Chapter XV: {574} (1)

“STE.—Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon us with
savages, and men of Inde?”
_The Tempest_, Act ii., Sc. 2.

“We have now, so far forth as it is requisite for our design,
considered the _Nature and Functions of the Soule_; and have
plainly demonstrated that she is a substance distinct from the
body.”
—DR. HENRY MORE: _Immortality of the Soule_. 1659.

“KNOWLEDGE IS POWER; IGNORANCE IS IMBECILITY.”—AUTHOR OF
“Art-Magic:” _Ghost-Land_.

The “secret doctrine” has for many centuries been like the symbolical “man of sorrows” of the prophet Isaiah. “Who hath believed our report?” its martyrs have repeated from one generation to another. The doctrine has grown up before its persecutors “as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground; it hath no form, nor comeliness ... it is despised and rejected of men; and they hid their faces from it.... They esteemed him not.”

There need be no controversy as to whether this doctrine agrees or not with the iconoclastic tendency of the skeptics of our times. It agrees with _truth_ and that is enough. It would be idle to expect that it would be believed by its detractors and slanderers. But the tenacious vitality it exhibits all over the globe, wherever there are a group of men to quarrel over it, is the best proof that the seed planted by our fathers on “the other side of the flood” was that of a mighty oak, not the spore of a mushroom theology. No lightning of human ridicule can fell to the ground, and no thunderbolts ever forged by the Vulcans of science are powerful enough to blast the trunk, or even scar the branches of this world-tree of KNOWLEDGE.

We have but to leave unnoticed their letter that killeth, and catch the subtile spirit of their hidden wisdom, to find concealed in the _Books of Hermes_—be they the model or the copy of all others—the evidences of a truth and philosophy which we feel _must_ be based on the eternal laws. We instinctively comprehend that, however finite the powers of man, while he is yet embodied, they must be in close kinship with the attributes of an infinite Deity; and we become capable of better appreciating the hidden sense of the gift lavished by the _Elohim_ on _H’Adam_: “Behold, I have given you everything which is upon the face of all the earth ... _subdue it_,” and “_have dominion_” over ALL.

Had the allegories contained in the first chapters of _Genesis_ {575} been better understood, even in their geographical and historical sense, which involve nothing at all esoteric, the claims of its true interpreters, the kabalists, could hardly have been rejected for so long a time. Every student of the _Bible_ must be aware that the first and second chapters of _Genesis_ could not have proceeded from the same pen. They are evidently allegories and parables;[855] for the two narratives of the creation and peopling of our earth diametrically contradict each other in nearly every particular of order, time, place, and methods employed in the so-called creation. In accepting the narratives literally, and as a whole, we lower the dignity of the unknown Deity. We drag him down to the level of humanity, and endow him with the peculiar personality of man, who needs the “cool of the day” to refresh him; who rests from his labors; and is capable of anger, revenge, and even of using precautions against man, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life.” (A tacit admission, by the way, on the part of the Deity, that man _could do it_, if not prevented by sheer force.) But, in recognizing the allegorical coloring of the description of what may be termed historical facts, we find our feet instantly on firm ground.

To begin with—the garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the _Bible_ is not all mere allegory. “Eden, or the Hebrew גן־עדן GAN-EDEN, meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the Erythraian Sea.”[856] In the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_, its location is designated in numerals, and in the cipher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian _Tablets_, it is rendered _gan-dunyas_. “Behold,” say the אלהים _Eloim_ of Genesis, “the man is become as one of us.” The _Eloim_ may be accepted in one sense for _gods_ or powers, and taken in another one for the _Aleim_, or priests; the hierophants initiated into the good and the evil of this world; for there was a college of priests called the _Aleim_, while the head of their caste, or the chief of the hierophants, was known as _Java Aleim_. Instead of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric knowledge through a regular initiation, an _Adam_, or man, uses his intuitional faculties, and, prompted by the Serpent—_Woman_ and matter—tastes of the Tree of Knowledge—the esoteric or secret doctrine—unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-Karth, the “Lord” of the Eden, all wore “coats of skin.” The text says: “And _Java Aleim_, made for Adam and his wife כתנות עור, CHITONUTH OUR.” The {576} first Hebrew word, _chitun_, is the Greek χιτων, _chiton_. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the _Bible_, and means a _coat_, an upper garment.

Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as every early cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of its double origin. Its _Genesis_ is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men, and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brahmans, of Hindustan; but there are more proofs in favor of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite, or Assyrian, ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed otherwise than in the imagination of some philologists and ethnologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to the Akkadian people, whose very name has been changed a dozen times already; and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahmanical Hindus.

It is the opinion of Professor A. Wilder, that if the Assyrians had been called Turanians and the Mongolians Scyths, then, in such a case the wars of Iran and Turan, Zohak and Jemshid, or Yima, would have been fairly comprehended as the struggle of the old Persians against the endeavors of the Assyrian satraps to conquer them, which ended in the overthrow of Nineveh; “the spider weaving her web in the palace of Afrasiab.”[857]

“The Turanian of Prof. Müller and his school,” adds our correspondent, “was evidently the savage and nomadic Caucasian, out of whom the Hamite or Æthiopian builders come; then the Shemites—perhaps a hybrid of Hamite and Aryan; and lastly the Aryan—Median, Persian, Hindu; and later, the Gothic and Slavic peoples of Europe. He supposes the Celt to have been a hybrid, analogous to the Assyrians—between the Aryan invaders of Europe and the Iberic (probably Æthiopic) population of Europe.” In such a case he must admit the possibility of our assertion that the Akkadians were a tribe of the earliest Hindus. Now, whether {577} they were Brahmans, from the Brahmanic planisphere proper (40° north latitude), or from India (Hindustan), or, again, from the India of Central Asia, we will leave to philologists of future ages to decide.

