living things, who was thus the “father” of all kinds of animals, but a _veiled_ record of the order of evolution in _this_ Round? So far, we do not see that any Orientalist has ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. The _Shatapatha Brâhmana_, says one, gives “_a not very intelligible_ account” of Kashyapa’s origin.

According to the _Mahâbhârata_, the _Râmâyana_, and the _Purânas_, he was the son of Marîchi, the son of Brahmâ, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind.

According to the _Shatapatha Brahmâna_: Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he made (_akarot_); hence the word _kûrma_ (tortoise). Kashyapa means tortoise; hence men say, “All creatures are descendants of Kashyapa.”(578)

He was all this; he was also the father of the bird Garuda, the “king of the feathered tribe,” who _descends from_, and is of one stock with _the reptiles_, the Nâgas, and who becomes their mortal enemy _subsequently_—as he is also a _cycle_, a period of time, when, in the course of evolution, the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life” and “survival of the fittest,” etc., turned in preference on those from whom they issued to devour them, perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room for other and more perfect species.

In that admirable epitome, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, a lesson in Natural History is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance of the _Bible_ with it. The author remarks that Geology traces the “dawn of creation” through a line of scientific research:

Commencing with the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of the Laurentian, and continued in a chain, every link of which is firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life, and first indication of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians; the Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land animals began to appear; and finally the Tertiary, in which mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type and species to species, are gradually differentiated and specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, until we arrive at the Glacial and Prehistoric periods, and at positive proof of the existence of man.(579)

The same order, _plus_ the description of animals unknown to Modern Science, is found in the Commentaries on the _Purânas_ in general, and in the _Book of Dzyan_ especially. The only difference—a grave one, no doubt, as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the _false personality_ and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox Psychology—is as follows. Having been in all the so‐called seven “creations,” which stand allegorically for the seven evolutionary changes, or sub‐races, as we may call them, of the First Root‐Race of Mankind—Man has been on Earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the Kingdoms of Nature in the previous _three_ Rounds,(580) his _physical_ frame—one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods—was ready to receive the Divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, _i.e._, 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid‐point of the Third Root‐Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the Two and then the Three made One; for though the lower animals, from the amœba to man, received _their_ Monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, these qualities have to remain dormant till the animal reaches its human form, before which stage Manas (mind) has no development in them. In the animals every principle is paralyzed, and in a fœtus‐like state, save the second, the Vital, and the third, the Astral, and the rudiments of the fourth, Kâma, which is desire, instinct—whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy‐tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it.

As Commentary ix says:

_Men are made complete only during their Third, toward the Fourth Cycle [Race]. They are made __“__Gods__”__ for good and evil, and responsible, only when the two arcs meet [after three and a half Rounds towards the Fifth Race]. They are made so by the Nirmânakâya [Spiritual or Astral remains] of the Rudra‐Kumâras, __“__cursed to be reborn on Earth again__”__ [meaning—doomed in their natural turn to reïncarnation in the higher ascending arc of the terrestrial Cycle]._

Now the writer is certain to be met with what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization—that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature:

From the primitive speck of protoplasm, and the nucleated cell in which all life originates ... and “is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and, last of all, of the human type.”(581)

This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against _that_; for it all relates to the _shell_ of man—his body, which, in its growth, is subject, of course, like every other once so‐called morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization—which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its so‐called _inorganic_ Upâdhi, or basis, as the formation of _cells_ to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man—it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in Nature, ever‐ present, and as ever invisible and unknowable, and of intra‐cosmic Gods, who were all once men.(582)

But we would ask, what does Science and its exact discoveries and now axiomatic theories prove against _our_ Occult theory? Those who believe in the law of evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell—which from a vital became a morphological cell, until it finally awoke as protoplasm pure and simple—can surely never limit their belief to one line of evolution! The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age—we mean the “primordial” _matter_ of Science—was the same in every essential

## particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial

_living_ matter of to‐day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if the now orthodox theory of evolution were _quite_ correct, namely, a constant, ever‐flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of this, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal beings all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms, assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity, in the description of Palæontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely—_man_ and the _lower genera_ of being!

Certain well‐marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, _but persisting comparatively unaltered_, while other forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed “persistent types” of life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds.(583)

Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., as off‐shoots of a moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the amphibia, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms—which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to Man, on every Globe, in the _three preceding_ Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be, the arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question, “What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination of pre‐mammalian organic species?”—is easily answered. One is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects which are destined to receive their final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The fish evolved into an amphibian—a frog—in the _shadows_ of ponds, and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the formation of the types in the present Round. On strict analogy, the cycle of seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through every Kingdom of Nature, is repeated on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think over and work out this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby, though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of Mother‐Nature before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyâni, still more perfect than he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built Chain of Worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the Astral merges into Physical Evolution. Of this Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey, it says. But now see the contradiction.

Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club‐mosses, some of them generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the Carboniferous epoch, for:

The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species.... Sub‐kingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The Globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus ... the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas.... The Arachnida, the highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus differing from its living congeners only in ... the eyes. [etc.]

All of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter’s authoritative statement about the Foraminifera:

There is no evidence of any fundamental modification or advance in the foraminiferous type from the palæozoic period to the present time.... The foraminiferous fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous period; but _there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type_.(584)

Now, as in the Foraminifera, Protozoa of the lowest type of life, mouthless and eyeless, there is no indication of change except their now greater variety—so man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his palæolithic ancestor being even found superior in some respects to his present frame. Where is, then, the uniformity of law which is claimed—the _absolute rule_ for one species shading off into another and thus, by insensible gradations, into higher types? We see Sir William Thomson admitting as much as 400,000,000 years for the time since the surface of the Globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living things;(585) and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so‐called “Age of Reptiles,” we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching _its highest development_. We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period:

We find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from previously existing forms ... Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains.

And, subsequently, we are notified of:

The gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval Man himself may claim to have been evolved.(586)

He _may_; but no one, except a Materialist, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the quadrumanous order, than that primeval man—who has _remained stationary_ in his human specialization since the first fossil skeleton found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type—has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape.

That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through stages indistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and _at last the human type_,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Hæckel, in his _Schöpfungsgeschichte_, shows a double drawing representing two embryos—that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, with the exception of a slight difference in the head, which is larger and wider about the brain in the man, are indistinguishable.

In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal, and finally of man.

If we take him up at the more advanced stage, where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form, we find that for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks’ growth _between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them_. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail, hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy.(587)

Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile—a Nâga, instead of coupling man with the Quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the latter, if not more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to Æsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it from prehistoric times, it is no new discovery.(588)

As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in itself _the totality of the kingdoms of nature_, and since it seems to be a “persistent type” of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern Philosophies believe in Evolution, which Manu and Kapila(589) give with far more clearness than any Scientist does at present. No need to repeat what has been fully debated in _Isis Unveiled_, as the reader may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rest, in our earlier volumes.(590) But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, “from the structureless Amœba to man,” are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre‐Silurian epochs, in the sea or land‐ mud. The Occultists believe in an _Inherent Law of Progressive Development_.(591) Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself; for we find him stating that, since _there can be no advantage_ “to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm ... to become highly organized,” therefore, “natural selection,” _not necessarily including progressive development_—leaves the animalcule and the worm, the “persistent types,” quiet.(592)

There does not appear much _uniform_ law in such behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some _super_‐physical selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern Occultists would call the “Law of Retardation,” may have something to do with it.

But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance to his law as is now given to it by his atheistic followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive:

First, on account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; secondly, on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to use—nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two‐ thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says: “For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; _of this history we possess the last volume alone_, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, _only here and there a short chapter has been preserved_; and of each page _only here and there a few lines_.”(593)

It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride, or unreasonable belief in man’s representing even here on Earth—in _our_ period, perhaps—the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own; for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” which will prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palæontologists. Believing as we do that man has, during the preceding Rounds, evolved from, and passed through, the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on Earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the Orang Outang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would most irresistibly forward the Occult Doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man. One may even enquire how it is that Biologists and Anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape—how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory—unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a _non_‐precedent in Nature, quite a _special_ and unique case. And that is what all this leads Physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape, not man, which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance. The Pithecoid is _an accidental creation_, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.

The Occult Doctrine is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying Law in Nature, the latter having no personal “special design,” but

## acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole Manvantaric

period and deals with the land‐worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same Evolutionary Law, and both have to progress according to Karmic Law. Both have started from the same Neutral Centre of Life and both have to re‐merge into it at the consummation of the Cycle.

It is not denied that in the preceding Round man _was_ a gigantic ape‐like creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only—the middle, or the transition, point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man during the first two and a half Root‐Races what he is now. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the Secondary period, as we claim.

Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult Teaching, “a God on Earth who had fallen into Matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma, and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the _actual_ Man and his Inner Nature; the Fall mentioned above having left no “original sin” on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with.

Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc—which is centrifugal for Spirit and centripetal for Matter—and those he is preparing to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces—viz., Matter will become centrifugal and Spirit centripetal—that all such transformations _are next in store for the anthropoid apes also_; all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round—for these will all be men in the Fifth Round, just as the present men inhabited ape‐like forms in the Third, the preceding Round.

Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples—“blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it—of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub‐races of the Fourth Root‐Race during the period of what is called the “fall into generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an _accident_, a cross‐breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume, it is the speechless animal that first began sexual connection, for it was the first to separate into male and female. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow this bestial example—as is now shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in woman. The ape is, indeed, as remarked in _Isis Unveiled_:

A transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family‐_a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter_.(594)

The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the “Egos” of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the _latest_ Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human “Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam’s _first_ wife, whom the Talmud describes as a “charming” woman, “with long wavy hair,” _i.e._—a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael‐Lilith, or man‐animal united, a being called, in the _Zohar_, Hayo Bischat, the Beast or Evil Beast. It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals, or men of a lower order, in the Fifth Round, while the Adepts of a certain School hope that some of the “Egos” of the apes of a higher intelligence will reäppear at the close of the Sixth Root‐Race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Genera and species of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown—man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root‐Race likewise, as well as after every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in, the latter. In the Sixth Root‐Race, the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms—though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches—will develop from the “cast off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were no apes before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the Monads of the unprogressed men of our Race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated Baboon.

This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on Earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation” or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant _ex nihilo_.

This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter.

A Panoramic View Of The Early Races.

There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first “mindless” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later Lemurians; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.

As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are “productions of blind natural forces,” we are assured by some; “quite modern” we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by Sceptic and Materialist, and made subservient to the _Bible_ in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian Deluge theory, it is declared by the Christian clergy to be “the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed Continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of Modern Science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the Scientists as a dream.

Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. But Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the _Purânas_, nor anywhere else. But with only one of the Esoteric keys in hand, it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless “Lands of the Gods,” Devas and Munis described in the _Purânas_, in their Varshas, Dvîpas, and Zones. Their Shveta‐dvîpa, during the early days of Lemuria, stood out like a giant‐peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis, after the disappearance of Lemuria, when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half‐sunk.

It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three Races‐except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the First had no history of its own. Of Race the Second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans only, before the history of our own Race, the Fifth, can be attempted.

What is known of other Continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early Races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of Materialistic Science is daubed with the contemptuous term “superstition.” The wise men of to‐day will believe nothing. Plato’s “winged” and “hermaphrodite” races, and his Golden Age, under the reign of Saturn and the Gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to their _new_ place in Nature; our Divine Races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of “sea slime”!

Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber:

The _fictions_ of ancient poetry ... will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.

However one‐sided the efforts of the learned author of _A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri_—efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old Paganism, “to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture”—time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that “truth” by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of Archaic Paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri—the most mysterious Gods of antiquity—has been thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all of these scholars, from first to last, had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter, as follows:

We have no reason to think that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon _a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first_ [the Fourth in Esoteric Teaching] _race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge_.(595)

To this, Faber adds:

I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly indeed in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of the scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlantians were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phenicians, and the Egyptians.(596)

In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the Giants.(597) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French _confrère_, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indicopleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah—that he “formerly inhabited the _island_ Atlantis.” This island, whether it was the “Poseidonis” mentioned in _Esoteric Buddhism_, or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.

No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, which they had the same right to do as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a Giant, as Faber shows; and if a Giant, then why is he not shown as such in _Genesis_?(598)

Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and _post‐diluvian_ nation, which, however, as he says, certainly flourished before the foundation of the Hindû, Egyptian, and Phœnician empires. In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post‐diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was _sunk_ under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of Science, who will accept neither the tradition that several Continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric Cycle—it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindûs, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Âryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses—as every Initiate would—the two Continents, and assigns to the small island which last sunk, all the events pertaining to the two enormous Continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the _first couple_, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In so saying, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to “Earth,” he means Matter, as the Atlanteans were really the first purely _human_ and _terrestrial_ Race—those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.

Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated Adept, about the history of the Third Race after its “Fall,” though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations—all of which was based upon, and followed the early Âryan calculations—to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root‐Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.(599) It is only when the latter has reached its full human period that a beginning can be made, without the uninitiated reader finding himself hopelessly bewildered.

The Third Race _fell_—and created no longer; it _begat_ its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation, it begat, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “Lords Gods” of the _Bible_, the “Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, had warned it to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature; but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness—we must not say sin—of what they had done, only when too late; after the Angelic Monads from higher Spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The Doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on Earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various “Fires” are latent, and in others they are

## active. The _Vital_ Fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of

them. But no animal has the three higher “principles” awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus _non‐existing_. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose Shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in Matter. But as said in _Pymander_:

This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature(600) being mingled with Man(601) brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the _essence of the Seven_ [Pitris, or Governors] and her own; the _Fire_ and the _Spirit_ and _Nature_ [the Noumenon of Matter]; which [commingling] forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and positive] according to the essences of the Seven Governors.(602)

Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,(603) the “Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World, “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that:

Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.

It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior “mirror,” and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the _Desatir_:

All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is the _shadow of something that is in the superior spheres_. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.

In the Kabalistic books, in the _Zohar_ prëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the “Shadow” (Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.

The Third Race was prëeminently the bright “Shadow,” at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was “created” by the Elements and was not born.

The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. The _mutilation_ of Uranus by his son Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was universal(604) it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed, “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme,(605) who, however, does not attempt to explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by _destroying all his children as soon as born_. Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space, or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial “men” from themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolve _their_ progeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus (_Chronos_) Time,(606) who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—‐in Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of evolution.

This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again. As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create real _human_ “men.”(607) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.(608) Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,(609) and varies from Zeus, the great “Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly Man” in _Pymander_; and even in the _Bible_ he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “Sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely _human_ Atlantean Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be read in Hesiod, who tells us that:

The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an admixture of _two_ elements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron Age.(610)

After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.(611) Hesiod calls this present of the _first woman_ “a fatal gift.” It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of [divine creative] fire.” Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean _Vendidâd_.

Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, the _Rig Veda_, the _Zend Avesta_, etc., but no _first_ man is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the _Bible_.(612) Everywhere the man of _our_ Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.(613) Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;(614) and Pindar echoes the statement.(615) Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah’s,(616) ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram’zimas, the “master of all,” advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.(617) As well understood by the author of _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says:

The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever‐decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is extreme. “They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown.”(618) The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes,(619) or under the walls of Troy.(620)

Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated in the classics. But this is all “mythology” and poetry. What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their own imagination.

40. THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH(621) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. “WE ARE THE KINGS;(622) WE ARE THE GODS” (_A_).

41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK UPON. WIVES FROM THE MINDLESS, THE NARROW‐HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE, ALSO KHADO,(623) WITH LITTLE MINDS (_B_).

42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR THE HUMAN BODY. MALE AND FEMALE THEY WORSHIPPED (_C_). THEN THE THIRD EYE ACTED NO LONGER (_D_).

(_a_) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was—pride! It is the memory of this Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, which has lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and has found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid, and at the same time distorted, legends. Anyone who has read and studied the Commentaries on the Archaic Doctrine, will easily recognize in some of these Atlanteans the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all those _tutti quanti_ of “accursed memory,” as theological literature expresses it; of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this naturally leads us to enquire into the religious ethics of these early Races, mythical as they may be.

What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, had any; for they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe _on faith_. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever‐present, as also the ever to be unknown and invisible, All, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his _inner_ God, each felt he was a Man‐God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower “principles” by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From “Sons of Light and Wisdom” they ended by becoming the “Sons of Darkness.” They fell in the battle of mortal life with Life Immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.(624)

At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root‐Race had thus no beliefs that could be called _religion_. That is to say, he was not only ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” but even of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians from the very beginning of their intellectual life, had a religion, and a most beautiful one. Had they not their bright Gods of the Elements around them, and even within themselves?(625) Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tended by, those who had given them being and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into Matter could never have been achieved, nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super‐ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner “principles” with a portion, or rather, a reflection, of that essence. The Dhyânîs of the Seven Heavens—the seven planes of Being—are the Noumena of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of Nature—the grosser effects of which we perceive in what Science is pleased to call “modes of motion,” the imponderable forces and what not—are the still higher Noumena of still higher Hierarchies.

