The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 3, ch 6 cont

The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2

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A.

SOME STATEMENTS ABOUT THE SACRED ISLANDS AND CONTINENTS

IN THE CLASSICS, EXPLAINED ESOTERICALLY.

All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many others. But as no Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knew, posterity got only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a moralist than as a geographer and ethnologist or historian, the Greek philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 761 WHO, OR WHAT WILL BE DENIED NEXT?

event which he located on one comparatively small island 3000 stadia long by 2000 wide; (or about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland), whereas the priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as "all Asia and Lybia" put together. But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato's narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.* It was not he who invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks of the Atlantes (who are our Atlanteans) and of their island in his Odyssey. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses. The Atlantes and the Atlantides of mythology are based upon the Atlantes and the Atlantides of history. Both Sanchoniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much these accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.

In our own day we witness the stupendous fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakespeare and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful races -- the Lemurians and the Atlanteans -- have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic?

Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes -- a people of Western Africa which gave its name to Mount Atlas; who were vegetarians, and "whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams"; and who, moreover, "daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them."

These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas (Vide supra) gives the key to it. If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to that other statement -- namely, that

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* Plato's veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such friendly critics as Professor Jowett, when the "story of Atlantis" is discussed, that it seems well to cite the testimony of a specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary cavillers in a very ridiculous position: --

"If our knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in every instance wherein the people of Europe accord with the people of America, they were both in accord with the people of Atlantis. . . . . It will be seen that in every case where Plato gives us information in this respect as to Atlantis, we find this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture, navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship, agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all the minor details." (Donnelly, "Atlantis," p. 194.)

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they daily "cursed the Sun" -- this again has nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration that grew with the race. It is explained in our Commentaries. "They (the sixth sub-race of the Atlanteans) used magic incantations even against the Sun" -- failing in which, they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the gods. Thence the same traditions taking form in the Bible about the antediluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, found also in the "Book of Enoch."

Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing the land in which all the gods had received their birth; as also of having had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from Antiquity.

The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and an universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean: because both continents bore races instructed by divine masters, and because both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reappearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso -- "the watery deep," (See Hesiod's Theogony, 507-509, and Odyssey 1, 51): Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the "sustainer" of the huge pillars that separate the heavens from the earth (1, 52-53). He is their "supporter." And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,* Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the earth, and join his brother Iapetos in the depths of Tartarus. Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning, Atlas "standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the universe and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the earth and the celestial vault -- the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere" . . . (Memoires de l'Academie des

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* Christians ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical destruction of continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of the earth "standing out of the water, and in the water, which earth, being overflowed, perished, but is now reserved unto fire"; (See also the "Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers," p. 4, London, 1815).

[[Vol. 2, Page]]763 THE HEIRLOOM OF ATLANTIS.

Inscriptions, p. 176). For Atlas is Atlantis which supports the new continents and their horizons on its "shoulders."

Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grece Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron's translation of the Homeric word [[echei]] by sustinet, as it is not possible to see "how Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in various localities." If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a continent in the west said to support heaven and earth at once (AEschylus, "Prometheus Vinctus," 351, 429, etc.) -- i.e., the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders support the celestial vault, an allusion to the gigantic peaks of the Lemurian and Atlantean continents -- the epithet "supporter" becomes very correct. The term "conservator" for the Greek word [[echei]], which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning [[phulassei]] and [[epimeleitai]], does not render the same sense.

The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running along the terrestrial border (or disc). These mountain peaks plunged their roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas, and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thus, the Lybians called Mount Atlas "the pillar of Heaven," according to Herodotus (IV., 184), and Pindar qualified the later AEtna as "the celestial pillar" (Pyth. 1, 20; Decharme, 315). Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when the African continent had not yet been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, independent, of the continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell,* for Australia is now part of the Eastern continent. Proud Atlas, according to esoteric tradition, having sunk one third of its size into the waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.