An opinion which with us amounts to certitude, demonstrated by an inductive method of our own, which we are afraid will be but little appreciated by the orthodox methods of modern science, is based on what will appear to the latter merely circumstantial evidence. For years we have repeatedly noticed that the same esoteric truths were expressed in identical symbols and allegories in countries between which there had never been traced any historical affiliation. We have found the Jewish _Kabala_ and the _Bible_ repeating the Babylonian “myths,”[858] and the Oriental and Chaldean allegories, given in form and substance in the oldest manuscripts of the Siamese Talapoin (monks), and in the popular but oldest traditions of Ceylon.

In the latter place we have an old and valued acquaintance whom we have also met in other parts of the globe, a Pali scholar, and a native Cingalese, who has in his possession a curious palm leaf, to which, by chemical processes, a timeproof durability has been given, and an enormous conch, or rather one-half of a conch—for it has been split in two. On the leaf we saw the representation of a giant of Ceylonian antiquity and fame, blind, and pulling down—with his outstretched arms, which are embracing the four central pillars of a pagoda—the whole temple on a crowd of armed enemies. His hair is long and reaches nearly to the ground. We were informed by the possessor of this curious relic, that the blind giant was “Somona, the Little;” so called in contradistinction with Somona-Kadom, the Siamese saviour. Moreover, the Pali legend, in its important particulars, corresponds with that of the biblical Samson.

The shell bore upon its pearly surface a pictorial engraving, divided in two compartments, and the workmanship was far more artistic, as to conception and execution, than the crucifixes and other religious trinkets carved out of the same material in our days, at Jaffa and Jerusalem. In the first panel is represented Siva, with all his Hindu attributes, sacrificing his son—whether the “only-begotten,” or one of many, we never stopped to inquire. The victim is laid on a funeral pile, and the father is hovering in the air over him, with an uplifted weapon ready to strike; but the god’s face is turned toward a jungle in which a rhinoceros has deeply buried its horn in a huge tree and is unable to extricate it. The adjoining panel, or division, represents {578} the same rhinoceros on the pile with the weapon plunged in its side, and the intended victim—Siva’s son—free, and helping the god to kindle the fire upon the sacrificial altar.

Now, we have but to remember that Siva and the Palentinian Baal, or Moloch, and Saturn are identical; that Abraham is held until the present day by the Mahometan Arabs as Saturn in the Kaaba;[859] that Abraham and Israel were names of Saturn;[860] and that Sanchoniathon tells us that Saturn offered his only-begotten son as a sacrifice to his father Ouranos, and even circumcised himself and forced all his household and allies to do the same,[861] to trace unerringly the biblical myth to its source. But this source is neither Phœnician, nor Chaldean; it is purely Indian, and the original of it may be found in the _Maha-Bharata_. But, whether Brahmanical or Buddhistical, it must certainly be much older than the Jewish _Pentateuch_, as compiled by Ezra after the Babylonian captivity, and revised by the Rabbis of the Great Synagogue.

Therefore, we are bold enough to maintain our assertion against the opinion of many men of learning, whom, nevertheless, we consider far more learned than ourselves. Scientific induction is one thing, and _knowledge of facts_, however unscientific they may seem at first, is another. But science has discovered enough to inform us that Sanscrit originals, of Nepaul, were translated by Buddhistic missionaries into nearly every Asiatic language. Likewise Pali manuscripts were translated into Siamese, and carried to Burmah and Siam; it is easy, therefore, to account for the same religious legends and myths circulating in all these countries. But Manetho tells us also of Pali shepherds who emigrated westward; and when we find some of the oldest Ceylonic traditions in the Chaldean _Kabala_ and Jewish _Bible_, we must think that either Chaldeans or Babylonians had been in Ceylon or India, or the ancient Pali had the same traditions as the Akkadians, whose origin is so uncertain. Suppose even Rawlinson to be right, and that the Akkadians did come from Armenia, he did not trace them farther back. As the field is now opened for any kind of hypothesis, we submit that this tribe might as well have come to Armenia from beyond the Indus, following their way in the direction of the Caspian Sea—a part which was also India, once upon a time—and from thence to the Euxine. Or they might have come originally from Ceylon by the same way. It has been found impossible to follow, with any degree of certitude, the wanderings of these nomadic Aryan tribes; hence we are left to judge from inference, and by comparing their esoteric myths. Abraham himself, for all our scientists can know, might have been one of these Pali shepherds who emigrated _West_. He is shown to have gone with his {579} father, Terah, from “_Ur_ of the Chaldees;” and Sir H. Rawlinson found the Phœnician city of Martu or Marathos mentioned in an inscription at _Ur_, and shows it to signify THE WEST.