It was the “Golden Age” in those days of old, the Age when the “Gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.” When it ceased, the Gods departed—_i.e._, became invisible—and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms—the Elements.

It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi‐divine man after his separation into sexes—hence the first‐begotten and humanly‐born mortals—who became the first “sacrificers” to the _God of Matter_. They stand, in the dim far‐away past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,(626) as the first Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter—a worship which very soon degenerated into _self‐worship_, and thence led to phallicism, which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolism of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve _became matter_, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel—the latter the life‐bearing soil, the former “the tiller of that ground or field.”

Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the Ray of which man feels within himself—or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark, cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, the “mighty men ... of renown” in those days,(627) who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim, Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.

Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal God. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon, and, so to say, blended with, astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors—the Hyperborean Continent; the Atlanteans, toward the South Pole, the “_Pit_,” cosmically and terrestrially—whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two Poles were denominated, by the Ancients, Dragons and Serpents—hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the “Sons of God”—Sons of Spirit and Matter—the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of the dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the “Fallen Angels” in its Esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man’s self‐consciousness; it is the support on which hinges his entire Life‐Cycle—the history of his evolution and growth.

On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of Esoteric Anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into various contrasted aspects.

The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so much space is devoted to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject every time it presents itself. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The “Fallen Angels,” so‐called, are _Humanity_ itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no being _before_ the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart; it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, “_Demon est Deus inversus_,” finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.

Thus it has now become self‐evident that, postulating as we do, (_a_) the appearance of Man before that of other Mammalia, and even before the Ages of the huge Reptiles; (_b_) Periodical Deluges and Glacial Periods owing to the Karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (_c_) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a “supernatural” Being, though it is only super‐_human_—our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of Mankind in the Third Race—all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara—owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings “hypostasizing” into their Fifth Principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that these Angels are identical with their “Fallen” Spirits, than the Esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.(628) The _Divine_ Man dwelt in the animal, and therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution—when also “all the animal creation was _untied_,” and males were attracted to females—_that race fell_; not because they had eaten of the Fruit of Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub‐ races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyân Chohans had incarnated.(629) “When we have ascertained the extent of the universe (and learnt to know all that there is in it) we will multiply our race,” answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated Ascetics will “multiply,” _i.e._, once more produce “mind‐born” immaculate sons—in the Seventh Root‐Race.

It is so stated in the _Vishnu_ and _Brahmâ Purânas_, in the _Mahâbhârata_(630) and in the _Harivamsha_. In one portion of the _Pushkara Mâhâtmya_, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will‐born progeny, the “Sons of passive Yoga,” will not create men, “_converts half himself into a female_ by whom he begets daughters,” the future females of the Third Race which begat the Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In the _Vishnu Purâna_ it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.(631)

Happily for the Human Race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the highest Dhyânîs (intellectually and spiritually) before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub‐races—save some of the lowest—of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, the “Seeds of the _Trinity of Wisdom_” had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same Great Personality to step _ad libitum_ from one worn‐out body into another.

(_b_) The first War that Earth knew, the first shedding of human gore, was the result of man’s eyes and senses being opened, which made him see that the daughters of his brethren were fairer than his own—and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race was born. The Titans or Giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race—that of the Giants.

For “there _were_ Giants” in the days of old, indeed.(632) The evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same proportionate size in the flora going _pari passu_ with the fauna. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the Carboniferous period.

Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works—in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity—contain references to Giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Râkshasas of Lankâ—the opponents conquered by Râma. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments’ attention.

Are Giants A Fiction?

Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill‐digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants,” in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier’s later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape‐theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray “_a tendency to revert to the original type_,” they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well‐known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were “in the earth in those days” of old, the _Bible_ alone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.

Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who, though believing too piously in the _Bible_ and Noah’s Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men of _high stature_.(633)

The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a “tall stature” to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily “Noah’s”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.

As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,(634) if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a “sarcophagus of giants” found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty‐two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus.(635) Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class _all_ these men as either fools or liars?

Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.(636) Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work, _Les Volcans de la Grèce_, that:

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.(637)

In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in the _Bible_ and tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the “mighty ones,” the Rephaim, the spectres or the “phantoms,” the Nephilim, or the “fallen ones” (_irruentes_), are shown as if identical, though they are “all _men_,” since the _Bible_ calls them the primitive and the mighty ones—_e.g._, Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two _Phantom_ (Astral) Races, to the “Fallen” Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the “original sin.” “Ye shall be as Gods,” says the Serpent of _Genesis_ to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of _false divinities_.(638) Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of _images_, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.(639) It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical “Serpent,” as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological “Fall” of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to them _prior_ to their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that “Adam knew Eve his wife.” We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead‐letter of the Hebrew _Bible_, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.

It was only after his defection from the Neo‐Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translate _gigantes_ by _serpentes_, explaining that “serpents and giants signify _demons_.”(640)

We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the _Bible_, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in _Genesis_. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah’s Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of the _Shoo‐King_,(641) we read:

When the Miao‐tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),(642) _according to our ancient documents_, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy‐Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang‐ty [a King of the _Divine_ Dynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no more _going up and down_!(643)

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.

As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and Ethereal _Divine_ Man was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man‐, or hero‐worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy _which has never died since that period_. As the _Catechism_ of the Inner Schools says:

_The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin‐men [Kumâra]_(_644_)_ four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, __“__He is dead__”__; behold, he is alive __ and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand._(645)

It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the _Linga Purâna_, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only after _getting married_ and being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the “Four” is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.

We have now to examine the nature of the “Sons of the Flame” and of “Dark Wisdom,” as well as the _pros_ and _cons_ of the Satanic assumption.

Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls “The Curse after the Fall,”(646) are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the “Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],” and pronounced his “curse,” which “the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because _his_ man [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,” for which Hea expresses the desire that “_wisdom and knowledge_ hostilely may they injure him [man].”(647)

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly‐acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter of _Genesis_. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.

But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being upon and _in_ man—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of “creation” on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.

The early Atlanto‐Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic “Fall,” which has transformed the “First‐born” of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the “Pagans”—_i.e._, if the accounts given in the _Book of Enoch_,(648) and in _Hermes_, in _Purânas_ and _Bible_ are taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:

Sentences such as, “In his [Satan’s] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,” etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super‐human, procreation. Henceforth, “man will _beget_, not _create_.”(649) But as, by so doing, he has to use his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.

The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels most _graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth_, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.(650)

This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter of _Genesis_—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the _pre_‐human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—the _Pre_‐Adamite period. But even _Genesis_ begins its _real_ history (Chap. vi) by the giants of “those days” and the “sons of God” marrying and teaching their wives—the “daughters of men.”

This period is the one described in the _Purânas_; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre‐historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole _personnel_ of the _Brâhmanas_ and _Purânas_—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre‐human period. All these are the _Seed_ of Humanity, so to speak. It is around these “Sons of God,” the “mind‐born” astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the “Shiva Eye” of the ancient Seers—the “Third Eye” of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground‐work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.

But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi‐divine Beings, self‐imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whom _lower, more material_, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of “walking in the air,” and the “greatest _kindness to mortals_;” but with no _mind_—only animal instinct.(651)

(_c_) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that “miracle of miracles,” as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro‐Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principle _knew_ at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever‐growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the “principles” had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre‐natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred “monsters”—_i.e._, men of distinct varieties from themselves.

Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by the _Sovereign Powers_, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. They _commanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity in_ the stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to deal _not with men as we are_ but with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character of _magic_ and _sorcery_....

And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre‐historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence of _facts_ and showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of “Notes on Aristotle’s Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,” in _Mind_:

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century, B.C., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to accept _fables_ so easily.

Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those “children of Heaven and Earth,” were indeed marked with a character of _sorcery_; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so‐ called “animals,” and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross‐breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the “animals,” were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute _à priori_ denial of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new “Incarnate” bred, was called an “animal,” not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from the _filling_ and perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,” remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross‐breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the only _human_ family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles as _speaking animals_ and no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is an _inferior_ race. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded as _men_ at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals “fair to look upon,” as a biped:

_Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair._

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictly _inter se_—_i.e._, in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearance _on this Earth_ of the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, “appears to be a _primâ facie_ deduction rather than an absolute law” even now. He shows that:

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare‐rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from “three distinct species of fossil‐ oxen, the _Bos primigenius_, _Bos longifrons_ and _Bos frontosus_.”(652) Yet some of those species, _as the ape family_, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

Thus Mr. Darwin’s remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—_natura non facit saltum_, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the “missing link” in our Fourth Round geological formations.

We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be _the descendant of man_, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere‐to‐be‐found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:

_Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant‐Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man’s] sires._

Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l’Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary‐Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.

(_d_) “Then the Third Eye acted no longer,” says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?

A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

The Races With The “Third Eye.”

The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull’s‐eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.(653)

It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, _human_ side of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.

But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, that _it was not so_. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom‐like in their constitution, organism, and _shape_ even, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store‐house, so to speak, of _all the seeds of life_ for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.(654) As Ain Suph is “One, _notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him_,”(655) so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.

As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. He _unites in himself all forms_.(656)

The mystery of the _earthly_ man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.(657)

The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the _Divine_ Man—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of “Esoteric Studies,” the _new type_, at the beginning of every Round.

As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdom _in esse_, _i.e._, he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have been _the_ new type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast‐off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant‐kingdom below.(658)

If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the “rings” spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching. Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the “Soul,” for the _Zohar_, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that “the _real_ man is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animal _Unit_, from which the “cast‐off clothes” determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.(659)

Thus, he “created,” for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the _Vendîdâd_ of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and _his_ Ark with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in the _Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_. Open the Mazdean _Vendîdâd_, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,” an Argha or Vehicle.

Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bring _the seeds of men and women_, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind _to be kept inexhaustible there_, so long _as those men shall stay in the Vara_.(660)

Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply means _Man_.(661)

Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a window _self‐shining within_ [which is the Soul].(662)

And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:

Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter’s clay.(663)

The Egyptian ram‐headed God makes man of clay on a potter’s wheel, and so in _Genesis_ do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.

When the “Maker of the material world,” Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light “to the Vara which Yima made,” he answers that:

There are _uncreated_ lights and _created_ lights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].(664)

This is a clear reference to the “Land of the Gods” or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the “uncreated lights” which enlighten man within—his “principles.” Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda’s answer which is forthwith followed by the words:

Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite] _two are born, a male and female_.(665)

The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:

_At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third...._

This is clear, since every “Sun” meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth’s revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?

Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah’s Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:

O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?

Ahura Mazda answered: “It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”(666)

And the note explains:

The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avesta _in the language of birds_.(667)

This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind‐Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed Mystery” it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:

In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (the _souls_ and the angels have their place).(668)

Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the “Bird’s Nest” was, with both, Heaven, and is God’s Bosom, in the _Zohar_. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is called the Bird’s Nest.”(669)

“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,” and that is the Soul from which the She’kheen‐ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.(670)

_The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space_,

—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.

It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Esoterically. And that “tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.

It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.(671) These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindû _Purânas_ and the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super‐human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes, “three‐eyed” mortals.

It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”

In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill‐regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated _ex nihilo_ so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.(672)

The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three‐eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.

To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic _involution_ proceeds on parallel lines with physical _evolution_—that the _inner_ senses, innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply _a phase of the law of growth_, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:

_There were four‐armed human creatures in those early days of the male‐ females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them._(_673_)_ A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages._(_674_)_... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,_(_675_)_ soon disappeared. The double‐faced became the one‐faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the __“__Deva Eye.__”_

Unfortunately not. The “Deva Eye” exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eye _is dead_, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the “four‐armed” men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four‐armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.

Such is the mystery of the _human eye_ that some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists. “The eyes in the human embryo grow _from within without_”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that “our” earliest vertebrate ancestor was a “_transparent_” creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a “transparent creature” once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes _in the epidermis_? If it started _inside_, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester’s extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses “_from within without_,” from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eye _retreated inwards_ when its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.

The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the “Eye of Shiva,” the Tri‐lochana, or “three‐eyed,” thus receives its justification and _raison d’être_: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection between _abnormal_, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be a _sine quâ non_ condition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata, reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful “inductive”

## action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.

All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three‐eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.

It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have a _third_ eye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.(676) The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—_a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well_—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain’s _Anatomy_:

It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.

The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.

The two _optic thalami_, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the _third ventricle_. Behind, the two thalami continue united by the _posterior commissure_, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by the _peduncles of the pineal gland_....

At an early period the _optic tracts_ may be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.

The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.(677)

The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.

It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland the _Seat of the Soul_, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man. Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that “special” locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion “by the _animal spirits_(678) which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”

Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of the _real_ processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding _cyclic_ course of this great Law, they would _know_ instead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern “blind‐force” and “mechanical” processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled for _physical_ use at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd “eye” is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and went _pari passu_ with, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median “eye” at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,(679) and _Vox populi, vox Dei_.

In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one‐eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their “coats of skin,” viz., to evolve, from _within without_, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed(680) later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day, _i.e._, beneath an opaque skin.(681) Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non‐rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and still _is_, in man the organ of _spiritual_ sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.

This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000 years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:

_We [the Fifth Root‐Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see._

Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo‐astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on its _descending_ line. And as we are parallel to it, on the _ascending_, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.

[Illustration: Evolution of Root‐Races in the Fourth Round]

[Transcriber’s Note: The graph shows, to the left, “Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.” To the right is “Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain‐intellectuality.” Below is “Meridian of Races.”]

We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub‐ race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of a Root‐Race. Our Race then has, as a Root‐Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub‐races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub‐races.

It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.

It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore‐part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.

It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.

This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, the _Shan Hai King_, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255 B.C., they may be found in another work, called the _Bamboo Books_, and in a third, the _’Rh Ya_, whose author was “initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122 B.C.” The _Bamboo Books_ contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295 B.C.(682) Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.

Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eye _is indissolubly connected with Karma_. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.

The “Eye of Shiva” did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva‐Man of the Third Race had been made the hand‐ maidens of the newly‐awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no _Fall_. The sin was not in using those newly‐developed powers, but in _misusing_ them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of every _spiritual_ iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma(683) would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term “spiritual” instead of “physical” iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the “Master” Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.

As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.

Questions with regard to Karma and Re‐births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly‐born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma‐Nemesis, whose bond‐maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring‐in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle‐point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.

Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.

It is only the knowledge of the constant re‐births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life‐Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the “Gods” themselves—have to pass through the “Circle of Necessity,” rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terrible _apparent_ injustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one’s ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.(684)

Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably “pious” Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that “such _is the will_ of God.”

Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that God _scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch_! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve’s words:

But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?

Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in “original sin,” in _one_ life _only_ on this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell‐fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian(685)—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man’s unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:

Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast _involved_ The pride of human wisdom, _to confound_ The _daring scrutiny_ and prove _the faith_ Of thy _presuming_ creatures!

Truly a robust “faith” is required to believe that it is “presumption” to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to “perplex” him, and to test a “faith” with which that “Power,” moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.

Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and on life‐experience, in Karma‐Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not the _wave_ which drowns a man, but the _personal_ action of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under the _impersonal_ action of the laws that govern the _ocean’s_ motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow‐men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever‐ present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,(686) for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.

Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re‐birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. The _inner_, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, the _permanent_ Individuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the “spiritual” Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.

The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root‐Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many “Noahs.”

The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned in _Genesis_, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre‐historic “Submerged Continents.” To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.

The Primeval Manus Of Humanity.

Those who are aware that the “Great Flood,” which was connected with the sinking of an entire Continent (save only a few islands) could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago, and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya, or the Fish, Avatâra of Vishnu, may feel perplexed at the apparent discrepancy between the facts stated and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to turn to _The Theosophist_ of July, 1883, for by studying the article therein, on “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” the whole question can be explained to him. It is in the explanation there given, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brâhmans.