This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo-Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told.** So

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* This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Northern and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed part of the continent.

** Had not Diocletian burned the esoteric works of the Egyptians in 296, together with their books on alchemy -- "[[peri chumeias kai chrusou]]"; Caesar 700,000 rolls at Alexandria, and Leo Isaurus 300,000 at Constantinople (viiith cent.); and the Mahomedans all they could lay their sacrilegious hands on -- the world might know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birth-place in Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in Egypt.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 764 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

secret was the knowledge of the last islands of Atlantis, indeed, -- on account of the superhuman powers possessed by its inhabitants, the last direct descendants of the gods or divine Kings, as it was thought -- that to divulge its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as much in his ever-suspected Meropis, when he speaks of the Phoenicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; and who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.

There are those Orientalists and historians -- and they form the majority -- who, while feeling quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the Bible, and some of the events narrated in it, show great disgust at the immorality in the pantheons of India and Greece.* We may be told that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato, express the same; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented --"those miserable stories of the poets," as Euripides expresses it ([[haoidon hoide dustenoi logoi]], Hercules furens, 1346, Dindorf's Edition).

But there may have been another reason for this, perhaps. To those who knew that there was more than one key to theogonic symbolism, it was a mistake to have expressed it in a language so crude and misleading. For if the educated and learned philosopher could discern the kernel of wisdom under the coarse rind of the fruit, and knew that the latter concealed the greatest laws and truths of psychic and physical nature, as well as the origin of all things -- not so with the uninitiated profane. For him the dead letter was religion; the interpretation -- sacrilege. And this dead letter could neither edify nor make him more perfect, seeing that such an example was given him by his gods. But

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* Professor Max Muller's Lectures -- "on the Philosophy of Mythology" -- are before us. We read his citations of Herakleitos (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer deserved "to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged;" and of Xenophanes "holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. . . . " and for ascribing "to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men . . . unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud." Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett's translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantos (Republic) that "the young man (in the State) should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father (as Zeus did with Kronos) . . in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods. . . In my opinion, these stories are not fit to be repeated." To this Dr. Max Muller observes that "the Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief"; while the Christian religion is "an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorised codex and of a settled system of faith" (p. 349). So much the worse if it is "historical," for surely Lot's incident with his daughters would only gain, were it "allegorical."

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 765 THE GOD-BEARING LAND.

to the philosopher -- especially the Initiate -- Hesiod's theogony is as historical as any history can be. Plato accepts it as such, and gives out as much of its truths as his pledges permitted him.

The fact that the Atlantes claimed Uranos for their first king, and that Plato commences his story of Atlantis by the division of the great continent by Neptune, the grandson of Uranos, shows that there were continents and kings before Atlantis. For Neptune, to whose lot that continent fell, finds on a small island only one human couple made of clay (i.e., the first physical human man, whose origin began with the last sub-races of the Third Root-Race). It is their daughter Clito that the god marries, and it is his eldest son Atlas who receives for his part the mountain and the continent which was called by his name.

Now all the gods of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindu Pantheon and the Rishis, were the septiform personations (1) of the noumena of the intelligent Powers of nature; (2) of Cosmic Forces; (3) of celestial bodies; (4) of gods or Dhyan Chohans; (5) of psychic and spiritual powers; (6) of divine kings on earth (or the incarnations of the gods); and (7) of terrestrial heroes or men. The knowledge how to discern among these seven forms the one that is meant, belonged at all times to the Initiates, whose earliest predecessors had created this symbolical and allegorical system.

Thus while Uranos (or the host representing this celestial group) reigned and ruled over the Second Race and their (then) Continent; Kronos or Saturn governed the Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptune* and others fought in the allegory for Atlantis, which was the whole earth in the day of the Fourth Race. Poseidonis, or the (last) island of Atlantis "the third step of Idaspati" (or Vishnu) in the mystic language of the secret books -- lasted till about 12,000 years ago.** The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in claiming that it was their country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas, where "the gods were born" -- i.e., "incarnated." But it was after their fourth incarnation that they became, for the first time, human Kings and rulers.