If their language seems in one sense to oppose their identity with the Brahmans of Hindustan, yet there are other reasons which make good our claims that the biblical allegories of _Genesis_ are entirely due to these nomadic tribes. Their name Ak-ad, is of the same class as Ad-Am, Ha-va,[862] or Ed-En—“perhaps,” says Dr. Wilder, “meaning son of _Ad_, like the sons of Ad in ancient Arabia. In Assyrian, _Ak_ is creator and Ad-ad is AD, the father.” In Aramean Ad also means _one_, and Ad-ad the _only-one_; and in the _Kabala Ad-am_ is the only-begotten, the first emanation of the unseen Creator. _Adon_ was the “Lord” god of Syria and the consort of Adar-gat, or Aster-‘t,’ the Syrian goddess, who was Venus, Isis, Istar, or Mylitta, etc.; and each of these was “mother _of all living_” the _Magna Mater_.

Thus, while the first, second, and third chapters of _Genesis_ are but disfigured imitations of other cosmogonies, the fourth chapter, beginning at the sixteenth verse, and the fifth chapter to the end—give purely historical facts; though the latter were never correctly interpreted. They are taken, word for word, from the secret _Book of Numbers_, of the Great Oriental _Kabala_. From the birth of Enoch, the appropriated first parent of modern Freemasonry, begins the genealogy of the so-called Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic families, if such they be correctly. Every woman is an euhemerized land or city; every man and patriarch a race, a branch, or a subdivision of a race. The wives of Lamech give the key to the riddle which some good scholar might easily master, even without studying the esoteric sciences. “And Ad-ah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and _of such as have cattle_,” nomadic Aryan race; “ ... and his brother was Jubal; he was the father of all such as _handle the harp and organ_; ... and Zillah bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor _of every artificer in brass and iron_,” etc. Every word has a significance; but it is no _revelation_. It is simply a compilation of the most _historical_ facts, although history is too perplexed upon this point to know how to claim them. It is from the Euxine to Kashmere, and beyond that we must search for the cradle of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and leave {580} the particular garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates to the college of the weird astrologers and magi, the Aleim.[863] No wonder that the Northern seer, Swedenborg, advises people to search for the LOST WORD among the hierophants of Tartary, China, and Thibet; for it is there, and only there now, although we find it inscribed on the monuments of the oldest Egyptian dynasties.

The grandiose poetry of the four _Vedas_; the _Books of Hermes_; the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_; the _Nazarene Codex_; the _Kabala_ of the Tanaïm; the _Sepher Jezira_; the _Book of Wisdom_, of Schlomah (Solomon); the secret treatise on _Muhta and Badha_,[864] attributed by the Buddhist kabalists to Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya system; the _Brahmanas_;[865] the _Stan-gyour_,[866] of the Thibetans; all these volumes have the same groundwork. Varying but in allegories they teach the same secret doctrine which, when once thoroughly eliminated, will prove to be the Ultima Thulè of true philosophy, and disclose what is this LOST WORD.

It is useless to expect scientists to find in these works anything of interest except that which is in direct relation to either philology or comparative mythology. Even Max Müller, as soon as he refers to the mysticism and metaphysical philosophy scattered through the old Sanscrit literature, sees in it naught but “theological absurdities” and “fantastic nonsense.”

Speaking of the _Brahmanas_, all full of _mysterious_, therefore, as a matter of course, absurd, meanings, we find him saying: “The greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse, _theological twaddle_. No person who is not acquainted beforehand with “the place which the _Brahmanas_ fill in the history of the Indian mind, could read more than ten pages _without being disgusted_.”[867]

We do not wonder at the severe criticism of this erudite scientist. {581} Without a clew to the real meaning of this “twaddle” of religious conceptions, how can they judge of the esoteric by the exoteric? We find an answer in another of the highly-interesting lectures of the German savant: “No Jew, no Roman, no Brahman ever thought of converting people to his own national form of worship. Religion was looked upon as private or national property. It was to be guarded against strangers. The most sacred names of the gods, the prayers by which their favor could be gained, were kept secret. No religion was more exclusive than that of the Brahmans.”[868]

Therefore, when we find scholars who imagine, because they have learned the meaning of a few exoteric rites from a srotriya, a Brahman priest initiated in the sacrificial mysteries, that they are capable of interpreting all the symbols, and have sifted the Hindu religions, we cannot help admiring the completeness of their scientific delusions. The more so, since we find Max Müller himself asserting that since “a Brahman was born—nay, _twice-born_, and could not be made, not even the lowest caste, that of the Sudras, would open its ranks to a stranger.” How much less likely that he would allow that stranger to unveil to the world his most sacred religious Mysteries, the secret of which has been guarded so jealousy from profanation throughout untold ages.

No; our scientists do not—nay, cannot understand correctly the old Hindu literature, any more than an atheist or materialist is able to appreciate at their just value the feelings of a seer, a mystic, whose whole life is given to contemplation. They have a perfect right to soothe themselves with the sweet lullaby of their self-admiration, and the just consciousness of their great learning, but none at all to lead the world into their own error, by making it believe that they have solved the last problem of ancient thought in literature, whether Sanscrit or any other; that there lies not behind the external “twaddle” far more than was ever dreamed of by our modern exact philosophy; or that above and beyond the correct rendering of Sanscrit words and sentences there is no deeper thought, intelligible to some of the descendants of those who veiled it in the morning hours of earth’s day, if they are not to the profane reader.