For the benefit of those, however, who may not have _The Theosophist_ of that date to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:

Who was Manu, the son of Svâyambhuva? The Secret Doctrine tells us that _this_ Manu was no man, but the representation of the first human races, evolved with the help of the Dhyân Chohans (Devas), at the beginning of the First Round. But we are told in his _Laws_ (i. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa, or “interval from creation to creation”—read rather interval from one _minor_ Pralaya to another(687)—and that “in the present divine age, there have been as yet _seven_ Manus.” Those who know that there are seven Rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now in the Fourth; and who are taught that there are seven Dawns and seven Twilights, or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on, and between, the planets [Globes] there is an “awakening to _illusive_ life,” and an “awakening to _real_ life”; and that, moreover, there are Root‐ Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as Seed‐Manus—_the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming_ Round (or the Shishtas—the surviving fittest(688); a mystery divulged only to those who have passed their third degree in Initiation)—those who have learned all this will be better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the Hindû Sacred Scriptures that, “The first Manu produced _six_ other Manus [_seven_ primary Manus in all], and these produced in their turn each seven other Manus”(689) (_Bhrigu_, i. 61‐63)—the production of the latter standing in the Occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu—the last one, the Progenitor of our Fourth‐Round Humanity—must be the _seventh_, since we are on our Fourth Round,(690) and there is a _Root_‐Manu at Globe A, and a _Seed_‐Manu at Globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a Root‐Manu (Dhyân Chohan) and closes with a Seed‐Manu, so a Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu appear respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human period on any

## particular planet [Globe].(691) It will be easily seen from the

foregoing statement that a Manvantaric period (Manu‐antara) means, as the term implies, the time _between_ the appearance of two Manus or Dhyân Chohans; and hence a Minor Manvantara is the duration of the _seven_ Races on any particular planet [Globe], and a Major Manvantara is the period of one human Round along the Planetary Chain. Moreover, as it is said that each of the seven Manus _creates_ 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 Root‐Races on the seven planets [Globes] during each Round, then every Root‐Race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called “Vaivasvata” and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who in India represents the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah.

But in the Esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our _Fifth_ Race—who saved it from the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth or Atlantean—is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root or Primitive Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root‐Manu.

For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their respective order and in their relation to each Round:

1st Round, 1st (Root) Manu on Planet A—Svâyambhuva. 1st Round, 1st (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Svârochi, or Svârochisha. 2nd Round, 2nd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Auttami. 2nd Round, 2nd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Tâmasa. 3rd Round, 3rd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Raivata. 3rd Round, 3rd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Châkshusha. 4th Round, 4th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Vaivasvata (our Progenitor). 4th Round, 4th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Daksha‐sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Brahma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Dharma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Rudra‐sâvarna. 7th Round, 7th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Rauchya. 7th Round, 7th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Bhautya.

Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root‐Manu of our Fourth Human Wave (the reader must always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while _our_ Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who are made to preside over the seven Races of this our planet [Globe]. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and ever‐recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every Root‐Race. And it is this Vaivasvata—the Hindû ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah and other names—who is the allegorical “Man” who rescued our Race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration.(692)

Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu‐antara, lit., “between two Manus”) as 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human, Man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this Earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, _e.g._, the Manu of the Great Cosmic or Sidereal Flood—a mystery—or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the _Racial_ Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As these several and quite distinct events are purposely blended in the _Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_ in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader’s mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The “blinds” which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric Philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed, and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.

As Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake, remarked: “the first principle in Hindû religious philosophy is _unity in diversity_.” If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, it is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same Logos, the celestial as well as the terrestrial Messengers and Permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of

## activity—conscious during the period of Cosmic Evolution, unconscious

(from our point of view) during Cosmic Rest—for the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which “sleepeth not,” nor is it ever awake, for it is Sat or “Be‐ness,” not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great _Unseen_ Logos, who evolves all the other Logoi; the Primeval Manu who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the _Manifested_ Logos.(693) Hence we learn in the Commentaries that while no Dhyân Chohan, not even the highest, can realize completely

_The condition of the preceding Cosmic Evolution, ... the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences in all the Cosmic Evolutions throughout Eternity._

This is very plain: the first Manu is called Svâyambhuva, the “Self‐ manifested,” the Son of the _Unmanifested_ Father. The Manus are the Creators of the Creators of our First Race—the Spirit of Mankind—which does not prevent the _seven_ Manus from having been the first “Pre‐Adamic” Men on Earth.

Manu declares himself created by Virâj,(694) or Vaishvânara, the Spirit of Humanity,(695) which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic Activity—that Logos or Universal Monad (collective Elohim) which radiates _from within himself_ all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity—Progenitors of the numberless Solar Systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated _human_ Monads of Planetary Chains as well as of every being thereon. Svâyambhuva, or Self‐born, is the name of every Cosmic Monad _which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a Planetary Chain_ (of which Chains there are seven in our System). And the radiations of this Centre become again so many Manus Svâyambhuva (a mysterious generic name, meaning far more than appears), each of them becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity.

As to the question of the four distinct Races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in the subject, except the ethereal bodies of the first Races; and this is a matter of legendary, nevertheless very correct, history. The legend is universal. And if the Western _savant_ pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindûs have, to this day.

Trying to account for the community of legends held by Chinese, Chaldæans, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, in remote antiquity, and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of _Mythical Monsters_ remarks that:

We must ... not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture ... [as in China], the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay, and how much more ... if ... minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, ... the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes.(696)

How many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from the following Stanza of Commentary Twenty‐two:

_During the first seven crores [70,000,000 years] of the Kalpa the Earth and its two Kingdoms [mineral and vegetable], one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi‐ ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore_(_697_)_ the Mother [Earth] grows opaque, and in the fourteenth_(_698_)_ the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of Nature [geological changes] last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals._

_The last change took place nearly twelve crores [120,000,000] of years ago. But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier._

Thus, if we are to believe Esoteric Teaching, _universal_ geological disturbances and changes have not occurred for the last 120 million years, but the Earth, even before that time, was ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about 18,000,000 years ago, after the first great failure of Nature to create beings alone—_i.e._, without the help of the divine “Fashioners”—had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three Races.(699) The actual duration of the first two and a half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The history of the Races begins at the separation of the sexes, when the preceding egg‐bearing androgynous Race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race appeared as an entirely new race _physiologically_. It is this “Destruction” which is allegorically called the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu, or Humanity, remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain.

In the symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for chaotic unsettled Matter—Chaos itself; and Water for the Feminine Principle—the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it:

Ἀρχὴ answers to the Hebrew _rasit_, or Wisdom ... and [at the same time] to the emblem of the female generative power, the _arg_ or _arca_, in which the germ of nature [and of mankind] floats or broods on the great abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane [or racial] cycle.

Archê (Ἀρχὴ) or Ark is also the mystic name of the Divine Spirit of Life which broods over Chaos. Now Vishnu _is_ the Divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of Life—the third Person of the Trimûrti—composed of Brahmâ, the Creator, Shiva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu is shown, in the allegory, under the form of a _Fish_, guiding the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu across the Waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word _Fish_ (as Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, and others have done). Its theological meaning is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus was called the Fish, as were Vishnu and Bacchus; ΙΗΣ, the “Saviour” of Mankind, being but the monogram of the God Bacchus, who was also called ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Fish.(700) Moreover, the Seven Rishis in the Ark symbolized the seven “principles,” which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a _human_, and thus ceased to be a divine creature.

But to return to the Races; details as to the submersion of the Continent inhabited by the Second Root‐Race are not numerous. The history of the Third, or Lemuria, is given, as is also that of Atlantis, but the others are only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary Age (the Eocene).(701) During this Deluge—an actual geological deluge this time—Vaivasvata Manu is also shown saving mankind, allegorically—in reality, a portion of it, the Fourth Race—just as he saved the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,(702) after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, which was known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.

It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. This is the Cataclysm of which the old records, as in the _Book of Enoch_, say, “the ends of the Earth got loose”; and upon which have been built the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deucalion and all the _tutti quanti_ of the Elect Saved. Tradition, not taking into account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both “Deluges” indifferently. Yet there is a great difference. The Cataclysm which destroyed the huge Continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor—the Fourth Continent—was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest Tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, have remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred Records of the East.

Hence, Modern Science denies the existence of Atlantis. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the change of climate to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are others, such as Sir Henry James and Sir John Lubbock,(703) who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the Astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced—only to accept it later on, whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact?

How far our figures agree, or rather disagree, with Modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Volume, where the Geology and Anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the teachings of Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned by the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which, however, calls Atlantis “Lemuria” whenever it accepts such a submerged Continent. With regard to the pre‐human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even prior to the appearance of the “mindless” First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. We might, however, add that what Science, which recognizes _physical man only_, has a right to regard as the _pre‐human_ period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean Race, since it is only then that man became the “complete _organic_ being he is now.” And this would make Adamic Man no older than a few millions of years.(704)

The author of the _Qabbalah_ truly remarks that: “Man to‐day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being‐hood of precedent human life,” or _lives_, rather.

According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam, went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: _Hesed_, Habel, _Ge’boor‐ah_, Qai‐yin and _Ra’h‐min_ Seth. These three were divided into ... 70 species, called; the principal roots of the human race.(705)

Said Rabbi Yehudah: “How many garments [of the incorporeal man] are these which are crowned (from the day man was created)?” Said R. El’azar: “The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the _Rua’h_ spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the _Neshamah_ is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings ...: and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the _Nephesh_ is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world.”(706)

This relates to the Races, their “garments,” or degree of materiality, and to the three “principles” of man in their three vehicles.

Stanza XI. The Civilization And Destruction Of The Fourth And Fifth Races.

43. The Lemuro‐Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization. The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. 44. Statues, witnesses to the size of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans. 45. Lemuria destroyed by fire, Atlantis by water. The Flood. 46. The destruction of the Fourth Race and of the last antediluvian monster‐animals.

43. THEY(707) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT OF THE FIRES(708) VOMITED, OUT OF THE WHITE STONE(709) OF THE MOUNTAINS AND OF THE BLACK STONE,(710) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM.

At this point, as the history of the first two _human_ races—the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans—proceeds, we have to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively.

Here reference is also made to the _divine_ Dynasties, which were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldæans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their _human_ Kings. These are still believed in by the modern Hindûs, and are enumerated in their sacred books. Of these, however, we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern Geologists are now being driven into admitting the demonstrable existence of submerged continents. But to confess the existence of the continents is quite a different thing from admitting that there were men on them during the early geological periods(711)—ay, men and civilized nations, not Palæolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their _divine_ Rulers, built large cities, cultivated Arts and Sciences, and knew Astronomy, Architecture and Mathematics to perfection. The primeval civilization of the Lemurians did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final physiological evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Nevertheless, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub‐race building their first rock‐cities out of stone and lava.(712) One of these great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow strip of sterile ground, and was totally destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the last sub‐races of the Lemurians; and an Occultist, therefore, shows no surprise on learning that the stone relics which were found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are

Very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru,(713)

and also that they are in the _Cyclopean style_. The first large cities, however, were built in that region of the Continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection on the former, and Karma—its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the Spark projected into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long generations of bestiality.(714) Whereas the Âryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated.(715)

It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements—his brothers, more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them, built cities, and cultivated Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, notwithstanding civilization, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, the “builders” could now obtain their powers only gradually; even those they did obtain being generally used for conquest over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one’s own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking.

“There is no such thing as magic” philosophizes “She”—the author forgetting that “magic” in early days still meant the great Science of Wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought—“though,” she adds, “there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.”(716) But they have become “Secrets” only in our Race, and were public property with the Third.

Gradually, mankind decreased in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save only the Hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—called later the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist.”

Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub‐race. But, as said in the Commentary:

_The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island [the primitive Shveta‐dvîpa] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria’s] Elect, had taken shelter on the Sacred Island [now the __“__fabled__”__ Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert], while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground [__“__cave‐men__”__], when the golden yellow Race [the Fourth] became in its turn __“__black with sin.__”__ From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Shveta‐dvîpa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya [?], east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted.... The Demi‐Gods of the Third had made room for the Semi‐Demons of the Fourth Race. Shveta‐dvîpa,_(_717_)_ the White Island, had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dvîpa (Pushkara) and Râkshasas from the seventh climate replaced the Sâdhus and the Ascetics of the Third Age, who had descended to them from other and higher regions...._

In their dead letter, the _Purânas_, in general, read like an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. And if one were to read the first three chapters of Book II of _Vishnu Purâna_ and accept _verbatim_ the geography, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata’s seven sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvîpas (Islands or Continents); and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnîdhra, the King of Jambu‐dvîpa, apportioned Jambu‐dvîpa among his nine sons; and then how Nâbhi, _his_ son, had a hundred sons and apportioned lands to all these in his turn—he would most likely throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the student of Esotericism will understand that, when the _Purânas_ were written, their true meaning was intended to be clear only to the Initiated Brâhmans, and so the compilers wrote these works allegorically and would not give the _whole_ truth to the masses. And he will, further, explain to the Orientalists—who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, have made and still are making such a mess of it—that the first three chapters purposely confuse the following subjects and events:

I. The series of Kalpas, or Ages, and also of Races, are never taken into account; and events which have happened in one are allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying:

Whenever any contradictions in different Purânas are observed, they are ascribed ... to differences of Kalpas and the like.

II. The several meanings of the words “Manvantara” and “Kalpa” or Age, are withheld, the general signification only being given.

III. In the genealogy of the Kings and the geography of their dominions, the Varshas (countries) and Dvîpas are all regarded as terrestrial regions.

Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is permissible and easy to show that:

(_a_) The Seven Dvîpas apportioned to Priyavrata’s septenary progeny refer to several localities—first of all to our Planetary Chain. In this Jambu‐ dvîpa alone represents our Globe, while the six others are the (to us) invisible companion Globes of the Chain. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu‐dvîpa “is _in the centre of all_ these”—the so‐called “Insular Continents”—and is surrounded by a _sea of salt water_ (Lavana), whereas Plaksha, Shâlmalia, Kusha, Krauncha, Shâka, and Pushkara, are surrounded severally “by great seas ... of sugar‐cane juice, of wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk,” etc., and such like metaphorical names.(718)

(_b_) Bhâskara Âchârya, who uses expressions from the books of the Secret Doctrine, in his description of the sidereal position of all these Dvîpas, speaks of: “the sea of milk and the sea of curds,” etc., as meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of Nebulæ; the more so, since he calls “the country to the south of the equator” Bhûr Loka, that to the north Bhuva, Svar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya Lokas; and adds: “These lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits,” _i.e._, they are various “Paradises.”(719)

(_c_) That this geographical distribution of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to _our_ Round, or even to _our_ Races—the name of Bhârata‐varsha (India) notwithstanding—is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of _Vishnu Purâna_, who tells us that:

Bharata [the son of Nâbhi, who gave his name to Bhârata‐varsha or India] ... consigned the kingdom to his son Sumati ... and abandoned his life at ... Shâlagrâma. He was afterwards born again, as a Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics.... Under these princes [Bharata’s descendants] Bhârata‐varsha was divided into nine portions; and their descendants successively held possession of the country for seventy‐one periods of the aggregate of the four ages (or for the reign of a Manu) [representing a Mahâyuga of 4,320,000 years].(720)

But having said so much, Parâshara suddenly explains that:

This was the creation of Svâyambhuva (Manu), by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the _first_ Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varâha [_i.e._, the _Boar_ incarnation, or Avatâra].

Now every Brâhman knows that _our_ Humanity began on this Earth (or Round) _only with Vaivasvata Manu_. And if the Western reader turns to the sub‐ section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,”(721) he will see that Vaivasvata is the _seventh_ of the fourteen Manus who preside over our Planetary Chain during its Life Cycle; but as every Round has two Manus (a Root‐ and a Seed‐Manu), he is the Root‐Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only incongruity, and speculates that:

The patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas, and [thus] have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods.

It is nothing of the kind; but as Orientalists know nothing of the Secret Teaching, they persist in taking everything _literally_, and then turn round and abuse the writers for that which they do not comprehend!

These Genealogies embrace a period of _three and a half_ Rounds; they speak of _pre‐human_ periods, and explain the descent into generation of every Manu—the first manifested sparks of the One Unity—and, furthermore, show each of these human Sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first, the Pitaras, the human Ancestors, then by the human Races. No Being can become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human Cycles. Therefore the Shloka says:

Happy are those who are born, even from the [latent] condition of gods, _as men_, in Bhârata‐varsha; as that is the way to ... final liberation.(722)

In Jambu‐dvîpa Bhârata is considered _the best of its divisions_, because it is _the land of works_. In it alone it is that:

The succession of four Yugas, or ages, the Krita, the Tretâ, the Dvâpara, and Kali take place.

When, therefore, Parâshara, on being asked by Maitreya “to give him the descriptions of the Earth,” returns again to the enumeration of the same Dvîpas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Svâyambhuva Manvantara—it is simply a “blind”; yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub‐divisions, islands and continents, some of which were called by the names of celestial Lokas, and by those of other Globes. Hence the confusion.

All these islands and lands are called by the Orientalists “mythical” and “fabulous.”(723) Very true, some are _not of this Earth_, but they still exist. The White Island and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since Atala was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the Fifth Race to the Land of Sin—Atlantis, in general, not to Plato’s island alone; and since the White Island was (_a_) the Shveta‐dvîpa of Theogony, and (_b_) Shâka‐dvîpa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions rather) in its beginnings. This was when it yet had its “seven holy rivers that washed away all sin,” and its “seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue,” as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas—that caste which even the Brâhmans acknowledged as not inferior to their own, and which was the nursery of the first Zarathushtra. The Brâhmans are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on Nârada’s advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun to the temple built by Sâmba the _reputed_ son of Krishna, for in reality the latter had none. In this the _Purânas_ are _historical_, allegory notwithstanding, and Occultism is stating facts.

