The Secret Doctrine

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.

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__”__...!_

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);