We do not feel in the least astonished that a materialist, and even an orthodox Christian, is unable to read either the old Brahmanical works or their progeny, the _Kabala_, the _Codex_ of Bardesanes, or the Jewish _Scripture_ without disgust at their immodesty and apparent lack of what the uninitiated reader is pleased to call “common sense.” But if we can hardly blame them for such a feeling, especially in the {582} case of the Hebrew, and even the Greek and Latin literature, and are quite ready to agree with Professor Fiske that “it is a mark of wisdom to be dissatisfied with imperfect evidence;” on the other hand we have a right to expect that they should recognize that it is no less a mark of honesty to confess one’s ignorance in cases where there are two sides to the question, and in the solution of which the scientist may as easily blunder as any ignoramus. When we find Professor Draper, in his definition of periods in the _Intellectual Development of Europe_, classifying the time from the days of Socrates, the precursor and teacher _of Plato_, to Karneades, as “the age of faith;” and that from Philo to the destruction of the Neo-platonic schools by Justinian—the “age of decrepitude,” we may be allowed to infer that the learned professor knows as little about the real tendency of Greek philosophy and the Attic schools as he understood the true character of Giordano Bruno. So when we see one of the best of Sanscrit scholars stating on his own unsupported authority that the “greater portion of the _Brahmanas_ is simply theological twaddle,” we deeply regret to think that Professor Müller must be far better acquainted with the old Sanscrit verbs and nouns than with Sanscrit thought; and that a scholar so uniformly disposed to do justice to the religions and the men of old should so effectually play into the hands of Christian theologians. “What is the use of Sanscrit?” exclaims Jacquemont, who alone has made more false statements about the East than all the Orientalists put together. At such a rate there would be none indeed. If we are to exchange one corpse for another, then we may as well dissect the dead letter of the Jewish _Bible_ as that of the _Vedas_. He who is not intuitionally vivified by the religious spirit of old, will never see beyond the exoteric “twaddle.”

When first we read that “in the cavity of the cranium of Macroposopos—the Long-Face—lies hidden the aërial Wisdom which nowhere is opened; and it is not discovered, and not opened;” or again, that “the _nose_ of the ‘ancient of days’ is _Life_ in every part;” we are inclined to regard it as the incoherent ravings of a lunatic. And when, moreover, we are apprized by the _Codex Nazaræus_ that “she, the _Spiritus_,” invites her son Karabtanos, “who is frantic and without judgment,” to an unnatural crime with his own mother, we are pretty well disposed to throw the book aside in disgust. But is this only meaningless trash, expressed in rude and even obscene language? No more can it be judged by external appearance than the sexual symbols of the Egyptian and Hindu religions, or the coarse frankness of expression of the “holy” _Bible_ itself. No more than the allegory of Eve and the tempting serpent of Eden. The ever-insinuating, restless spirit, when once it “falls into matter,” tempts Eve, or Hava, which bodily represents chaotic matter “frantic and without judgment.” For _matter_, Karabtanos, is the son of _Spirit_, or the _Spiritus_ of the {583} Nazarenes, the _Sophia-Achamoth_, and the latter is the daughter of the pure, intellectual spirit, the divine breath. When science shall have effectually demonstrated to us the origin of matter, and proved the fallacy of the occultists’ and old philosophers who held (as their descendants now hold) that matter is but one of the correlations of spirit, then will the world of skeptics have a right to reject the old Wisdom, or throw the charge of obscenity in the teeth of the old religions.

“From time immemorial,”[869] says Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, “an emblem has been worshipped in Hindustan as the type of creation, or the origin of life. It is the most common symbol of Siva [Bala, or Maha-Deva], and is universally connected with his worship.... Siva was not merely the reproducer of human forms; he represented the fructifying principle, the generative power that pervades the universe.... Small images of this emblem carved in ivory, gold, or crystal, are worn as ornaments about the neck.... The maternal emblem is likewise a religious type; and worshippers of Vishnu represent it on their forehead by a horizontal mark.... Is it strange that they regarded with reverence the great mystery of human birth? Were _they_ impure thus to regard it? Or are we impure that we do _not_ so regard it? We have travelled far, and unclean have been the paths, since those old Anchorites first spoke of God and the soul in the solemn depths of their first sanctuaries. Let us not smile at their mode of tracing the infinite and incomprehensible Cause throughout all the mysteries of nature, lest by so doing we cast the shadow of our own grossness on their patriarchal simplicity.”

Many are the scholars who have tried, to the best of their ability, to do justice to old India. Colebrooke, Sir William Jones, Barthelemy St. Hilaire, Lassen, Weber, Strange, Burnouf, Hardy, and finally Jacolliot, have all brought forward their testimony to her achievements in legislation, ethics, philosophy, and religion. No people in the world have ever attained to such a grandeur of thought in ideal conceptions of the Deity and its offspring, MAN, as the Sanscrit metaphysicians and theologians. “My complaint against many translators and Orientalists,” says Jacolliot, “while admiring their profound knowledge is, that _not having lived in India_, they fail in exactness of expression and in comprehension of the _symbolical_ sense of poetic chants, prayers, and ceremonies, and thus too often fall into material errors, whether of translation or appreciation.”[870] Further, this author who, from a long residence in India, and the study of its literature, is better qualified to testify than those who have never been there, tells us that “the life of several generations would scarce suffice merely {584} to read the works that ancient India has left us on history, ethics (_morale_), poetry, philosophy, religion, different sciences, and medicine.” And yet Louis Jacolliot is able to judge but by the few fragments, access to which had ever depended on the complaisance and friendship of a few Brahmans with whom he succeeded in becoming intimate. Did they show him _all_ their treasures? Did they explain to him _all_ he desired to learn? We doubt it, otherwise he would not himself have judged their religious ceremonies so hastily as he has upon several occasions merely upon circumstantial evidence.