The whole story is told in _Bhavishya Purâna_. It is stated that Sâmba having been cured of leprosy by Sûrya (the Sun), built a temple and dedicated it to the Deity. But when he was looking for pious Brâhmans to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God, Nârada—the virgin Ascetic who is found in every age in the _Purânas_—advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brâhmans to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Sâmba to Gauramukha (White‐face), the Purohita, or family priest, of Ugrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed Sâmba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Sûrya, to discharge the duty. But as he was ignorant of the place where they lived, Sûrya, the Sun himself, directs Sâmba to Shâka‐dvîpa _beyond the salt water_. Then Sâmba performs the journey, using Garuda, the Great Bird, the vehicle of Vishnu and Krishna, who transports him to the Magas, etc.(724)

Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Nârada, who is found reborn in every Cycle (or Race), in addition to Garuda—the symbol Esoterically of the Great Cycle—give the key to the allegory; nevertheless the Magas are the Magi of Chaldæa, and their caste and worship were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Shâka‐dvîpa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Shâka‐dvîpa are the forefathers of the fire‐worshipping Parsîs. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing periods of hundreds of thousands of years this time into only a few centuries; in spite of Nârada and Sâmba, they carry the event only to the days of the flight of the Parsîs to Gujerat. This is simply absurd, as this took place only in the eighth century of our era. True, the Magas are credited in the _Bhavishya Purâna_ with still living in Shâka‐dvîpa in the day of Krishna’s “son,” nevertheless the last portion of that Continent—Plato’s “Atlantis”—had perished 6,000 years before. They were Magas “late of” Shâkadvîpa, and in those days lived in Chaldæa. This, again, is an intentional confusion.

The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet were they the human Asuras and the Râkshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the future Continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the ocean floors. Lemuria, as we have called the Continent of the Third Race, was then a gigantic land.(725) It covered the whole area from the foot of the Himâlayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the Great Desert of Shamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam [? Annam]. From thence, it stretched south across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go south, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; and from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean, beyond Rapa‐nui (Teapy, or Easter Island) which now lies in latitude 26°S., and longitude 110°W.(726) This statement seems to be corroborated by Science—even if only partially. When discussing continental trends, and showing the infra‐Arctic masses trending generally with the meridian, several ancient continents are mentioned, though inferentially. Among such are mentioned the “Mascarene continent,” which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, and another ancient continent which “stretched from Spitzbergen to the Straits of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom.”(727) This corroborates the Occult teaching which says that what are now the polar regions were formerly the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity, and the tomb of the bulk of the Mankind of that region during the Third Race, when the gigantic Continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the Commentary, to a decrease of velocity in the Earth’s rotation:

_When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities [the poles] agree with its middle Circle [the equator], when it runs slower and tilts in every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth. The waters flow toward the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle Belt [equatorial lands], while those at the ends are subject to Pralayas by submersion._

And again:

_Thus the Wheel [the Earth] is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon, for the breath of its waters [tides]. Toward the close of the age [Kalpa] of a great [Root‐] Race, the Regents of the Moon [the Fathers, or Pitris] begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the Wheel about its Belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the extremities [poles], new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in._

We have only to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very clearly. Scientists—_modern_ Specialists—have ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planet, and have noted the shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically.(728) Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward to the periods of the Earth’s first incrustation.(729) Therefore it seems easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statement. We propose to treat of this at greater length in the Addenda.

Some Theosophists who have understood from a few words in _Esoteric Buddhism_ that “old continents” which have been submerged will reäppear, have asked the question: “What will Atlantis be like when raised?” Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were identically the _same_ lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would, indeed, be _barren for ages_. But because the Atlantic sea‐bottom is covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming—a new “cretaceous formation” of strata, in fact—that is no reason why, when the time for a new Continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion and upraising of the sea‐bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the surface. The Racial Cataclysms are not a Noah’s Deluge of forty days—a kind of Bombay monsoon.

That the periodical sinking and reäppearance of the mighty Continents, now called Atlantis and Lemuria by modern writers, is no fiction, will be demonstrated in the Section in which all the evidence has been collated together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dvîpas) are mentioned in the _Sûrya Siddhânta_, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean Astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out to be “reïncarnated” in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these “Sacred Islands” Atlantean—as is done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindû Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Svâyambhuva Manu, to his seven sons—was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these Islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose Continent had been submerged in its turn. When first mentioned by Parâshara in the _Vishnu Purâna_, the seven refer to an Esoteric Doctrine which is explained further on. In this connection, of all the seven Islands, Jambu‐dvîpa (our Globe) is the only one that is terrestrial. In the _Purânas_ every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that Primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region, which, when the magnolia blossomed where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a Continent. Science speaks of an “ancient continent” which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse‐shoe‐like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring’s Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi‐circle. This Continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains reäppeared again on the face of the oceans. Therefore, though it can be said, without departing from truth, that Atlantis is included in the seven great Insular Continents since the Fourth Race Atlanteans came into possession of some of the Lemurian relics, and settling on the islands, included them among _their_ lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the Cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on this remnant of Lemuria, but only to perish thereon, when it was destroyed in one day by volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain Geographers and Geologists; to the Occultists, however, it is _history_. What does Science know to the contrary?

Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, _the latter was believed to be part of India_.... Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre‐historic ages ... was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the “Brâhmans of Upper India,” stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Shamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the _future_ Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America.(730)

This was written from the words of a Master—a rather doubtful authority for the Materialists and Sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather, Ernst Hæckel, who, in _his_ distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost _verbatim_:

It would seem that the region on the earth’s surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the _closely related catarrhine apes_ [!!] took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished], or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean which, lying to the South of the Asia of to‐day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to Upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa.(731)

In the epoch of which we are treating, the Continent of Lemuria had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. Nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe, existed in those days; all of them slumbering as yet on the ocean‐floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the Cis‐Himâlayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond them stretched the “lotus leaves” of Shveta‐dvîpa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Island, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilization of the Third Race. It was a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the ocean‐floor, which raised this small relic of the Archaic Ages—after it had been submerged with the rest—untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of north polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race.

In this we are again corroborated to a degree by Materialistic Science. Hæckel, when speaking of Blumenbach’s brown or Malay race, and the Australians and Papuans, remarks:

There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island‐world, that _seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent_.(732)

It certainly was “a gigantic and continuous continent,” for, during the Third Race, it stretched east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie. The present Australia was but a portion of it, and in addition to this there are a few surviving islands strewn hither and thither on the face of the Pacific, and a large strip of California, which belonged to it. Funnily enough, Hæckel, in his fantastic _Pedigree of Man_, considers:

The Australians of to‐day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged [?!], of that _second_ branch of the primitive human race ... that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man’s infancy, and seems to have been the parent of all the other straight‐haired races of men.... The one, woolly‐ haired, migrated in part westwards [_i.e._, to Africa and eastwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no existence as yet].... The other, straight‐haired, was evolved farther to the North, in Asia, and ... peopled Australia.(733)

As writes a Master:

Behold the relics of that once great nation [Lemuria of the Third Race] in _some_ of the flat‐headed aborigines of your Australia.(734)

But they belong to the last remnants of the seventh sub‐race of the Third. Professor Hæckel must also have _dreamt_ a dream and seen for once a _true_ vision!

It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the ancestors of those, whom we term the most ancient peoples of the world—now called respectively the Âryan Hindûs, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phœnicians on the other. These were governed by the Divine Dynasties, _i.e._, Kings and Rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance _as it was then_, but who were Beings from Spheres higher and more celestial than our own Sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is, of course, useless to attempt to force the existence of such Beings on sceptics. _Their_ greatest pride consists in proving their patronymic denomination as Catarrhinides—a fact which they try to demonstrate on the alleged authority of the Coccyx appended to their Os Sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if it were only long enough, they would wag with joy and for ever, in honour of its eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their Ape‐ancestors as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets Theosophists and students of the Occult Sciences right on this point.

If we regard the second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the _really human race_ with solid bones, then Hæckel’s surmise that “the evolution of the primitive men took place ...in _either_ Southern Asia or ... Lemuria”—Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of the question—is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, just as the evolution of the First Race, from the bodies of the Pitris, took place on seven distinctly separated regions, at the Arctic Pole of the (then) only Earth—so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur. It began in those northern regions, which have just been described as including Behring’s Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi‐tropical even in the Arctic regions and excellently adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The Commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when:

_The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over __ the heads of that portion of the Sweat‐born; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish remained as half‐grown babes_(_735_)_ in size and intellect. This was the third Pralaya of the Races._(736)

This means again, that our Globe is subject to seven periodical and _entire_ changes which go _pari passu_ with the Races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial Pralayas, occasioned by the change in the inclination of the Earth’s axis. It is a Law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as Science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic Law. In Occultism this Inexorable Law is referred to as the “Great Adjuster.” Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and also the changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes. In fact, it does not seem at all sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared to deny the axial phenomena altogether, rather than admit the intelligent hand of the Karmic Law which alone can reasonably explain these sudden changes and their accompanying results. It has tried to account for them by various and more or less fantastic speculations; one of which, as de Boucheporn imagined, would be the sudden collision of our Earth with a Comet, thus causing all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding to our Esoteric explanation, since Fohat is as good as any Comet, and, in addition, has universal Intelligence to guide him.

Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu’s Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four such axial disturbances. The old Continents—save the first—were sucked in by the oceans, other lands appeared, and huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the “survival of the fittest” nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones—the failures—were disposed of by being swept off the Earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.

The sub‐races are also subject to the same cleansing process, and the side‐branchlets or family‐races as well. Let any one, well acquainted with astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight and shadows of the Past. Let him observe and take notes of what he knows of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles—especially with the Sidereal Year, which is equal to 25,868 of our solar years.(737) Then, if the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, he will find how the weal and woe of nations are intimately connected with the beginning and close of this Sidereal Cycle. True, the non‐occultist has the disadvantage that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing, through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he may find consolation in the knowledge of, or—if he so prefers—speculation about, the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of—some 16,000 years hence. Our meaning is very clear. Every Sidereal Year the tropics recede from the pole _four degrees_ in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator turns through the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every Astronomer knows, at present the tropic is only twenty‐three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the equator. Hence it has still two and a half degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal Year. This gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years.

After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) as Commentary Thirty‐three tells us:

_Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and pigmies [the dwarfed races of the Poles].... Many acquired divine, nay more—unlawful knowledge, and followed willingly the Left Path._

Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods it took to accomplish this _fourth_ destruction who can tell! But we are told that:

44. THEY(738) BUILT GREAT IMAGES NINE YATIS HIGH,(739) THE SIZE OF THEIR BODIES (_a_). INNER FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS.(740) WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH(741) (_b_).

(_a_) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged continent, as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages, are all between twenty and thirty feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all twenty‐seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders.(742) The writer is well aware that the modern Archæologists have decided that “these statues are not very old,” as declared by one of the high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of those arbitrary decisions of Modern Science which does not carry much weight.

We are told that after the destruction of Lemuria by subterranean fires men went on steadily decreasing in stature—a process already commenced after their _physical_ Fall—and that finally, some millions of years later, they decreased to between six and seven feet, and are now, as in the older Asiatic races, dwindling down to nearer five than six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family, such as the Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders, are of a _higher stature than the rest of mankind_; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo‐Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub‐races, the others to the very latest and most transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow.

(_b_) How could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindûs is denied by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Âryan Hindûs knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled‐for slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear _evidence of facts_, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs(743) preserve irrefutable proofs of records embracing more than three‐and‐a‐half Sidereal Years—or about 87,000 years—the Hindû calculations cover nearly thirty‐three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the _Sphinxiad_:

These _poor benighted_ Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the [last local] Flood [in Asia], or Age of Horror.

And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Âryan _historical_ memory—the Flood which submerged the last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The Floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.

The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic Continent already described. As a Master says:

_Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them ... there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?_(744)

Not identically the _same_ Continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root‐ Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse‐shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh‐water deposit called the Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river—is the bed of _the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary age_. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary‐ age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe _as formerly portions of one continent_—thus corroborating the whole “horse‐shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the _elevated ridge_ in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then _shifts almost at right angles_ to proceed in a _south‐easterly_ line _toward the African coast_, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d’Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse‐shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.(745)

The _Atlantic portion of Lemuria_ was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root‐Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the shifting and re‐shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth‐Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third‐Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid‐Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest Occult authority, that:

_Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America._(746)

The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Âryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “_myriads_ of centuries”;(747) and the latter points to the fact that:

Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.(748)

To this Professor R. Owen adds that:

Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community _before_ the time of Menes.

And Winchell states that:

At the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left _anatomical books_.

This is quite natural if we are to believe the statement of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years which have elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, notwithstanding its tremendous antiquity. The complete records of the growth, development, social and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the Secret Annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the Seven Sciences; and these Sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the Secret Records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints:

1. The Realistic Plane of Thought.

2. The Idealistic.

3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.

The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely _mythical_ element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For it is symbolical, the archaic mode of thought; emblematical, a later though very ancient mode of thought; parabolical or allegorical; hieroglyphical; or again logogrammical, the most difficult method of all; every letter, as in the Chinese language, representing a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the _Vedas_, the _Book of the Dead_, or, to a certain degree, in the _Bible_, is composed of such logograms. No one not initiated into the mystery of the Occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great may be his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say—_i.e._, in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of solar myth and sexual worship—how is it to be expected that the profane scholar should penetrate into the arcana behind the veil? One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead‐letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word‐symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern Mythologists.

Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah, etc.,—all the head‐figures of the World‐Deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological—all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such Deluges are based on events that took place in Nature, and stand as _historical_ records, therefore—whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical—of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.

To speak of a race nine “yatis,” or twenty‐seven feet, high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than, let us say, the story of “Jack the Giant‐Killer,” is a somewhat unusual proceeding. Where are your proofs?—the writer will be asked. In history and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Dânavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Râkshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldæa, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim.(749) Moses speaks of Og, a king whose “bedstead” was nine cubits long (15ft. 4in.) and four wide,(750) and Goliath was “six cubits and a span in height” (or 10ft. 7in.). The only difference found between “revealed scripture” and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., is this: While the Pagans mention only the _skeletons of giants_, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them _had personally seen_, the _Bible_ interpreters unblushingly demand that Geology and Archæology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants has to be given up.

Of yet standing witnesses to the submerged Continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archæology claims several such on this Earth, though beyond wondering “what these may be”—it has never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Not to speak of the Easter Island statues already mentioned, to what epoch belong the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian? Archæology, as usual, assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity, and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science.

Teapi, Rapa‐nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the South American coast.... In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four ... and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their activity remains.(751)

But who made the great stone images(752) which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? “_No one knows_,” says a reviewer.

It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants [a handful of Polynesian savages] arrived.... Their workmanship _is of a high order_, ... and it is believed that the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America.... Even at the date of Cook’s visit, some of the statues, measuring twenty‐seven feet in height and eight across the shoulders, were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen broad ... all built of hewn stone in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, _or the ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru_.(753)

“_There is no reason to believe that any of the statues have been built up, bit by bit, by scaffolding erected around them_,” adds the reviewer very suggestively—without explaining _how_ they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. Two of the best of these colossal images are now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like a man asleep. Their types, though all are long‐headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths, and chins differ greatly in form; their head‐dress, moreover—a kind of flat cap with a piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head—shows that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked, Who made them?—but it is not Archæology nor yet Geology that is likely to answer, even though the latter recognizes in the island a portion of a submerged continent.

But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world?—for Bartholdi’s “Statue of Liberty,” now at New York, _is a dwarf_ when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (_vide supra_, quotation from _Shoo‐King_), the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had “troubled the earth”; the Jesuits are right, and the Archæologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins which are discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. “Masses of enormous human bones” were found “in America, near Munte [?]” a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters.(754)

Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal‐warriors of Nadir Shah? Bamian is a small, miserable, half‐ruined town in Central Asia, half‐way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Koh‐i‐baba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian, or Hindu‐Kush, Chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis‐Khan in the thirteenth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their Vihâras. Such Vihâras are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock‐cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. In front of some of these caves five enormous statues—of what is regarded as Buddha—have been discovered or rather _rediscovered_ in our century, for the famous Chinese traveller Hiouen Thsang speaks of having seen them, when he visited Bamian in the seventh century.

The contention that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or _seventy_ feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 mètres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose legs the largest vessels of those days passed with ease, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second largest statue, which is also cut out in the rock like the first, is only 120 feet or fifteen feet taller than the said “Liberty.”(755) The third statue is only 60 feet high, the two others still smaller, the last being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present Race. The first and largest of the colossi represents a man draped in a kind of “toga”; M. de Nadeylac thinks that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, are undeniable indications that Buddha was meant to be represented. But they really prove nothing. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samâdhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to Esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who _knows and hears all_, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. As a Shloka says:

_The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance._

Gautama Buddha was an Âryan Hindû, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort their ears artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottoes of the Miao‐tse into Vihâras and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore, Hiouen Thsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that “the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue” in his day “dazzled one’s eyes,” but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, which is cut out of the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. In such case, it may be asked, Whom does it represent?

Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust. Three of them standing in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathâgata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments—which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting—are all due to the piety of the monk‐ ascetics, as also are some other minor figures and rock‐cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who, after the submersion of their Continent, sought refuge in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Thus, the five statues are an imperishable record of the Esoteric Teaching as to the gradual evolution of the Races.

The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second—120 feet high—represents the Sweat‐born; and the third—measuring 60 feet—immortalizes the Race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first _physical_ Race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the statues found on Easter Isle. These were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter.

These are, then, the “Giants” of antiquity, the ante‐ and post‐diluvian Gibborim of the _Bible_. They lived and flourished one million years ago rather than between three and four thousand only. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as “grasshoppers” in comparison with the Jews, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years.

In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear in mind the wise words of Montaigne. Saith the great French Philosopher:

It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or truth: which is an ordinarie fault in those who perswade themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort....

But reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage to have the bounds and limits of God’s will, and the power of our common mother Nature tied to his sleeve, and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie....

If we term those things monsters or miracles to which our reason cannot attain, how many such doe daily present themselves unto our sight? Let us consider through what cloudes, and how blinde‐folde, we are led to the knowledge of most things that passe our hands; verily we shall finde it is rather custome than science that receiveth the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things, were they newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them as much or more unlikely and incredible than any other.(756)

A fair‐minded scholar, before denying the possibility of _our_ history and records, should search modern history, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is to be found scattered about and buried, even in the British Museum alone. The reader is asked to throw one more glance at the subject‐matter treated of in the Section which follows.

Cyclopean Ruins And Colossal Stones As Witnesses To Giants.

De Mirville, in his enormous works, “Mémoires Adressées aux Académies,” carrying out the task of proving the reality of the Devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of “historical evidence” that, in the days of “miracle,” both pagan and biblical, stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sang. That finally, the “Christ‐stone,” or Christ‐rock, “the spiritual Rock” that followed Israel,(757) “became a Jupiter‐lapis,” swallowed by his father Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.”(758) We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of biblical metaphors simply for the sake of proving the “Satanism” of idols, though a good deal might be said(759) on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence to hand, to show that: (_a_) had there been no giants to move such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany), or other such Cyclopean structures; and (_b_) were there no such thing as Magic, there could never have been so many witnesses to “oracular” and “speaking” stones.

In the _Achaica_ we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty _stupid_ “for worshipping stones.” But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of thinking.”(760) Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same thing—a crime with which Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans, as they do—one may be allowed to believe in what so many great Philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniuses.

The reader is referred to the _Académie des Inscriptions_, if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of magic and psychic powers. In a poem on “Stones” attributed to Orpheus, these stones are divided into Ophites and Sideritês, the “Serpent‐stone” and “Star‐stone.”

The Ophitês is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has _the gift of speech_; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound _similar to the cry of a child_. It is by means of this stone that Helenus foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland.(761)

Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these “bétyles,” call them “_animated_ stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius especially never parted with his Ophitês, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from it, delivered _in a small voice resembling a low whistling_.(762) Arnobius, a holy man, who “from a Pagan had become one of the _lights of the Church_,” as Christians tell their readers, confesses he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it a question, “which it answered occasionally in a _clear and sharp small voice_.” Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan Ophitês, we ask?

The famous stone at Westminster was called _liafail_, “the speaking stone,” and raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry, in his _Monuments Celtiques_, says he saw it when it still bore the inscription:(763)

_Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum_ _Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem_.

Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heræscus, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.”(764)

De Mirville—who seeks to justify the _Bible_—enquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old _chior‐ gaur_ or the “dance of giants” (from _côr_, “dance,” whence _chorea_, and _gaur_, “giant”)? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop St. Gildas. But the authors of such works as _Voyage dans le Comté de Cornouailles, sur les Traces des Géants_, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge,(765) Carnac, and West Hoadley, give far fuller and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions—true forests of rocks—immense monoliths are found, “some weighing over 500,000 kilograms.” These “hanging stones” of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, or giants. Who then, _if not giants_, could ever raise such masses—especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley—range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, and though set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, would nevertheless resist the efforts of twenty men should they attempt to displace them.

Now if we say that most of these stones are relics of the last Atlanteans, we shall be answered that all the Geologists claim them to be of a natural origin; that, a rock when “weathering”—_i.e._, losing flake after flake of its substance under the influence of the weather—assumes this form; that, the “tors” in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this cause. And thus since all Scientists consider the “rocking stones to be of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in layers”—our statement will be justly denied, especially as “we see this process of rock‐modification in progress around us to‐day.” Let us then examine the case.

First read what Geology has to say, and you will then learn that often these gigantic masses are entire strangers in the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those countries and which are only to be found far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke, in speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have been brought over “from immense distances and with prodigious efforts.”(766) Charton speaks of a specimen of such rock from Ireland, which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English Geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin “_perhaps even African_.”(767)

This is a strange _coincidence_, for Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular stones to a _Sorcerer who brought them from Africa_. De Mirville sees in this Sorcerer “an accursed Hamite.”(768) We see in him a dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands—a giant in any and every case.(769) Says Cambry, naively:

Men have nothing to do with it ... for never could _human_ power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has accomplished it all [!!] and Science will demonstrate it some day [!!].(770)

Nevertheless, it was _human_, though gigantic power, which accomplished it, and no more “Nature” alone than God or Devil.

“Science,” having undertaken to demonstrate that even the Mind and Spirit of man are simply the production of “blind forces,” is quite capable of accepting the task, and it may be that she will come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that Nature alone has marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland!

It is true that Cambry recanted later on, when saying:

I believed for a long time in _Nature_, but I _recant_, ... for chance _is unable to create_ such marvellous combinations, ... and those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau.

Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author, when speaking of the _moving_ rocks, or “rocking stones” situated on the slope of Golcar (the “Enchanter”) says:

The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to Gods.(771)

In _Stonehenge_, by Flinders Petrie, it is said that:

Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or “sarsen” stone, locally called “grey wethers.” But some of the stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably the North of Ireland.

To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in 1850 in the _Revue Archéologique_, are worthy of being quoted:

Every stone is a block whose weight would try the most powerful machines. There are, in a word, scattered throughout the globe, masses, before which the word _materials_ seems to remain inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded, and that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the things themselves. Besides which, these _immense rocking_ stones, called sometimes _routers_, placed upright on one of their sides as on a point, their equipoise being so perfect that the slightest touch is sufficient to set them in motion ... betray a most positive knowledge of statics. Reciprocal counter‐motion, surfaces, plane, convex and concave, in turn ... all this allies them to Cyclopean monuments, of which it can be said with good reason, repeating De la Vega, that “the demons seem to have worked on them more than men.”(772)

For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, with masses weighing millions of pounds, can be the work of Palæolithic _savages_, of cave‐men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is not our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place, notwithstanding every effort to keep it elsewhere. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II, a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far larger one and had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytaneum, “whence it _ran away several times_, and so they were forced to weight it with lead.”(773) Here we have immense stones stated by all antiquity to be “living, moving, speaking, and self‐ perambulating.” They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they were called _routers_, from the word to “rout,” or “put to flight”; and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones, and sometimes called “_mad_ stones.”(774)

The rocking stone is accepted by Science. But why did it rock? One must be blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and that they were called for this very reason the “stones of truth.”(775)

_This is history_, the past of prehistoric times warranting the same in later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the Moon and the Serpent, were the more ancient “rocks of destiny” of older nations; and their motion, or _rocking_, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this ancient _reading_. Vormius and Olaus Magnus show that it was according to the orders of the oracle, whose voice spoke through “these immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of [ancient] giants,” that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. Says Pliny:

In India and Persia it is she (the Persian Otizoë) whom the Magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns;(776)

and he further describes a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that “a single finger can move it, while the weight of the whole body makes it resist.”(777) Why then should not the rocking stones of Ireland, or those of Brimham, in Yorkshire, have served for the same mode of _divination_ or oracular communications? The hugest of them are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller, such as Brimham Rocks, with revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more ancient lithoi. Had not the Bishops of the Middle Ages destroyed all the plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know more of these.(778) As it is, we know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and _magic_. É. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in the _Antiquités de France_ (vol. ix), an article showing the Chatampéramba (the “Field of Death,” or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical in situation with the old tombs at Carnac; that is to say, “a prominence and a central tomb.” Bones are found in the tombs, and Mr. Halliwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives calling the tombs the “dwellings of the Râkshasas” or giants. Several stone circles, “considered the work of the Panch Pândava (five Pândus), as all such monuments are in India, where they are to be found in such great numbers,” when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, “were found to contain _human bones of a very large size_.”(779)

Again, De Mirville is right in his _generalization_, if not in his conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to “great natural geological commotions” (Charton), and “the work of Nature” (Cambry), is now exploded, his remarks are very just:

We advise Science to reflect .... and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends; for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking masses will oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to realize once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity.(780)

This is just what we can never repeat too often, though it may be that the voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediæval Theology in _its_ interpretations of the so‐called _Revelation_. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape—a transformation requiring millions of years—and yet fears to make Mankind older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of species, natural selection and evolution from the lowest form to the highest, from mollusc to fish, from reptile to bird and mammalian—yet it refuses to man, who is physiologically only a higher mammal and animal, such a transformation of his external form. But if the monstrous Iguanodon of the Wealden may have been the ancestor of the diminutive Iguana of to‐day, why could not the monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man—the link between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this “theory” than in that of refusing to man a spiritual immortal Ego, making of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, _as a distinct genus_ in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific than the present Exact Sciences, they are nevertheless more logical and consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and the natural affinities of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal; but it requires more than the mere interplay between certain material aggregates and their environment, to call to life a _fully conscious man_, even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two “poor cousins” of the quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Hæckel that (objective) Life on our Globe “is a logical postulate of scientific natural history,” but add that the rejection of a like _spiritual_ involution, from _within without_, of invisible subjective Spirit‐ Life—Eternal and a Principle in Nature—is more illogical, if possible, than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by “blind forces” inherent in Matter, without any _external_ help.

Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being as follows: first, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named _organic protein_; then, under the influence of incident forces, these states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind‐pipes and bellows; after which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart’s “Requiem”; this was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., _ad infinitum_, its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic _savants_ tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown.

Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of species, his words apply to our doctrine.

Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations _on a preëxisting kind of being_.(781)

Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a modification on a preëxistent and prehistorical kind of man, even supposing for argument’s sake that there is _nothing_ within him to last longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is not so! For, when we are told that “organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call _artificial evolution_”(782)—we answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great Adepts did as much, and, indeed, far more, before the Chemists ever attempted to “build out of dissociated elements complex combinations.” The Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster will have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no Chemist, or Alchemist either, will ever endow such a monster with more than animal instinct, unless indeed he does that with which the “Progenitors” are credited, namely, leave his own Physical Body, and incarnate in the “Empty Form.” But even this would be an _artificial_, not a natural man, for our “Progenitors” had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become _Gods_ before they became Men.

The above digression—if indeed it is one—is an attempt at justification before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this.

It also gives the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or Theology, and why they prefer any “psychic craze” to the dogmatic assertions of the pair, since neither of them, in its infallibility, has anything better to offer than _blind_ faith. _Universal_ tradition is by far the safer guide in life. And universal tradition shows Primitive Man living for ages together with his Creators and first Instructors—the Elohim—in the World’s “Garden of Eden,” or “Delight.”(783)

45. THE FIRST GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS (_A_).

46. ALL HOLY SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE ANIMALS, PRODUCED FROM THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (_B_).

(_a_) As this subject—the fourth great Deluge on our Globe in this Round—is fully treated in the Sections that follow the last Stanza, to say anything more at present would be a mere anticipation. The seven Great Islands (Dvîpas) belonged to the Continent of Atlantis. The Secret Teachings show that the Deluge overtook the Fourth, Giant Race, not on account of its depravity, or because it had become “black with sin,” but simply because such is the fate of every Continent, which—like everything else under our Sun—is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was when the Fifth Race was in its infancy.

(_b_) Thus the Giants perished—the Magicians and the Sorcerers, adds the fancy of popular tradition. But “all holy saved,” and alone the “unholy” were “destroyed.” This was due, however, as much to the _prevision_ of the “holy” ones, who had not lost the use of their Third Eye, as to Karma and Natural Law. Speaking of the subsequent Race, our Fifth Humanity, the Commentary says:

_Alone the handful of those Elect, whose Divine Instructors had gone to __ inhabit that Sacred Island—__“__from whence the last Saviour will come__”__—now kept mankind from becoming one‐half the exterminator of the other [as mankind is now_—H. P. B.]. _It [mankind] became divided. Two‐ thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the Earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one‐third remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race—the Divine Incarnates. When the Poles moved [for the fourth time] this did not affect those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like the Lemurians—alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and __“__were seen no more__”__...!_

Stanza XII. The Fifth Race And Its Divine Instructors.

47. The remnants of the first two Races disappear for ever. Groups of the various Atlantean races saved from the Deluge along with the Forefathers of the Fifth. 48. The origins of our present Race, the Fifth. The first Divine Dynasties. 49. The earliest glimmerings in history, now pinned to the allegorical chronology of the _Bible_, and “universal” history slavishly following it. The nature of the first Instructors and Civilizers of mankind.

47. FEW(784) REMAINED. SOME YELLOW, SOME BROWN AND BLACK, AND SOME RED REMAINED. THE MOON‐COLOURED(785) WERE GONE FOR EVER (_A_).

48. THE FIFTH(786) PRODUCED FROM THE HOLY STOCK REMAINED; IT WAS RULED OVER BY THE FIRST DIVINE KINGS.

49. ... THE SERPENTS WHO RE‐DESCENDED, WHO MADE PEACE WITH THE FIFTH,(787) WHO TAUGHT AND INSTRUCTED IT (_b_)....

(_a_) This Shloka relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with it, but living and ever‐recurring tradition does. History—or what is called history—does not go back further than the fantastic origins of our fifth sub‐race, a “few thousands” of years. It is the sub‐divisions of the first sub‐race of the Fifth Root‐Race which are referred to in the sentence, “Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red remained.” The “moon‐coloured”—_i.e._, the First and the Second Races—were gone for ever; ay, without leaving any traces whatever—and that, so far back as the third “Deluge” of the Third Lemurian Race, that “Great Dragon,” whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this is the true meaning of the verse in the Commentary which says:

_The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom, the Serpents whose holes are now under the Triangular Stones._

Or in other words, “the pyramids, at the four corners of the world.”

(_b_) This puts clearly what is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the Commentaries; namely, that the Adepts or “Wise” men of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind of pyramidal structure, if not actually under a pyramid. For such “pyramids” existed in the “four corners of the world” and were never the monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though indeed until they were found scattered all over the two Americas, under and above ground, beneath and amidst virgin forests, and also in plain and vale, they were generally supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If true geometrically correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, nevertheless many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular pyramidal and conical “menhirs” in Morbihan, and Brittany generally, many of the Danish “tumuli” and even of the “giant tombs” of Sardinia with their inseparable companions, the “nuraghi,” are so many more or less clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first settlers on the newly‐born continent and isles of Europe, the “some yellow, some brown and black, and some red” races that remained after the submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands, 850,000 years ago—Plato’s Island excepted—and before the arrival of the great Âryan races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East. Those who can hardly accept the placing of the antiquity of the human race so far back as the 57,000 years, the age assigned by Dr. Dowler to the skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi, will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken some day. We may disparage the foolish self‐glorification of the Arcadians who styled themselves “older than the Moon” (προσέληνοι), and of the people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the Sun appeared in Heaven—but not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the Mammoth and Mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic Salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the Mammalians, man is the only one whom Science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames, from the giant Homo Diluvii to the creature between five and six feet that he is now.

But the “Serpents of Wisdom” have preserved their records well, and the history of human evolution _is_ traced in Heaven as it is traced on underground walls. Humanity and the _Stars_ are bound together indissolubly, because of the _Intelligences_ that rule the latter.

Modern Symbologists may scoff at this and call it “fancy,” but as Mr. Staniland Wake writes:

It is unquestionable that the Deluge has [ever] been associated in the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the constellations.(788)

The “Old Dragon” is identical with the “Great Flood,” says Mr. Proctor:

We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples, ... the Dragon would be the uppermost or ruling constellation.... It is singular how closely these constellations ... correspond in sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded respecting the [Biblical] Flood.(789)

The reasons for this _singularity_, however, have been made abundantly clear in this work. It only shows that there were _several_ Deluges confused in the memories and traditions of the sub‐races of the Fifth Race. The first great Flood was astronomical and cosmical, while several others were terrestrial. And yet our very learned friend Mr. Gerald Massey—an initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still only a self‐initiate—declared and insisted that the Atlantean Submersion and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people, and that Atlantis was no better than an “astronomical allegory.” But the great zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and allegory can hardly interfere with history; moreover, every student of Occultism knows what that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Dr. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of the allegory.