Diodorus speaks of Uranos as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either consciously or otherwise, the continents; but, as shown, Plato indirectly corrects the statement. The first astronomical teacher of men was Uranos, because he is one of the seven Dhyan Chohans of that second period or Race. Thus also in the second Manvantara

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* Neptune or Poseidon is the Hindu Idaspati, identical with Narayana (the mover on the waters) or Vishnu, and like this Hindu god he is shown crossing the whole horizon in three steps. Idaspati means also "the master of the waters."

** Bailly's assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the Egyptian priests do not represent "solar years" is groundless. Bailly knew nothing of geology and its calculations; otherwise he would have spoken differently.

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(that of Swarochisha), among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding gods or Rishis of that race, we find Jyotis,* the teacher of astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the names of Brahma. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the sky, Ouranos), and name him as their first teacher of astronomy. Uranos gave birth to the Titans of the Third Race, and it is they who (personified by Saturn-Kronos) mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who fell into generation, when "creation by will was superseded by physical procreation," they needed Uranos no more.

And here a short digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence of the last scholarly production of Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century, "The Greater Gods of Olympos," the ideas of the general public about Greek Mythology have been still further perverted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as "the true key to the Homeric conception," whereas this "key" was merely a blind. Poseidon "is indeed essentially of the earth earthy . . . . strong and self-asserting, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive," -- but this is because he symbolises the Spirit of the Fourth Root-Race, the ruler of the Seas, that race which lives above the surface of the seas ([[limne]], Il. xxiv., 79), which is composed of the giants, the children of Eurymedon, the race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan and one-eyed Cyclops. Though Zeus reigns over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules, and who is the true key to the triad of the Kronid Brothers and to our human races. Poseidon and Nereus are one: the former the ruler or spirit of Atlantis before the beginning of its submersion, the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the living race; Nereus, its spirit reincarnated in the subsequent Fifth or Aryan Race: and this is what the great Greek scholar of England has not yet discovered, or even dimly perceived. And yet he makes many observations upon the "artfulness" of Homer, who never names Nereus, at whose designation we arrive . . . . only through the patronymic of the Nereids!

Thus the tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to confine their speculations to the exoteric images of mythology and to lose sight of their inner meaning: and it is remarkably illustrated in the case of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, as we have shown. While almost the most conspicuous figure of our age as a statesman, he is at the same time one of the most cultured scholars England has given birth to. Grecian literature has been the loving study of his life, and he has found time amid the bustle of public affairs to enrich contemporary literature with contributions to Greek scholarship which will make his name famous through coming generations. At the same time, as his sincere

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* See Matsya Purana, which places him among the seven Prajapatis of the period.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 767 THE POWER OF NAMES.

admirer, the present writer cannot but feel a deep regret that posterity, while acknowledging his profound erudition and splendid culture, will yet, in the greater light which must then shine upon the whole question of symbolism and mythology, judge that he has failed to grasp the spirit of the religious system which he has often criticised from the dogmatic Christian standpoint. In that future day it will be perceived that the esoteric key to the mysteries of the Christian as well as of the Grecian theogonies and Sciences, is the Secret Doctrine of the pre-historic nations, which, along with others, he has denied. It is that Doctrine alone which can trace the kinship of all human religious speculations or even so-called Revelations, and it is this teaching which infuses the Spirit of life into the lay figures on the Mounts of Meru, Olympus, Walhalla, or Sinai. If Mr. Gladstone were a younger man, his admirers might hope that his scholastic studies would be crowned by the discovery of this underlying truth. As it is, he but wastes the golden hours of his declining years in futile disputations with that giant free-thinker, Col. Ingersoll, each fighting with the weapons of exoteric temper, drawn from the arsenals of ignorant LITERALISM. These two great controversialists are equally blind to the true esoteric meaning of the texts which they hurl at each other's head like iron bullets, while the world alone suffers by such controversies: since the one helps to strengthen the ranks of materialism, and the other those of blind Sectarianism and of the dead letter. And now we may return once more to our immediate subject.

Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our commentators. The power of names is great, and was known since the first men were instructed by the divine masters. And as Solon had studied it, he translated the "Atlantean" names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the Great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of "Atlantis."

Thus, in the Timaeus and Critias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself surrounded by mountain chains. . . . . And the plain was smooth and level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other. . . . . They surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.

Now in other places the entire size of the island of Poseidonis is given as about the same as that assigned here to the "plain around the

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city" alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great continent, and the other to its last remnant -- Plato's island.

And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million men; its navy as 1,200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!

The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters (seven sub-races), whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope, Merope, Alcyone, and Celaeno. This ethnologically, as they are credited with having married gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides have become the seven Pleiades (?). In occult science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to Karmic law.

Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria (confused already several thousands of years before our era with Atlantis): and these were the Egyptians, the Phoenicians (Vide Sanchoniathon), and the old Greeks (Vide Diodorus, after Plato). But the oldest civilized country of Asia -- India -- can be shown to claim the same descent likewise. Sub-races guided by Karmic law or destiny repeat unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother-races. As the comparatively fair Brahmins have come -- when invading India with its dark-coloured Dravidians -- from the North, so the Aryan Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The occult sciences show that the founders (the respective groups of the seven Prajapatis) of the Root Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find: --

"He who understands the age of Dhruva* who measures 9090 mortal years, will understand the times of the pralayas, the final destiny of nations, O Lanoo."

Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should locate its great progenitors and saints in the Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is 70,000 YEARS, HOWEVER, SINCE THE POLE OF THE EARTH POINTED TO THE FURTHER END OF URSA MINOR'S TAIL; and many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the constellation of Ursa Major.

The Aryan race was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further south into Asia. Hence Prometheus is son of Asia, and Deukalion, his son, the Greek Noah -- he who created men out of the stones of mother

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* The equivalent of this name is given in the original.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 769 THE SONS OF COELUS AND TERRA.

earth -- is called a northern Scythe, by Lucian, and Prometheus is made the brother of Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the Snows.*

Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phoenicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed.** All the "fables" of Greece were built on historical facts, if that history had only passed unadulterated by myths to posterity. The "one-eyed" Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Coelus and Terra -- three in number, according to Hesiod -- were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the "one-eye" referring to the Wisdom eye***; for the two front eyes were fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of Ithaca was saved by putting out with a fire-brand the eye of Polyphemus, is based upon the psycho-physiological atrophy of the "third" eye. Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a "sage" in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.**** His adventure with the latter -- a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey -- is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of

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* Deukalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phoenicia. Now the worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole where the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in latitude 68 [[degrees]] it remains dead only for forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of Lemuria, or on that continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, and which stretched up to the Polar regions. This is well shown by de Gebelin's "Allegories d'Orient," p. 246, and by Bailly; though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects.

** The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, were described (Herod, IV., 33-35; Pausanias, 1, 31, 2; V., 7, 8; ad X., 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the gods, and of Apollo chiefly.

*** The Cyclopes are not the only "one-eyed" representatives in tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye. (Geographie ancienne, Vol. II, p. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts. (See supra.)

**** Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of AEaea, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs for their voluptuousness; and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection (Odyssey and elsewhere). Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas (Odys. Book XII.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the ocean: thus identifying it with Atlantis.

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the Third Race to lose their all-penetrating spiritual eye. That other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclops to avenge the death of his son Asclepios, does not refer to the three races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the "Wisdom-eye." The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the south as much as in the north; the latter, were confined to the north solely. Thus Apollo -- pre-eminently the god of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration -- killed them -- his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal -- and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions. (Hygin. "Astron. Poetique," Book ii. c. 15). Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean god is the Sun personified, which during the course of the sidereal year (25,868 y.) changes the climates on the earth's surface, making of tropical, frigid regions, and vice versa. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his "Greater Gods of Olympos," "the qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athene) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology" (Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.)