Still, no traveller has shown himself fairer in the main or more impartial to India than Jacolliot. If he is severe as to her present degradation, he is still severer to those who were the cause of it—the sacerdotal caste of the last few centuries—and his rebuke is proportionate to the intensity of his appreciation of her past grandeur. He shows the sources whence proceeded the revelations of all the ancient creeds, including the inspired _Books of Moses_, and points at India directly as the cradle of humanity, the parent of all other nations, and the hot-bed of all the lost arts and sciences of antiquity, for which old India, herself, was lost already in the Cimmerian darkness of the archaic ages. “To study India,” he says, “is to trace humanity to its sources.”

“In the same way as modern society jostles antiquity at each step,” he adds, “as our poets have copied Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence; as our philosophers have drawn inspiration from Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle; as our historians take Titus Livius, Sallust, or Tacitus, as models; our orators, Demosthenes or Cicero; our physicians study Hippocrates, and our codes transcribe Justinian—so had antiquity’s self also an antiquity to study, to imitate, and to copy. What more simple and more logical? Do not peoples precede and succeed each other? Does the knowledge, painfully acquired by one nation, confine itself to its own territory, and die with the generation that produced it? Can there be any absurdity in the suggestion that the India of 6,000 years ago, brilliant, civilized, overflowing with population, impressed upon Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece, and Rome, a stamp as ineffaceable, impressions as profound, as these last have impressed upon us?

“It is time to disabuse ourselves of those prejudices which represent the ancients as having almost spontaneously-elaborated ideas, philosophic, religious, and moral, the most lofty—those prejudices that in their naïve admiration explain all in the domain of science, arts, and letters, by the intuition of some few great men, and in the realm of religion by revelation.”[871]

We believe that the day is not far off when the opponents of this {585} fine and erudite writer will be silenced by the force of irrefutable evidence. And when _facts_ shall once have corroborated his theories and assertions, what will the world find? That it is to India, the country less explored, and less known than any other, that all the other great nations of the world are indebted for their languages, arts, legislature, and civilization. Its progress, impeded for a few centuries before our era—for, as this writer shows, at the epoch of the great Macedonian conqueror, “India had already passed the period of her splendor” was completely stifled in the subsequent ages. But the evidence of her past glories lies in her literature. What people in all the world can boast of such a literature, which, were the Sanscrit less difficult, would be more studied than now? Hitherto the general public has had to rely for information on a few scholars who, notwithstanding their great learning and trustworthiness, are unequal to the task of translating and commenting upon more than a few books out of the almost countless number that, notwithstanding the vandalism of the missionaries, are still left to swell the mighty volume of Sanscrit literature. And to do even so much is the labor of a European’s lifetime. Hence, people judge hastily, and often make the most ridiculous blunders.

Quite recently a certain Reverend Dunlop Moore, of New Brighton, Pa., determined to show his cleverness and piety at a single stroke, attacked the statement made by a Theosophist in a discourse delivered at the cremation of Baron de Palm, that the _Code of Manu_ existed a thousand years before Moses. “All Orientalists of any note,” he says, “are now agreed that the _Institutes of Manu_ were written at different times. _The oldest part of the collection probably dates from the sixth century before the Christian era._”[872] Whatever other Orientalists, encountered by this Pennsylvania pundit, may think, Sir William Jones is of a different opinion. “It is clear,” he says, “that the _Laws of Manu_, such as we possess them, and which comprise but 680 slokas, cannot be the work attributed to Soumati, which is probably that described under the name of _Vriddha Manava_, or _Ancient Code of Manu_, which has not yet been entirely reconstructed, although many passages of the book have been preserved by tradition, and are often cited by commentators.”

“We read in the preface to a treatise on legislation by Narada,” says Jacolliot, “written by one of his adepts, a client of Brahmanical power: ‘Manu having written the laws of Brahma, in 100,000 slokas, or distichs, which formed twenty-four books and a thousand chapters, gave the work to Narada, the sage of sages, who abridged it for the {586} use of mankind to 12,000 verses, which he gave to a son of Brighou, named Soumati, who, for the greater convenience of man, reduced them to 4,000.’”