[Its twelve cantos] refer to the annual course of the Sun through the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac; ... [the eleventh canto being] consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and rain, and harmonizes with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac—Aquarius, or the Waterman.(790)

But even this is preceded in the old Records by the _pre_‐astronomical Cosmic Flood, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above Zodiacal or Noah’s Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the constellation of the Great Dragon, the “Dragons of Wisdom,” or the great Initiates of the Third and Fourth Races, and the floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race or the Atlanteans. When was it? Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of the zodiacal calculations in Egypt, _the poles have been thrice inverted_.

We will presently return again to this statement. Such symbols as are represented by the Signs of the Zodiac—a fact which offers a handle to Materialists upon which to hang their one‐sided theories and opinions—have too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too important, to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to consider the meaning of the statement, in Shloka 48, concerning the “first Divine Kings,” who are said to have “redescended,” guided and _instructed_ our Fifth Race after the last Deluge! We shall consider this last claim historically in the Sections that follow, but must end with a few more details on the subject of “Serpents.”

The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediæval, and modern works which have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of the weird and suggestive symbol (so often referred to) of the “tempter of man”—in the orthodox light of the Church—can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every available proof, at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been invariably made out by our Theologians and some pious Symbologists to be indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called the “Devil,” and every proof which goes against their theory has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored. The Occultist must, therefore, neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander. And so we propose to divide the subjects involved in these last three Verses into several groups, and to examine them as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine—the bulk of which, however, will be found in Part II, on Symbology.

Serpents And Dragons Under Different Symbolisms.

The name of the Dragon in Chaldæa was not written phonetically, but was represented by two monograms, meaning _probably_, according to the Orientalists, the “scaly one.” “This description,” very pertinently remarks G. Smith, “of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a serpent, or a fish.” To this we may add that, in one aspect, it applies to Makara, the tenth Zodiacal Sign, the Sanskrit term for a nondescript amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, but really signifying something else. This, then, is a virtual admission that the Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of the Dragon in ancient Chaldæa. It was from Chaldæa that the Hebrews got _their_ symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians, who made of the “scaly one” a living entity and a maleficent power.

A specimen of Dragons, “winged and scaled,” may be seen in the British Museum. In this representation of the events of the Fall, according to the same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a “tree,” and holding out their hands to the “apple,” while at the back of the “tree” is the Dragon‐Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two “Chaldees” ready for Initiation, the Serpent symbolizing the Initiator; while the jealous Gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane clergy. Not much of the literal “biblical event” there, as any Occultist can see!

“The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom,” says the Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures and the “Serpent.”

“The Serpents who redescended, .... who taught and instructed” the Fifth Race. What sane man, in our day, is capable of believing that _real_ serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess—now become almost an axiom with men of Science—that those who in antiquity wrote upon various sacred Dragons and Serpents were either superstitious and credulous people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the Profane.

“Terrible are the Gods when they manifest themselves”—those _Gods_ whom men call _Dragons_. And Ælianus, treating in his _De Naturâ Animalium_ of these ophidian symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he well understood the nature of these most ancient of symbols. Thus with reference to the above Homeric verse he most pertinently explains:

For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, _has within himself something still more of the divine nature_ of which it is better [for others?] to remain in ignorance.(791)

The “Dragon” symbol has a septenary meaning, and of these seven meanings, the highest and the lowest may be given. The highest is identical with the “Self‐born,” the Logos, the Hindû Aja. With the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent‐worshippers, he was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon.(792) Its seven “Stars” are the seven stars held in the hand of the “Alpha and Omega” in _Revelation_. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term “Dragon” was applied to the “Wise” men.

This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that, in spite of our boasted civilization, it can hardly escape being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished of Christian dogmas. Such a subject required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.

Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in Heaven originate with St. John, in his _Revelation_? Emphatically we answer—No. St. John’s “Dragon” is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean Magic.

In order that we may demonstrate this negation, the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects.

The Sidereal And Cosmic Glyphs.

Every Astronomer—not to speak of Occultists and Astrologers—knows that, figuratively speaking, the Astral Light, the Milky Way, and also the Path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the Circles of the Sidereal or Tropical Year, were always called “Serpents” in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the Adepts.

This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”—the Dragon “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” according to the Peratæ Gnostics, the “Good and Perfect Serpent,” the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco.

But we ought to discriminate between the various characters of this symbol. Now Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine, and when an Occultist reads in the _Vendîdâd_ complaints uttered against the “Serpent,” whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, and at the same time mental and psychic consumption—he knows that the Serpent alluded to is the North Pole, and also the Pole of the Heavens.(793) These two axes produce the seasons according to their angle of inclination to each other. The two axes were _no more parallel_; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaêjô “by the good river Dâitya” had disappeared, and “the Âryan Magi had to emigrate to Sogdiana”—say the exoteric accounts. But the Esoteric Teaching states that the pole had passed from the equator, and that the “Land of Bliss” of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo‐Âryans of the post‐ diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognize the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met _before_ the Flood, and conversed with the pure “Yazatas” or celestial Spirits of the Elements, whose life and _food_ they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein:

The _Vendîdâd_ seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara‐Korum chain.(794)

The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who, for a wonder, once wrote the truth, symbolized Kosmos by a large fiery circle, with a serpent with a hawk’s head lying across its diameter.

Here we see the pole of the earth within the plane of the ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac, in 25,000 [odd] years, must have “redden’d with the solar blaze”; and _each sign must have been vertical_ to the polar region.(795)

Meru, the Abode of the Gods, as explained before, was placed in the North Pole, while Pâtâla, the Nether Region, was supposed to lie towards the South. As each symbol in Esoteric Philosophy has _seven_ keys, Meru and Pâtâla have, geographically, one significance and represent localities, while, astronomically, they have another, and mean the “two poles”; the latter meaning led to their being often rendered in _exoteric_ sectarianism as the “Mountain” and the “Pit,” or Heaven and Hell. If we for the present hold only to the astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the Ancients knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern Astronomers. They had reasons, and good ones, for naming one the “Mountain” and the other the “Pit.” As the author just quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same. “Heli‐on is the Sun in his highest,” Heli‐os or Eli‐os meaning the “most high,” and Acheron is 32 degrees above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded the southern pole, the first astronomers called the Pit, while observing, toward the northern pole, that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared above the horizon—they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of the Gods, these were said to _ascend_ and _descend_ periodically; by which (astronomically) the _Zodiacal_ Gods were meant, the passing of the original north pole of the Earth to the south pole of the Heaven.

In that age at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the north pole to the north horizon; crossing the _eight coils of the serpent_ [eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years], which would seem like an imaginary _ladder_ with _eight staves_ reaching from the earth up to the pole, _i.e._, the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, _i.e._, the Signs of the Zodiac, ascended and descended. [Jacob’s ladder and the Angels] .... It is more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder.(796)

This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from Occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific and especially theological character. As said, the Christian Trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning. This it was which made Rutilius say of those who euhemerized it: “_Judæa gens, radix stultorum_.”

But the profane, and especially Christian fanatics who are ever in search of scientific corroboration for their dead‐letter texts, persist in seeing in the Celestial Pole the true Serpent of _Genesis_, Satan, the enemy of mankind; whereas it is really—a cosmic metaphor. When the Gods are said to forsake the Earth, it means not only the Gods, the Protectors and Instructors, but also the _minor_ Gods—the Regents of the Zodiacal Signs. The former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed Mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as well as in the Hindû Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura Mazda, the “Lord of Wisdom,” is the synthesis of the Amshaspands, or Amesha Spentas, the “Immortal Benefactors,”(797) the “Word,” or the Logos, and its six highest aspects in Mazdeanism. These “Immortal Benefactors” are described in _Zamyad Yasht_ as:

The Amesha Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great, helpful ... imperishable and pure ... which are all seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike ... which are _the creators and destroyers of the creatures_ of Ahura Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers.

These few lines are sufficient to indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspands, our Dhyân Chohans or the “Serpents of Wisdom.” They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians—the Star‐ Yazatas of the Zoroastrians—or again the seven Planets (including the Sun) of every religion.(798) The epithet, “the shining, having efficacious eyes,” proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the Divine Powers of Ahura Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the “Builders,” the “Watchers,” the Pitris, or Fathers, and the first Preceptors of Mankind.

When mortals have become sufficiently spiritualized, there will be no more need of _forcing_ them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men will _know_ then, that there never yet was a great World‐reformer whose name has passed into our generation, who (_a_) was not a direct emanation of the Logos (under whatever name known to us) _i.e._, an _essential_ incarnation of one of the “Seven,” of the “Divine Spirit who is sevenfold”; and (_b_) who had not appeared before, in past Cycles. They will recognize, then, the cause which produces certain riddles of the ages, in both history and chronology; the reason, for instance, why it is impossible _for them_ to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the _Dabistan_; why the numbers and individualities of the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up; why Krishna and Buddha speak of themselves as reïncarnations, Krishna identifying himself with the Rishi Nârâyana, and Gautama giving a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being “the _very supreme_ Brahmâ,” is yet called Anshânshâvatâra—“a part of a part” only of the Supreme on Earth; finally, why Osiris is a Great God, and at the same time a “Prince on Earth,” who reäppears in Thoth Hermes; and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognized, kabalistically, in Joshua, the son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The Esoteric Doctrine explains all this by saying that each of these, as also many others, had first appeared on Earth as one of the Seven Powers of the Logos, individualized as a God or Angel (Messenger); then, mixed with Matter, they had reäppeared in turn as great Sages and Instructors who “taught” the Fifth Race, after having instructed the two preceding Races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of Mankind, and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had become truly only the “parts of a part” on Earth, though _de facto_ the One Supreme in Nature.

This is the metaphysics of Theogony. Now every “Power” among the Seven, once he is individualized, has in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules over it;(799) hence the many meanings in every symbol. These, unless interpreted according to the Esoteric methods, generally lead to inextricable confusion.

Does the Western Kabalist, who is generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist, require a proof? Let him open Éliphas Lévi’s _Histoire de la Magie_,(800) and carefully examine his “Grand Symbole Kabbalistique” from the _Zohar_. He will find there, in the engraving, a development of the “interlaced triangles,” a _white_ man above and a _black_ woman below reversed, the legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and protruding behind the shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on each side. Éliphas Lévi makes of this symbol, God and Nature; or God, “Light,” mirrored inversely in Nature and Matter, “Darkness.” Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as emblematical cosmogony goes. Neither has he invented the symbol, nor have the Kabalists. The two figures in white and black stone have existed in the temples of Egypt from time immemorial, agreeably to tradition, and historically‐ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them. Therefore the symbol must have been in existence for nearly 2,500 years. This, at the very least, for Cambyses, who was a son of Cyrus the Great, succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two Kabiri personifying the _opposite poles_. Herodotus(801) tells posterity that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he burst into an inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought to be a man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate “the passing of the original north pole of the earth to the south pole of the heaven,” as perceived by Mackey.(802) But they also represented the poles _inverted_, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, which each time resulted in the displacement of the oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and _vice versâ_. These Kabirim were the “Deluge” Gods.

This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same Gods, and classes of Gods. Faber, at the beginning of this century, showed the identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei, Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes,(803) Titans, and Aletæ with the Kabiri. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis, and our Dhyân Chohans who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri‐Titans were seven Great Gods, cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected with _at‐al‐as_, the “divine sun,” and with _tit_, the “deluge.” But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe‐inspiring Great Gods—the Dioscuri,(804) the deities surrounded with the darkness of Occult Nature—become the Idei Dactyli, or Ideic “Fingers,” with the Adept‐healers by metals. The true etymology of the name Lares, now signifying “Ghosts,” must be sought in the Etruscan word _lars_, “conductor,” “leader.” Sanchuniathon translates the word Aletæ as “fire worshippers,” and Faber believes it to be derived from _al‐orit_, the “God of fire.” Both are right, for in both cases it is a reference to the Sun, the “highest” God, toward whom the Planetary Gods “gravitate” (astronomically and allegorically), and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber’s etymology, that “Lar is a contraction of El‐Ar, the solar deity,”(805) is not very correct. They are the Lares, the Conductors and Leaders of men. As Aletæ, they were the seven Planets—astronomically; and as Lares, the Regents of these Planets, our Protectors and Rulers—mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic worship, and also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, whose attributes and dual capacities were denoted by the names of the temples to which they respectively belonged, and also by those of their priests. They all belonged, however, to the septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyân Chohans. The Sabæans, who worshipped the “Regents of the Seven Planets” just as the Hindûs worship their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes (Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the Planetary Gods. Seth and Enos were borrowed from the Sabæans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but the truth about them can still be discovered even in _Genesis_.(806) Seth is the “Progenitor” of those early men of the Third Race in whom the Planetary Angels had incarnated; he was himself a Dhyân Chohan and belonged to the _informing_ Gods, and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch), or Hermes, was said to be his _son_—Enos being a generic name for all the early “Seers” (Enoïchion). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabaism, and that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idrus (Hermes or Enoch);(807) that thither Sabæans proceeded on pilgrimage, and chanted prayers _seven times_ a day, _turning to the North_ (Mount Meru, Kaph, Olympus, etc.).(808) Abd Allatif also tells us some curious things about the Sabæans and their books. So also does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote 200 years later. While the latter maintains “that each pyramid was consecrated to a _star_” (a Star _Regent_ rather), Abd Allatif assures us that he had read in ancient Sabæan books that “one pyramid was the tomb of Agathodæmon and the other of Hermes”:(809)

Agathodæmon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes was his son,

adds Mr. Staniland Wake in _The Great Pyramid_.(810)

Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples the Kabiri were the Great Cosmic Gods—the Seven and the _Forty‐nine_ Sacred Fires—in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, and therefore, to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were three and four, or seven—the male and female principles—the _crux ansata_. This division shows why some classical writers held that they were only three, while others named four. And these were Axieros (in his female aspect Demeter); Axiokersa (Persephone);(811) Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kasmilos (Hermes—not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus,(812) but “he of the sacred legend,” which was explained only during the Samothracian Mysteries). This identification, which is due, according to the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius,(813) to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is really no identification at all, as names alone do not reveal much.(814) Others again have maintained, being equally right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. These two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial pole, and the pole of the heavens, astronomically; and also the physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus, Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read esoterically for the understanding of the allegory. The parts played in the event by the Fire, Water, Earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how the “Father of the Gods” and the “merry God of Wine” were also made to personify the two terrestrial poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In Astronomy, the poles are indeed the “heavenly measure”; and so are the Kabiri‐Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri‐Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the “invention of Fire”(815) and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias(816) shows that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus.

But the fact that, astronomically, the Titan‐Kabirim were also the Generators and Regulators of the Seasons, and, cosmically, the great Volcanic Energies—the Gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works—does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed Humanity with intellect and reason. They are preëminently in every Theogony—especially in the Hindû—the Sacred Divine Fires, Three, Seven, or Forty‐nine, according as the allegory demands it. Their very names prove it, for they are the Agni‐putra, or Sons of the Fire, in India, and the Genii of the Fire under numerous names in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name _kabeiros_ meaning “the powerful through fire,” from the Greek καίω “to burn.” The Semitic word _kabirim_ contains the idea of “the powerful, the mighty, and the great,” answering to the Greek μεγάλοι, δυνατοί, but these are later epithets. These Gods were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phœnicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with Fire, their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to the Chthonian Divinities, and therefore has Christianity made of them _Infernal_ Gods.

They are truly “the great, beneficent and powerful Gods,” as Cassius Hermone calls them.(817) At Thebes, Core and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary,(818) and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter its holy precincts.(819) But we must not, at the same time, lose sight of the fact that the title of Kabiri was generic; that the Kabiri, the mighty Gods as well as mortals, were of both sexes, and also terrestrial, celestial and cosmic; that while, in their later capacity of rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon—as it is now regarded—was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the Rulers of Mankind, when, incarnated as Kings of the “Divine Dynasties,” they gave the first impulse to civilization, and directed the mind with which they had endued men, to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To these Kabiri or Titans is ascribed the invention of letters (the Deva‐nâgari, or alphabet and language of the Gods), of laws and legislature, of architecture, as also of the various modes of magic, so‐called, and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those Demi‐gods and Heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers—too zealous for plain truth—would force posterity to see only Pagan copies of one sole prototype, named Noah—all are generic names.

It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed the great boon of agriculture, by _producing_ corn or wheat. What Isis‐Osiris, the once living Kabiria, did in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class.