The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo's mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phoebus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle (Diod. Sic. II. 307). Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its race -- geologically.*

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* To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the southern. Thus Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book II.): "The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis." The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the mythologists have tried to make of Eridan the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridan and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridan, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridan by Jupiter's thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where "the magnolia blossomed" became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ices. This allegory covers then the events of two pralayas; and if well understood ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 771 THE CHILDREN OF NIOBE.

When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine -- Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of birds, the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels -- then the bright god assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of Seership, when he sends the astral double of AEneas to the battle field (II. 431-53), and has the gift of appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present -- (Iliad, xvii., 322-36) -- a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans, was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the north-wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe (the Atlantean race) -- the mother of seven sons and seven daughters personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches (see Apollodorus for this number) -- allegorizes the history of the two continents. The wrath of "the sons of god," or of "Will and Yoga," at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great (See "The Sons of God and the Sacred Island"); and the destruction of the "children of Niobe" by the children of Latona -- Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the earth's axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms -- is thus very clear.* The fable about the

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* So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii.) as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child "cries, travailing in birth, pained to be delivered." A great red Dragon, etc., stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God (the Sun). The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who keep the commandment of God, etc. (See xii., 1, 17.) Anyone, who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognise the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for "the man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron" of Revelation, is surely not the meek "Son of God," Jesus, but the physical Sun, "who rules all nations"; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona "to bring forth" -- (the Sun to appear). "She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth," until Neptune (the ocean), moved with pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos (the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the ocean) on which Latona finds refuge and where the bright god [[Delios]] is born, the god, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns -- with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the [[Footnote continued on next page]]

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 772 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain -- Atlantis covered with water -- is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades (or Atlantides) the grand-daughter of Atlas therefore, (See "Metamorphoses of Ovid," Book VI.), because she represents the last generations of the doomed continent.

A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous influence on antiquity. "If these names," he adds, "are mere allegories, then all that those fables contain of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real tradition -- however altered -- then the whole of the ancient history is still in it." (Lettres sur l'Atlantide, p. 137.)

So much so, that all ancient writings -- prose and poetry -- are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical races, though the Third and the Fourth in number. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet (Hesiod, in oper. and dieb. v. 143). Such were the giants of the first physical races. The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the "Sons of God," or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge, to rid the earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zoroaster as one of the "Sons of God." -- It says: "Thou, O Zarathustra, didst make all demons (i.e., Sorcerers), who before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth" (i.e., helped them to get submerged).

The Lemurians, as also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes -- the "Sons of Night" or Darkness, and the "Sons of the Sun," or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, from whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and "tried to wrench the lord of light" from their better favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months' duration in the Polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned

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[[Footnote continued from previous page]] chapter just cited of the Apocalypse. Latona became a powerful goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his occult aspect Apollo is patron of Number 7. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times around Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre -- the seven rays of the sun and the seven forces of nature. But this only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 773 THE CYCLES OF TIME.

than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the north where the year was divided into a day and night of six months' duration each, for Pliny says so in his Fourth Book, c. 12. They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Maeotis (between 45 [[degrees]] and 50 [[degrees]] latitude). Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians, which nation stopped near Tanais, having crossed Asia. "These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year" (in Mario). As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor (c. 16), "sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves."

Even the writers of the Zohar knew of the fact (as shown in iii., fol. 10a), as it is written: "In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . . . there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants." (Isaac Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 139).