Here we have the opinion of Sir William Jones, who, in 1794, affirmed that the fragments in possession of the Europeans could not be _The Ancient Code of Manu_, and that of Louis Jacolliot, who, in 1868, after consulting all the authorities, and adding to them the result of his own long and patient research, writes the following: “The Hindu laws were codified by Manu _more than 3,000 years before the Christian era_, copied by the whole of antiquity, and notably by Rome, which alone has left us a written law—the _Code of Justinian_; which has been adopted as the basis of all modern legislations.”[873]

In another volume, entitled _Christna et le Christ_, in a scientific arraignment of a pious, albeit very learned Catholic antagonist, M. Textor de Ravisi, who seeks to prove that the orthography of the name Christna is not warranted by its Sanscrit spelling—and has the worst of it—Jacolliot remarks: “We know that the legislator Manu is lost in the night of the ante-historical period of India; and that no Indianist has dared to refuse him the title of the most ancient law-giver in the world” (p. 350).

But Jacolliot had not heard of the Rev. Dunlop Moore. This is why, perhaps, he and several other Indiologists are preparing to prove that many of the Vedic texts, as well as those of Manu, sent to Europe by the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, _are not genuine texts at all_, but mostly due to the cunning tentative efforts of certain Jesuit missionaries to mislead science, by the help of apocryphal works calculated at once to throw upon the history of ancient India a cloud of uncertainty and darkness, and on the modern Brahmans and pundits a suspicion of systematical interpolation. “These facts,” he adds, “which are so well established in India that they are not even brought in question, _must be revealed to Europe_” (_Christna et le Christ_, p. 347).

Moreover, the _Code of Manu_, known to European Orientalists as that one which is commented upon by Brighou, does not even form a part of the ancient Manu called the _Vriddha-Manava_. Although but small fragments of it have been discovered by our scientists, it does exist as a whole in certain temples; and Jacolliot proves that the texts sent to Europe disagree entirely with the same texts as found in the pagodas of Southern India. We can also cite for our purpose Sir William Jones, who, complaining of Callouca, remarks that the latter seems in his commentaries to have never considered that “the laws of Manu are _restricted to the first three ages_” (_Translation of Manu and Commentaries_).

According to computation we are now in the age of Kali-Yug, the {587} _third_, reckoning from that of Satya or Kritayug, first age in which Hindu tradition establishes the laws of Manu, and the authenticity of which Sir William Jones implicitly accepted. Admitting all that may be said as to the enormous exaggerations of Hindu chronology—which, by the bye, dovetails far better with modern geology and anthropology than the 6,000 years’ caricature chronology of the Jewish _Scripture_—still as about 4,500 years have elapsed since the fourth age of the world, or Kali-Yug, began, we have here a proof that one of the greatest Orientalists that ever lived—and a Christian in the bargain, not a Theosophist—believed that Manu is many thousand years older than Moses. Clearly one of two things should happen: Either Indian history should be remodelled for the _Presbyterian Banner_, or the writers for that sheet should study Hindu literature before trying their hand again at criticism of Theosophists.

But apart from the private opinions of these reverend gentlemen whose views very little concern us, we find even in the _New American Cyclopædia_ a decided tendency to dispute the antiquity and importance of the Hindu literature. The _Laws of Manu_, says one of the writers, “do not date earlier than the third century B.C.” This term is a very elastic one. If by the _Laws of Manu_ the writer means the _abridgment_ of these laws, compiled and arranged by later Brahmans to serve as an authority for their ambitious projects, and with an idea of creating for themselves a rule of domination, then, in such a sense, they may be right, though we are prepared to dispute even that. At all events it is as little proper to pass off this abridgment for the genuine old laws codified by Manu, as to assert that the Hebrew _Bible_ does not date earlier than the tenth century of our era, because we have no Hebrew manuscript older than that, or that the poems of Homer’s _Iliad_ were neither known nor written before its first authenticated manuscript was found. There is no Sanscrit manuscript in the possession of European scholars much older than four or five centuries,[874] a fact which did not in the least restrain them from assigning to the _Vedas_ an antiquity of between four or five thousand years. There are the strongest possible arguments in favor of the great antiquity of the _Books of Manu_, and without going to the trouble of quoting the opinions of various scholars, no two of whom agree, we will bring forward our own, at least as regards this most unwarranted assertion of the _Cyclopædia_.

If, as Jacolliot proves, text in hand, the _Code of Justinian_ was copied from the _Laws of Manu_, we have first of all to ascertain the {588} age of the former; not as a written and perfect code, but its origin. To answer, is not difficult we believe.

According to Varro, Rome was built in 3961 of the Julian period (754 B.C.). The Roman Law, as embodied by order of Justinian, and known as the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, was not a code, we are told, but a digest of the customs of legislation of many centuries. Though nothing is actually known of the original authorities, the chief source from which the _jus scriptum_, or written law, was derived, was the _jus non scriptum_, or the law of custom. Now it is just on this law _of custom_ that we are prepared to base our arguments. The law of the twelve tables, moreover, was compiled about A.U.C. 300, and even this as respects private law was compiled _from still earlier sources_. Therefore, if these earlier sources are found to agree so well with the _Laws of Manu_, which the Brahmans claim to have been codified in the _Kritayug_, an age anterior to the actual _Kali-yug_, then we must suppose that this source of the “Twelve Tables,” as laws of _custom_ and tradition, are at least, by several hundred years, older than their copyists. This, alone, carries us right back to more than 1,000 years B.C.

The _Manava Dharma Sastra_, embodying the Hindu system of cosmogony, is recognized as next to the _Vedas_ in antiquity; and even Colebrooke assigns the latter to the fifteenth century B.C. And, now, what is the etymology of the name of _Manava Dharma Sastra_? It is a word compounded of _Manu_; _d’harma_, institute; and _sastra_, command or law. How then can Manu’s laws date only since the third century before our Christian era?