That serpents were ever emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by the Caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the God of Wisdom, with Hermes, and so on. The two serpents, entwined round the rod, are phallic symbols of Jupiter and other Gods who transformed themselves into snakes for purposes of seducing Goddesses—only in the unclean fancies of profane Symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the Adept, and of his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury, in his psychopompic character, conducting and guiding the souls of the dead to Hades with his Caduceus and even raising them to life with it, is a simple and very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret Wisdom: black and white Magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding the Soul after death, and displaying the power of calling to life that which is dead—a very deep metaphor if one but thinks over its meaning. All the peoples of antiquity, with one exception, reverenced this symbol; the exception being the Christians, who chose to forget the “brazen serpent” of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and prudence of the “serpent” by Jesus himself, “Be ye _wise_ as serpents and harmless as doves.” The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate successors of the “Serpents” or Initiates, who ruled the early races of the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor’s throne is the “Dragon’s Seat,” and his dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the Dragon. The aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the Dragon is a human, albeit _divine_, Being. Speaking of the “Yellow Dragon,” the chief of the others, the _Twan‐ying‐t’u_ says:

His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable ... he does not go in company and does not live in herds [he is an ascetic].... He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree [Karma]; at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains [invisible].

And Lü‐lan asserts that Confucius said:

The Dragon feeds in the pure (water) [of Wisdom] and disports in the clear (water) [of Life].(820)

Our Divine Instructors.

Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan Isle are not the only records left of the Deluge. China has also her tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma‐li‐ga‐si‐ma, and which Kæmpfer and Faber spell “Maurigasima,” for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kæmpfer, in his _Japan_,(821) gives the tradition: The island, owing to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiruun, the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the Gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the Divine Dynasties of Kings as frequently as do those of any other nation.

At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even multigeneric evolution of human beings—spiritual, psychic, intellectual, and physical—just as is described in the present work. A few of these claims have now to be considered.

Our races—they all show—have sprung from Divine Races, by whatever name the latter may be called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese Chim‐nang and Tchan‐gy—their “Divine Man” and Demi‐gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul‐lil—the Creative God and the “Gods of the Ghost‐world”; with the Egyptian Isis‐Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew Elohim; or again with Manco‐Capac and his Peruvian progeny—the story varies nowhere. Every nation has either the _seven_ and _ten_ Rishi‐ Manus and Prajâpatis; the seven and ten Ki‐y; or _ten_ and _seven_ Amshaspands(822) (six exoterically); ten and seven Chaldæan Annedoti; ten and seven Sephiroth, etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyân Chohans of the Esoteric Doctrine, or the “Builders” of the Stanzas of Volume I. From Manu, Thot‐Hermes, Oannes‐Dagon, and Edris‐Enoch, down to Plato Panodorus, all tell us of seven Divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven primitive and dual Gods who descend from their Celestial Abode(823) and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as Gods and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as “Divine Kings and Rulers.” But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Basnage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that Science had flourished in their country only since the time of Isis‐Osiris, whom they continued to adore as Gods, “though they had become princes in human form.” And he adds of the Divine Androgyne:

It is said that this prince [Isis‐Osiris] built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry.

When Abul Feda, in his _Historia Anteïslamitica_,(824) says that the “Sabæan language” was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch)—he means Astronomy. In the _Melelwa Nahil_,(825) Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodæmon. And in another account,(826) Agathodæmon is mentioned as a “King of Egypt.” The _Celepas Geraldinus_ gives us some curious traditions about Henoch, who is called the “Divine Giant.” In his _Book of the Various Names of the Nile_, the historian Ahmed Ben Yusouf Eltiphas tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth, who became later the Egyptian Typhon, Set, had been one of the Seven Angels, or Patriarchs, in the _Bible_; then he became a mortal and Adam’s son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris), “the author of thirty books,” was “Sabæan by origin”—_i.e._, belonged to the Saba, “a Host”:

Having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed one hundred and forty cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King.(827)

Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes—or rather one, who appeared, as did some Manus and Rishis, in several different characters. In the _Burham i Kati_, he is mentioned as Hormig, a name of the Planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednesday was sacred both to Hermes and Thot.(828) The Hermes of Oriental tradition was worshipped by the Phineatæ, and is said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, and civilized it under the name of Thoth.(829) But under whichever of these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the sciences from _latent to active potency_, _i.e._, with having been the first to teach Magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna Græcia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.

Not only does Herodotus, the “father of history,” tell us of the marvellous Dynasties of Gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the Dynasties of Demi‐gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole series of classical authors support him. Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., repeat the same story, and never vary in the order given.

As Creuzer shows:

It is, indeed, from the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light, that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres.... In the system of the ancient priests [Hierophants and Adepts] all things without exception, Gods, Genii, Souls [Manes], the whole world, are conjointly developed in space and duration. The pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of spirits.(830)

It is the modern historians—French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly—who have made more efforts to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of Divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never have been more unwilling than was Eratosthenes (260 B.C.) to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to recognize its truth. For this, the great Astronomer is treated with much contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho becomes with them “a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying priests of Heliopolis.” As the Demonologist De Mirville justly remarks:

All those historians and priests, so _veracious_ when repeating stories of _human_ kings and men, suddenly become _extremely suspicious_ no sooner do they go back _to their gods_.

But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (of Manetho above all), and of Ptolemy, in the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of all. In the words of the Egyptologist, De Rougé:

Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the remains of a list of Dynasties embracing the furthest mythic times, or the _Reigns of the Gods and Heroes_.... At the very beginning of this curious papyrus we have to arrive at the conviction that, so far back as even the period of Ramses, these mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of Egypt, the Gods Seb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth‐Hermes, and the Goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign of each of these.(831)

These synchronistic tables, besides the fact that they were disfigured by Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology of the Divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and kept secret from the profane multitudes.

Now though Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before that of Europe, nevertheless it came up later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. The whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea. This was made known, firstly, by Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and others, and, secondly, through Geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island, and the Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their Gods from the north‐east.

When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, to record the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between Leo and Libra, has found its Œdipus to understand the riddle of its signs, and justify the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus, that their Initiates taught (_a_) that the poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, and (_b_) that even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic.

Bailly had not sufficient words at command to express his surprise at the _sameness_ of all such traditions about the Divine Races, and exclaims:

What are finally all those reigns of Indian Devas and [Persian] Peris; or, those reigns of the Chinese legends; those Tien‐hoang or the Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti‐hoang, or Kings on Earth, and the Gin‐hoang, the King men, distinctions which are in perfect accord with those of the Greeks and Egyptians, in enumerating their Dynasties of Gods, of Demi‐gods and Mortals.(832)

As says Panodorus:

Now, it is during these thousand years [before the Deluge], that the _Reign of the Seven Gods_ who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those benefactors of humanity _descended_ on Earth and taught men to calculate the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic.(833)

Nearly five hundred years before the present era, the priests of Egypt showed Herodotus the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs‐Piromis—the Arch‐prophets or Mahâ Chohans of the temples, _born one from the other_, without the intervention of woman—who had reigned before Menes, their first _human_ King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and forty‐five in number, _each of which had its name, history and annals_. They also assured Herodotus—unless the most truthful of historians, the “father of history,” is now to be accused of fibbing, _just in this instance_—that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the _three_ Dynasties that preceded the human—namely, the Dynasties of the Gods, of the Demi‐gods, and of the Heroes, or Giants.(834) These “three” Dynasties are the three Races.

Translated into the language of the Esoteric Doctrine, these three Dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of the Kimpurushas, and of the Dânavas and Daityas—otherwise Gods, Celestial Spirits, and Giants or Titans. “Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of Gods, as men in Bhârata‐varsha!”—exclaim the incarnated Gods themselves, during the Third Root‐Race. Bhârata is generally India, but in this case it symbolizes the Chosen Land of those days, which was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu‐dvîpa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works _par excellence_; the land of Initiation and of Divine Knowledge.(835)

Can one fail to recognize in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, although he was almost unacquainted with the Âryan Hindû philosophies, which were but little known in his day, we find him writing:

We modern Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the Spirits of the Sun, Moon, etc. But we repeat again, _the natural good sense and the upright judgment_ of the ancient peoples, quite foreign to our _entirely material_ ideas of mechanics and physical sciences ... could not see in the stars and planets nothing but simple masses of light, or opaque bodies moving in circuits in sidereal space, merely according to the laws of attraction or repulsion; they saw in them _living_ bodies, _animated_ by spirits as they saw the same in every kingdom of nature.... _This doctrine of spirits, so consistent and conformable to nature_, from which it was derived, formed a grand and unique conception, wherein the physical, the moral, and the political aspects were all blended together.(836)

It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct conclusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the Universe—of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without such a psychological link, and the feeling of its presence, no Science can ever progress, and the realm of knowledge must be limited to the analysis of physical matter only.

Occultists believe in “spirits,” because they _feel_—and some see—themselves surrounded by them on every side.(837) Materialists do not. They live on this Earth, just as some creatures, in the world of insects and even of fishes, live surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without seeing, or so much as sensing them.(838)

Plato is the first sage among classical writers who speaks at length of the Divine Dynasties. He locates them on a vast continent which he calls Atlantis. Nor was Bailly the first or last to believe this. He had been preceded and anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher, the learned Jesuit, who in his _Œdipus Ægyptiacus_, writes:

I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this [the Dynasties and Atlantis] as pure fables (_meras nugas_) to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all those legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth.(839)

As De Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his _Meropis_, made the priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as did the priests of Saïs when they revealed to Solon the history and fate of Atlantis. According to Theopompus, it was a unique continent of an indefinite size, containing two countries inhabited by two races—a fighting, warrior race, and a pious, meditative race(840)—which Theopompus symbolizes by two cities.(841) The pious “city” was _continually visited by the Gods_: the belligerent “city” was inhabited by various beings _invulnerable_ by iron, who could be _mortally wounded_ only by stone and wood.(842) De Rougemont treats this as a pure _fiction_ of Theopompus and even sees a fraud (_supercherie_) in the assertion of the Saïtic priests. This was denounced by the Demonologists as illogical. In the ironical words of De Mirville:

A _supercherie_ which was based on a belief, the product of the faith of the whole of antiquity; a _supposition_ which yet gave its name to a whole mountain chain (Atlas); which specified with the greatest precision a topographical region (by placing this land at a small distance from Cadiz and the Strait of Calpe), which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, _the great transoceanic land_ situated beyond that Atlantis and which “is reached,” it said, “by the Islands not of the Blessed, but of the Good Spirits,” εὐδαιμόνια (our Îles Fortunées)—such a supposition can well be nothing else but a _universal chimera_!(843)

It is certain that, whether “chimera” or reality, the priests of the whole world had it from one and the same source—the universal tradition about the third great Continent which perished some 850,000 years ago,(844) a Continent inhabited by two distinct races, distinct physically and especially morally, both deeply versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets of nature, and mutually antagonistic in their struggle, during the course and progress of their double evolution. For whence even the Chinese teachings upon the subject, if it is but a “fiction”? Have they not recorded the existence once upon a time of a _Holy_ Island beyond the sun, Tcheou, beyond which were situated the lands of _Immortal_ Men?(845) Do they not still believe that the remnants of those Immortal Men—who survived when the Holy Island became black with sin and perished—have found refuge in the great Desert of Gobi, where they still reside, invisible to all and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits?

As the very unbelieving Boulanger writes:

If one has to lend ear to traditions, the latter place before the reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and Demi‐gods; and still earlier beyond they place the marvellous reign of the Gods and all the fables of the Golden Age.... One feels surprised that annals so interesting should have been rejected by almost all our historians. And yet the ideas presented by them were once universally admitted and revered by all nations; not a few revere them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such considerations seem to necessitate a less hurried judgment.... The ancients, from whom we hold these traditions, which _we accept no longer because we no longer understand them_, must have had motives for believing in them, furnished by their greater proximity to the first ages, which the distance that separates us from them refuses to us.... Plato in the fourth book of his _Laws_, says that, long before the construction of the first cities, Saturn had established on earth a _certain_ form of government under which man was very happy. Now as it is the Golden Age he refers to, or to that reign of Gods so celebrated in ancient fables, ... let us see the ideas he had of that happy age, and what was the occasion he had to introduce this _fable_ into a treatise on politics. According to Plato, in order to obtain clear and precise ideas on royalty, its origin and power, one has to turn back to the first principles of history and tradition. Great changes, he says, have occurred in days of old, _in heaven and on earth_, and the present state of things is one of the results [Karma]. Our traditions tell us of many marvels, of changes that have taken place in the course of the sun, of Saturn’s reign, and of a thousand other matters that remain scattered in human memory; but _one never hears anything of the evil which has produced these revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them_. Yet ... that Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able to treat of royalty and the origin of power.(846)

That Evil, Plato seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the natures of the rulers and the ruled, for he says that long before man built his cities, in the Golden Age, there was naught but happiness on Earth, for there were no needs. Why? Because Saturn, knowing that man could not rule man, without injustice forthwith filling the universe through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal to obtain power over his fellow creatures. To do this the God used the same means we ourselves use with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or a ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd, _i.e._, _a being of a species quite different from their own and of a superior nature_. This is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and placed to rule over it no mortal king or prince but—“Spirits and Genii (δαίμονες) of a divine nature more excellent than that of man.”

It was God (the Logos, the Synthesis of the Host), who thus presiding over the Genii became the first Shepherd and Leader of men.(847) When the world had ceased to be so governed and the Gods retired, ferocious beasts devoured a portion of mankind. Left to their own resources and industry, Inventors then appeared among them successively and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them.(848)

And mankind was right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of nature, the first and chief property of matter that was revealed to man.

As say the Commentaries:

_Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the __“__Lords of Wisdom,__”__ for the benefit of those they ruled from other Lokas [Spheres]._

Now:

The earliest inventions [?] of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made.... The _first use of fire_, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of animals; and, above all, _the processes by which the various cereals were first developed_ out of some wild grasses [?]—these are all _discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare_. They are all unknown to history—all lost in the light of an _effulgent dawn_.(849)

This will be doubted and denied in our proud generation. But if it be asserted that there are no grains and fruits _unknown to earth_, then we may remind the reader _that wheat has never been found in the wild state; it is not a product of the earth_. All the other cereals have been traced to their primogenital forms in various species of wild grasses, but wheat has hitherto defied the efforts of Botanists to trace it to its origin. And let us bear in mind, in this connection, how sacred was this cereal with the Egyptian priests; wheat was placed even in their mummies, and has been found thousands of years later in their coffins. Remember how the servants of Horus glean the wheat in the field of Aanroo, wheat _seven cubits high_.(850)

Says the Egyptian Isis:

I am the Queen of these regions; I was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn.... I am she who rises in the constellation of the Dog.... Rejoice, O Egypt! thou who wert my nurse.(851)

Sirius was called the Dog‐star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha, called the great Instructor of Mankind.

The Chinese _Y‐King_ attributes the discovery of agriculture to “the instruction given to men by celestial genii.”

Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. They are all blind,(852) since they remain ignorant how full the world is of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places.(853)

The “Sons of God” _have_ existed and _do_ exist. From the Hindû Brahmaputras and Mânasaputras, Sons of Brahmâ and Mind‐born Sons, down to the Bne Aleim of the Jewish _Bible_, the faith of the centuries and universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value is “independent criticism” so‐called, or “internal evidence”—based usually on the respective hobbies of the critics—in the face of the universal testimony, which has never varied throughout the historical cycles? For instance, read Esoterically the sixth chapter of _Genesis_, which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, though slightly changing its form, and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the _Zohar_.

There were giants in the earth in those days; _and also after that_, when the sons of God Bne Aleim came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown [or giants].(854)

What does this sentence, “and also after that,” signify unless it means: There were Giants in the Earth _before_, _i.e._, before the Sinless Sons of the Third Race; _and also after that_ when other Sons of God, lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on Earth—as Daksha did, when he saw that his Mânasaputras would not people the Earth? And then comes a long break in the chapter between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the “mighty men ... men of renown,” among whom is placed Nimrod the “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great,” nor in the builders of Babel, for this was _after_ the Deluge; but in the progeny of the Giants who produced _monstra quædam de genere giganteo_, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on Earth by a few miserable dying‐out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.

And if we are taken to task by Theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse has ever been a dilemma, not alone for the men of Science and biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Péronne puts it:

Either they (the Bne Aleim) were good Angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad (Angels), and in that case could not be called Bne Aleim, or sons of God.(855)

This biblical riddle—“the real sense of which no author has ever understood,” as is candidly confessed by Fourmont(856)—can only be explained by the Occult doctrine, through the _Zohar_ to the Western, and the _Book of Dzyan_ to the Eastern. What the latter says we have seen; what the _Zohar_ tells us is that Bne Aleim was a name common to the Malachim, the good Messengers, and to the Ischins, the lower Angels.(857)

We may add for the benefit of the Demonologists that their Satan, the “Adversary,” is included in _Job_ among the “sons” of God or Bne Aleim who visit their father.(858) But of this later on.