The island of Delos, the Asteria of the Greek mythology, was never in Greece, a country which, in its day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern seas. One calls it Basilea or "royal" (Vol. II., p. 225 of Diod.); the other, Pliny, names it Osericta (Book xxxvii, c. 2), a word, according to Rudbeck (Vol. I., p. 462-464), having had "a significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the divine Kings or god-Kings," or again the "royal island of the gods," because the gods were born there, i.e., the divine dynasties of the kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let geographers and geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiold on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions.* The secret books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a paradise before they became hell;

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* These islands were "found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses," etc. If there was no man on earth at that period "how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?" asks a master in a letter. ("Esoteric Buddhism," 67). The reply is given above in the text.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 774 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

the dark Hades of the Greeks and the cold realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the goddess-Queen of the country of the dead, "holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim." Yet, it was the birth-place of Apollo, who was the brightest of gods, in heaven -- astronomically -- as he was the most enlightened of the divine kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad IV., 239-62, Vide "The Greater gods" -- wherein Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the god of the four races) and six times in human form, i.e., as connected with the divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries (which have now become uninhabitable), as well as the name given to man both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church fathers for inventing a hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality.*

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths -- known to and communicating with the Greeks -- who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name it is averred came from pelagus, the great sea. Noah's Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men -- or rather of nations -- which were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Hindu Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun -- the "beloved of the gods," who rescued him from the flood in a canoe -- or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the gods did the same in the north, are all identical as a personage. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the continent and the island of Atlantis.

The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in Sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount

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* A good proof that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north, which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were "of one lip," these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, (Voyage de Renard en Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death -- all proceed from the same root or word.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 775 WHO WERE THE NEPHILIM?

Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition via pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote upon the Titans -- the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, which race descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birth-place of the first giants. The Commentaries on the sacred books explain that the said region was the far north, the polar lands now, the pre-Lemurian earliest continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.

But who were the Nephilim of Genesis vi. 4? There were Palaeolithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or Satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these Satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean race. What is the meaning of Poseidon's amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc., etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of those Lemuro-Atlantean races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, "monsters," as the Stanzas have it.

Now mythology, built upon Hesiod's Theogony, which is but a poetised record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Kottos, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Kronos for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with an hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in mythology every personage almost is a god or derni-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect;* and

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* Thus, for instance, Gyges is a hundred-armed and fifty-headed monster, a demi-god in one case, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king of the country, in another version. The same is found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of Brahma are reborn as mortals.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 776 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub-races, the esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the arctic and antarctic poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore northern Asia is called the "eternal or perpetual land," and the Antarctic the "ever living" and "the concealed"; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reappear in turn, into and above the great waters.

From the first appearance of the great continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants had been imprisoned in their circle by Kronos. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon (or Neptune, hence by the seas), which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad (viii., 13) makes of it the Tartaros. When the gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus -- the deity of the Fourth Race -- the father of the gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants in order to conquer the gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.* The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Rakshasas of Lanka and the Bharateans, the melee of the Atlanteans and Aryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds (or Peris), became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the angels of God and the angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, and one of the latest issues of the Aryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious

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* The continents perish in turn by fire and water: either through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or by sinking and the great displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish owing to the former cataclysmal process. The incessant earthquakes of this and the past years may be a warning.

[[Vol. 2, Page]] 777 MYTHOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY.

thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking Humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.

But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar -- as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire -- that Hesiod's theogony was based upon historical facts (see Decharme's Mythol. de la Grece Antique), it becomes easier for the occult teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.

Such symbolisms as are found in all the exoteric creeds, are so many landmarks of prehistoric truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then hyperborean and Saturnine*; thus showing the Golden Age and reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many-sided in its character indeed -- climatically, ethnologically and morally. For, the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The Cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations we may seek for some more corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.

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* Denis, the geographer, tells us that the great sea North of Asia was called glacial, or Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny (Book IV., c. 16) corroborate the statement by showing that it is its giant inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by telling us that all the continents were formed from North to South; and that as the sudden change of climate dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so, several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced the tallest men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this day. The tallest men now found are those in Northern countries, while the smallest are Southern Asiatics, Hindus, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and the English, with the inhabitants of central India and the average European on the continent. Thus also the giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of Hesiod, are all Northerners.

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