The Hindu _Code_ had never laid any claims to be divinely revealed. The distinction made by the Brahmans themselves between the _Vedas_ and every other sacred book of however respectable an antiquity, is a proof of it. While every sect holds the _Vedas_ as the direct word of God—_sruti_ (revelation)—the _Code of Manu_ is designated by them simply as the _smriti_, a collection of oral traditions. Still these traditions, or “recollections,” are among the oldest as well as the most revered in the land. But, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of its antiquity, and the general esteem in which it is held, lies in the following fact. The Brahmans have undeniably remodelled these traditions at some distant period, and made many of the actual laws, as they now stand in the _Code of Manu_, to answer their ambitious views. Therefore, they _must have done it at a time when the burning of widows (suttee) was neither practiced nor intended to be_, which it has been for nearly 2,500 years. No more than in the _Vedas_ is there any such atrocious law mentioned in the _Code of Manu_! Who, unless he is completely unacquainted with the history of India, but knows that {589} this country was once on the verge of a religious rebellion occasioned by the prohibition of _suttee_ by the English government? The Brahmans appealed to a verse from the _Rig-Veda_ which commanded it. But this verse has been recently proved to have been falsified.[875] Had the Brahmans been the sole authors of the _Code of Manu_, or had they codified it entirely instead of simply filling it with interpolations to answer their object not earlier than the time of Alexander, how is it possible that they would have neglected this most important point, and so imperilled its authority? This fact alone proves that the _Code_ must be counted one of their most ancient books.

It is on the strength of such circumstantial evidence—that of reason and logic—that we affirm that, if Egypt furnished Greece with her civilization, and the latter bequeathed hers to Rome, Egypt herself had, in those unknown ages when Menes reigned,[876] received her laws, her social institutions, her arts and her sciences, from pre-Vedic India;[877] and that therefore, it is in that old initiatrix of the priests—adepts of all the other countries—we must seek for the key to the great mysteries of humanity.

And when we say, indiscriminately, “India,” we do not mean the India of our modern days, but that of the archaic period. In those ancient times countries which are now known to us by other names were all called India. There was an Upper, a Lower, and a Western India, the latter of which is now Persia-Iran. The countries now named Thibet, Mongolia, and Great Tartary, were also considered by the ancient writers as India. We will now give a legend in relation to those places which science now fully concedes to have been the cradle of humanity.

Tradition says, and the records of the _Great Book_ explain, that long before the days of Ad-am, and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western prolongation. An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours. This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the “Sons of God;” not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real _Elohim_, though in the Oriental _Kabala_ they have another name. It was they who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now {590} _lost_ “word.” This word, which is no word, has travelled once around the globe, and still lingers as a far-off dying echo in the hearts of some privileged men. The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges were aware of the existence of this island, but the “word” was known only to the _Java Aleim_, or chief lord of every college, and was passed to his successor only at the moment of death. There were many such colleges, and the old classic authors speak of them.

We have already seen that it is one of the universal traditions accepted by all the ancient peoples that there were many races of men anterior to our present races. Each of these was distinct from the one which preceded it; and each disappeared as the following appeared. In _Manu_, six such races are plainly mentioned as having succeeded each other.

“From this Manu Swayambhouva (the minor, and answering to Adam Kadmon) issued from Swayambhouva, or the Being existing through himself, descended six other Manus (men typifying progenitors), each of whom gave birth _to a race_ of men.... These Manus, all powerful, of whom Swayambhouva is the first, have each, _in his period—autara_—produced and directed this world composed of movable and unmovable beings” (_Manu_, book i.).

In the _Siva-Purana_,[878] it runs thus:

“O Siva, thou god of fire, mayest thou destroy my sins, as the bleaching-grass of the jungle is destroyed by fire. It is through thy mighty Breath that Adhima (the first man) and Heva (completion of life, in Sanscrit), _the ancestors of this race of men_ have received life and covered the world with their descendants.”

There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions. Tradition points to many of the majestic ruins of India, Ellora, Elephanta, and the caverns of Ajunta (Chandor range), which belonged once to those colleges, and with which were connected such subterranean ways.[879] Who can tell but the lost Atlantis—which {591} is also mentioned in the _Secret Book_, but, again, under another name, pronounced in the sacred language—did not exist yet in those days? The great lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania?[880] If the hypothesis now so much doubted, and positively denied by some learned authors who regard it as a joke of Plato’s, is ever verified, then, perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of the god-inhabited continent was not altogether fable. And they may then perceive that Plato’s guarded hints and the fact of his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world and by cleverly combining truth and fiction, to disconnect himself from a story which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to divulge.