Now the _Zohar_ says that the Ischins, the beautiful Bne Aleim, were _not_ guilty, but mixed _themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so_.(859) Elsewhere the same volume shows these Bne Aleim belonging to the tenth sub‐division of the “Thrones.”(860) It also explains that the Ischins—“Men‐spirits,” _viri spirituales_(861)—now that men can see them no longer, help Magicians to produce, by their Science, Homunculi which are not “small men” but “men _smaller_ (in the sense of inferiority) than men.” Both show themselves under the form that the Ischins had then, _i.e._, gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.

But Azazel, whom the Church dogma persists in associating with Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a _mystery_, as explained elsewhere, and it is so expressed by Maimonides:

There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel.(862)

And so there is, as Lanci, a librarian to the Vatican, whom we have quoted before, and one who ought to know, says:

This venerable divine name (_nome divino e venerabile_) has become through the pen of biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a mountain, and a he‐goat.(863)

Therefore it seems foolish to derive the name, as Spencer does, from Azal (separated) and El (God), hence “one separated from God”—the Devil. In the _Zohar_, Azazel is rather the “sacrificial victim” than the “formal adversary of Jehovah,” as Spencer would have it.(864)

The amount of malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on this “Host” by various fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his “Host” are simply the Hebrew “Prometheus,” and ought to be viewed from the same standpoint. The _Zohar_ shows the Ischins chained to the mountain in the desert. This is allegorical, and simply alludes to these “Spirits” as being chained to the Earth during the Cycle of Incarnation. Azazel, or Azazyel, is one of the chiefs of the “transgressing” Angels in the _Book of Enoch_, who descending upon Ardis, the top of Mount Armon, bound themselves by swearing loyalty to each other. It is said that Azazyel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, to fabricate mirrors (?), to make _one see what is behind him_—viz., “magic mirrors.” Amazarak taught all the sorcerers and dividers of roots; Amers taught the solution of Magic; Barkayal, Astrology; Akibeel, the meaning of portents and signs; Tamiel, Astronomy; and Asaradel taught the motion of the Moon.(865) “These seven were the first instructors of the fourth man” (_i.e._, of the Fourth Race). But why should allegory be always understood as meaning just what its dead‐letter expresses?

It is the symbolical representation of the great struggle between Divine Wisdom, Nous, and its Earthly Reflection, Psyche, or between Spirit and Soul, in Heaven and on Earth. In Heaven—because the Divine Monad had voluntarily exiled itself therefrom, to descend, for incarnating purposes, to a lower plane and thus transform the _animal_ of clay into an immortal _God_. For, as Éliphas Lévi tells us:

The Angels aspire to become Men; for the perfect Man, the Man‐God, is above even Angels.

On Earth—because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was strangled in the coils of Matter.

Strange to say, the Occult Teaching reverses the characters; it is the anthropomorphous Archangel in the case of the Christians, and the man‐like God with the Hindûs, which represent Matter in this case; and the Dragon, or Serpent, Spirit. Occult symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery; theological symbolism conceals it still more. For the former explains many a saying in the _Bible_ and even in the _New Testament_ which has hitherto remained incomprehensible; while the latter, owing to its dogma of Satan and his rebellion, has belittled the character and nature of its would‐be infinite, absolutely perfect God, and created the greatest evil and curse on Earth—belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is now partially revealed. The key to its metaphysical interpretation has now been restored, while the key to its theological interpretation shows the Gods and Archangels standing as symbols for the dead‐letter or dogmatic religions, as arrayed against the pure truths of Spirit, naked and unadorned with fancy.

Many were the hints thrown out in this direction in _Isis Unveiled_, and a still greater number of references to the mystery may be found scattered throughout these volumes. To make the point clear once for all; that which the clergy of every dogmatic religion, preëminently the Christian, points out as Satan, the enemy of God, is, in reality, the highest divine Spirit—Occult Wisdom on Earth—which is naturally antagonistic to every worldly, evanescent illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions included. Thus, the Latin Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who do not choose to be its slaves, the Church which calls itself the “bride” of Christ, and at the same time the trustee of Peter, to whom the rebuke of the Master “Get thee behind me, Satan” was justly addressed; and again the Protestant Church which, while calling itself Christian, paradoxically replaces the New Dispensation by the old Law of Moses which Christ openly repudiated—both these Churches are fighting against divine Truth, when repudiating and slandering the Dragon of Esoteric Divine Wisdom. Whenever they anathematize the Gnostic Solar Chnouphis, the Agathodæmon Christos, or the Theosophical Serpent of Eternity, or even the Serpent of _Genesis_—they are moved by the same spirit of dark fanaticism that moved the Pharisees to curse Jesus with the words: “Say we not well thou hast a devil?”

Read the account of Indra (Vâyu) in the _Rig Veda_, the Occult volume _par excellence_ of Âryanism, and then compare it with the same in the _Purânas_—the exoteric version thereof, and the purposely garbled account of the true Wisdom Religion. In the _Rig Veda_, Indra is the highest and greatest of the Gods, and his Soma‐drinking is allegorical of his highly spiritual nature. In the _Purânas_, Indra becomes a profligate, and a regular drunkard on the Soma‐juice, in the ordinary terrestrial way. He is the conqueror of all the “enemies of the Gods” the Daityas, Nâgas (Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent‐gods, and of Vritra, the Cosmic Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindû Pantheon—the chief of the _militant_ Host. Turning to the _Bible_, we find Satan, one of the “Sons of God,”(866) becoming in exoteric interpretation the Devil, and the Dragon, in its infernal, evil sense. But in the _Kabalah_,(867) Samael, who is Satan, is shown to be identical with St. Michael, the Slayer of the Dragon. How is this, when it is said that Tselem (the Image) reflects alike Michael and Samael, _who are one_? Both proceed, it is taught, from Ruach (Spirit), Neshamah (Soul) and Nephesh (Life). In the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_ Samael is the concealed (Occult) Wisdom, and Michael the higher _terrestrial_ Wisdom, both emanating from the same source, but diverging after their issue from the Mundane Soul, which on Earth is Mahat, intellectual understanding, or Manas, the seat of intellect. They diverge, because the one (Michael) is _influenced_ by Neshamah, while the other (Samael) remains _uninfluenced_. This tenet was perverted by the dogmatic spirit of the Church, which, loathing independent Spirit, uninfluenced by the external form, hence by dogma, forthwith made of Samael‐Satan—the most wise and spiritual spirit of all—the Adversary of its anthropomorphic God and sensual physical man, the Devil!

The Origin Of The Satanic Myth.

Let us, then, fathom this creation of the Patristic fancy still deeper, and find its prototype with the Pagans. The origin of the new Satanic myth is easy to trace. The tradition of the Dragon and the Sun is echoed in every part of the world, both in its civilized and semi‐savage regions. It took rise in the whisperings about secret Initiations among the profane, and was once universally established through the formerly universal heliolatrous religion. There was a time when the four parts of the world were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the Dragon; but the cult is now preserved mostly in China and Buddhist countries,

Bel and the Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the priest of the Ophite religion as uniformly assuming the name of his God.(868)

Among the religions of the past, it is in Egypt we have to seek for its Western origin. The Ophites adopted their rites from Hermes Trismegistus, and heliolatrous worship with its Sun‐gods crossed over into the land of the Pharaohs from India. In the Gods of Stonehenge we recognize the divinities of Delphi and Babylon, and in those of the latter the Devas of the Vedic nations. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Krishna and Kâliya, Osiris and Typhon, are all one under many names—the latest of which are Michael and the Red Dragon, and St. George and his Dragon. As Michael is “one as God,” or his “Double” for terrestrial purposes, and is one of the Elohim, the fighting Angel, he is thus simply a permutation of Jehovah. Whatever the cosmic or astronomical event that first gave rise to the allegory of the “War in Heaven,” its earthly origin has to be sought in the temples of Initiation and archaic crypts; and the proof is that we find (_a_) the priests assuming the name of the Gods they served; (_b_) the “Dragons” held throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality and Wisdom, of secret Knowledge and of Eternity; and (_c_) the Hierophants of Egypt, of Babylon, and India, styling themselves generally the “Sons of the Dragon” and “Serpents”; thus corroborating the teachings of the Secret Doctrine.

There were numerous catacombs in Egypt and Chaldæa, some of them of a very vast extent. The most renowned of these were the subterranean crypts of Thebes and Memphis. The former, beginning on the western side of the Nile, extended towards the Libyan desert, and were known as the Serpent’s Catacombs, or passages. It was there that were performed the Sacred Mysteries of the Kuklos Anagkês, the “Unavoidable Cycle,” more generally known as the “Circle of Necessity”; the inexorable doom imposed upon every Soul after bodily death, when it has been judged in the Amentian region.

In De Bourbourg’s book, Votan, the Mexican Demi‐god, in narrating his expedition, describes a subterranean passage which ran on underground, and terminated at the root of the heavens, adding that this passage was a Snake’s hole, “_un agujero de colubra_”; and that he was admitted to it because he was himself a “Son of the Snakes,” or a Serpent.(869)

This is, indeed, very suggestive; for his description of the “Snake’s hole” is that of the ancient Egyptian crypt, as above mentioned. The Hierophants, moreover, of Egypt, and also of Babylon, generally styled themselves during the Mysteries, the “Sons of the Serpent‐god,” or “Sons of the Dragon.”

“The Assyrian priest always bore the name of his God,” says Movers. The Druids of the Celto‐Britannic regions also called themselves Snakes. “I am a Serpent, I am a Druid,” they exclaimed. The Egyptian Karnak is twin brother to the Carnac of Bretagne, the latter Carnac meaning the Serpent’s Mount. The Dracontia once covered the surface of the globe, and these temples were sacred to the Dragon, only because it was the symbol of the Sun, which, in its turn, was the symbol of the Highest God—the Phœnician Elon or Elion, whom Abraham recognized as El Elion.(870) Besides the surname of Serpents, they had also the appellation of “Builders” or “Architects,” for the immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was such that even now the pulverized remains of them “frighten the mathematical calculations of our modern engineers,” as Taliesin says.(871)

De Bourbourg hints that the chiefs of the name of Votan, the Quetzo‐ Cohuatl, or Serpent deity of the Mexicans, are the descendants of Ham and Canaan. “I am Hivim,” they say. “Being a Hivim, I am of the great race of the Dragon (Snake). I am a Snake myself, for I am a Hivim.”(872)

Furthermore, the “War in Heaven” is shown, in one of its significations, to have referred to those terrible struggles in store for the Candidate for Adeptship—struggles between himself and his (by Magic) personified human passions, when the enlightened _Inner Man_ had to either slay them or fail. In the former case he became the “Dragon‐Slayer,” as having happily overcome all the temptations, and a “Son of the Serpent” and a Serpent himself, having cast off his old skin and being born in a _new_ body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality in Eternity.

Seth, the reputed forefather of Israel, is only a Jewish travesty of Hermes, the God of Wisdom, called also Thoth, Tat, Seth, Set, and Satan. He is also Typhon, the same as Apophis, the Dragon slain by Horus; for Typhon was also called Set. He is simply the _dark side_ of Osiris, his brother, as Angra Mainyu is the black shadow of Ahura Mazda. Terrestrially, all these allegories were connected with the trials of Adeptship and Initiation. Astronomically, they referred to the Solar and Lunar eclipses, the mythical explanations of which we find to this day in India and Ceylon, where anyone can study the allegorical narratives and traditions which have remained unchanged for many thousands of years.

Râhu, mythologically, is a Daitya—a Giant, a Demi‐god, the lower part of whose body ended in a Dragon’s or Serpent’s tail. During the Churning of the Ocean, when the Gods produced the Amrita, the Water of Immortality, he stole some of it, and, drinking, became immortal. The Sun and Moon, who had detected him in his theft, denounced him to Vishnu, who placed him in the stellar spheres, the upper portion of his body representing the Dragon’s head and the lower (Ketu) the Dragon’s tail; the two being the ascending and descending nodes. Since then, Râhu wreaks his vengeance on the Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them. But this fable has another mystic meaning, for Râhu, the Dragon’s head, played a prominent

## part in the Mysteries of the Sun’s (Vikartana’s) Initiation, when the

Candidate and the Dragon had a supreme fight.

The caves of the Rishis, the abodes of Teiresias and the Greek seers, were modelled on those of the Nâgas—the Hindû King‐Snakes, who dwelt in cavities of the rocks under the ground. From Shesha, the thousand‐headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests, down to Python, the Dragon‐serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of the myth. In India we find the fact mentioned in the earliest _Purânas_. The children of Surasâ are the mighty “Dragons.” The _Vâyu Purâna_ replacing the “Dragons” of Surasâ of the _Vishnu Purâna_ by the Dânavas, the descendants of Danu by the sage Kashyapa, and these Dânavas being the Giants, or Titans, who warred against the Gods, they are thus shown identical with the “Dragons” and “Serpents” of Wisdom.

We have only to compare the Sun‐gods of every country, to find their allegories agreeing perfectly with each other; and the more the allegorical symbol is Occult the more its corresponding symbol in exoteric systems agrees with it. Thus, if from three systems widely differing from each other in appearance—the old Âryan, the ancient Greek, and the modern Christian schemes—several Sun‐gods and Dragons are selected at random, they will be found to be copied from each other.

Let us take Agni the Fire‐god, Indra the firmament, and Kârttikeya from the Hindûs; the Greek Apollo; and Michael, the “Angel of the Sun,” the first of the Æons, called by the Gnostics the “Saviour”—and proceed in order.

(1) Agni, the Fire‐god, is called Vaishvânara in the _Rig Veda_. Now Vaishvânara is a Dânava, a Giant‐demon,(873) whose daughters Pulomâ and Kâlakâ are the mothers of numberless Dânavas (30 millions), by Kashyapa,(874) and live in Hiranyapura, “_the golden city, floating in the air_.”(875) Therefore, Indra is, in a fashion, the step‐son of these two as a son of Kashyapa; and Kashyapa is, in this sense, identical with Agni, the Fire‐god, or Sun (Kashyapa‐Âditya). To this same group belongs Skanda or Kârttikeya, God of War, the _six‐faced_ planet Mars astronomically, a Kumâra, or Virgin‐youth, born of Agni,(876) for the purpose of destroying Târaka, the Dânava Demon, the grandson of Kashyapa by his son Hiranyâksha.(877) Târaka’s Yoga austerities were so extraordinary that they became formidable to the Gods, who feared such a rival in power.(878) While Indra, the bright God of the Firmament, kills Vritra, or Ahi, the Serpent‐Demon—for which feat he is called Vritra‐han, the “Destroyer of Vritra”—he also leads the hosts of Devas (Angels or Gods) against other Gods who rebel against Brahmâ, for which he is surnamed Jishnu, “Leader of the Celestial Host.” Kârttikeya is also found bearing the same titles. For killing Târaka, the Dânava, he is called Târaka‐jit, “Vanquisher of Târaka,”(879) Kumâra Guha, the “mysterious Virgin‐youth,” Siddha‐sena, “Leader of the Siddhas,” and Shakti‐dhara, “Spear‐holder.”

(2) Now take Apollo, the Grecian Sun‐god, and by comparing the mythical accounts given of him, see whether he does not answer both to Indra, Kârttikeya, and even Kashyapa‐Âditya, and at the same time to Michael (as the Angelic form of Jehovah) the “Angel of the Sun,” who is “like,” and “one with, God.” Later ingenious interpretations for monotheistic purposes, elevated though they be into not‐to‐be‐questioned Church dogmas, prove nothing, except, perhaps, the abuse of human authority and power.

Apollo is Helios, the Sun, Phoibos‐Apollo, the “Light of Life and of the World,”(880) who arises out of the Golden‐winged Cup (the Sun); hence he is the Sun‐god _par excellence_. At the moment of his birth he asks for his bow to kill Python, the Demon Dragon, who attacked his mother before his birth,(881) and whom he is divinely commissioned to destroy—like Kârttikeya, who is born for the purpose of killing Târaka, the _too holy and wise_ Demon. Apollo is born on a sidereal island called Asteria—the “golden star island,” the “earth which floats in the air,” which is the Hindû golden Hiranyapura; he is called the Pure (ἁγνὸς) Agnus Dei, the Indian Agni, as Dr. Kenealy thinks; and in the primal myth he is exempt “from all sensual love.”(882) He is, therefore, a Kumâra, like Kârttikeya, and as Indra was in his earlier life and biographies. Python, moreover, the “red Dragon,” connects Apollo with Michael, who fights the Apocalyptic Dragon, seeking to attack the woman in child‐birth, as Python attacks Apollo’s mother. Can any one fail to see the identity? Had the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who prides himself on his Greek scholarship and understanding of the spirit of Homer’s allegories, ever had a real inkling of the _esoteric_ meaning of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, he would have understood St. John’s _Revelation_, and even the _Pentateuch_, better than he does. For the way to the _Bible_ lies through Hermes, Bel, and Homer, as the way to these is through the Hindû and Chaldæan religious symbols.

(3) The repetition of this archaic tradition is found in