And how could the name of Atlanta itself originate with Plato at all? Atlante is _not_ a Greek name, and its construction has nothing of the Grecian element in it. Brasseur de Bourbourg tried to demonstrate it years ago, and Baldwin, in his _Prehistoric Nations and Ancient America_, cites the former, who declares that “the word _Atlas_ and _Atlantic_ have no satisfactory etymology in any language known in Europe. They are not Greek, and cannot be referred to any known language of the Old World. But in the Nahuatl (or Toltec) language we find immediately the radical _a_, _atl_, which signifies water, war, and the top of the head. From this comes a series of words, such as _atlan_, or the border of or amid the water; from which we have the adjective _Atlantic_. We have also _atlaca_, to combat.... A city named _Atlan_ existed when the continent was discovered by Columbus, at the entrance of the Gulf of Uraha, in Darien, with a good harbor. It is now reduced to an unimportant _pueblo_ (village) named Aclo.”[881]

Is it not, to say the least, very extraordinary to find in America a city called by a name which contains a purely local element, foreign moreover to every other country, in the alleged _fiction_ of a philosopher of 400 years B.C.? The same may be said of the name of _America_, which may one day be found more closely related to Meru, the sacred mount in the centre of the _seven_ continents, according to the Hindu tradition, then to Americus Vespucius, whose name by the bye, was never Americus at all, but _Albericus_, a trifling difference not deemed worth mentioning till very lately by _exact_ history.[882] We adduce the following reasons in favor of our argument:

1st. Americ, Amerrique, or Amerique is the name in Nicaragua for the {592} high land or mountain range that lies between Juigalpa and Libertad, in the province of Chontales, and which reaches on the one side into the country of the Carcas Indians, and on the other side into the country of the Ramas Indians.

_Ic_ or _ique_, as a terminal, means great, as _cazique_, etc.

Columbus mentions, in his fourth voyage, the village _Cariai_, probably _Caîcai_. The people abounded with sorcerers, or medicine men; and this was the region of the Americ range, 3,000 feet high.

Yet he omits to mention this word.

The name _America Provincia_, first appeared on a map published at Bâsle, in 1522. Till that time, the region was believed to be part of India. That year Nicaragua was conquered by Gil Gonzales de Avida.[883]

2d. “The Northmen who visited the continent in the tenth century,[884] a low level coast thickly covered with wood,” called it _Markland_, from _mark_, a wood. The _r_ had a rolling sound as in _marrick_. A similar word is found in the country of the Himalayas, and the name of the World-Mountain, Meru, is pronounced in some dialects as MeruAH, the letter _h_ being strongly aspirated. The main idea is, however, to show how two peoples could possibly accept a word of similar sound, each having used it in their own sense, and finding it applied to the same territory.

“It is most plausible,” says Professor Wilder, “that the State of Central America, where we find the name _Americ_ signifying (like the Hindu Meru we may add) great mountain, gave the continent its name. Vespucius would have used his surname if he had designed to give a title to a continent. If the Abbé de Bourbourg’s theory of _Atlan_ as the source of Atlas and Atlantic is verified, the two hypotheses could agree most charmingly. As Plato was not the only writer that treated of a world beyond the pillars of Hercules, and as the ocean is still shallow and grows sea-weed all through the tropical part of the Atlantic, it is not wild to imagine that this continent projected, or that there was an island-world on that coast. The Pacific also shows signs of having been a populous island-empire of Malays or Javanese—if not a continent amid the North and South. We know that Lemuria in the Indian Ocean is a dream of scientists; and that the Sahara and the middle belt of Asia were perhaps once sea-beds.”

To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of {593} hierophants was divided into two distinct categories: those who were instructed by the “Sons of God,” of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revelation, and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis—if such must be its name—and who, being of another race, were born with a sight which embraced all hidden things, and was independent of both distance and material obstacle. In short, they were the _fourth_ race of men mentioned in the _Popol-Vuh_, whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once. They were, perhaps, what we would now term “natural-born mediums,” who neither struggled nor suffered to obtain their knowledge, nor did they acquire it at the price of any sacrifice. Therefore, while the former walked in the path of their divine instructors, and acquiring their knowledge by degrees, learned at the same time to discern the evil from the good, the born _adepts_ of the Atlantis blindly followed the insinuations of the great and invisible “Dragon,” the King _Thevetat_ (the Serpent of _Genesis_?). Thevetat had neither learned nor acquired knowledge, but, to borrow an expression of Dr. Wilder in relation to the tempting Serpent, he was “a sort of Socrates who _knew_ without being initiated.” Thus, under the evil insinuations of their demon, Thevetat, the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked _magicians_. In consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to narrate; its substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came to an end by the submersion of the Atlantis; which finds its imitation in the stories of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood: The giants and magicians “ ... and all flesh died ... and every man.” All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are substantially identical with the great Father of the Thlinkithians in the _Popol-Vuh_, or the sacred book of the Guatemaleans, which also tells of his escaping in a large boat, like the Hindu Noah—Vaiswasvata.

If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story that from the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and the descendants of the Atlantian Noah, sprang up a mixed race of righteous and wicked. On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, Gautama-Buddhas, its numerous “Saviours,” and great hierophants; on the other hand, its “_natural_ magicians” who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual enlightenment, and because of weakness of physical and mental organizations, unintentionally perverted their gifts to evil purposes. Moses had no word of rebuke for those adepts in prophecy and other powers who had been instructed in the colleges of esoteric wisdom[885] mentioned {594} in the _Bible_. His denunciations were reserved for such as either wittingly or otherwise debased the powers inherited from their Atlantian ancestors to the service of evil spirits, to the injury of humanity. His wrath was kindled against the spirit of _Ob_, not that of OD.[886]