Chapter XLIII: Section VI: Giants, Civilizations, and Submerged Continents Traced in (1)

History.

When statements such as are comprised in the above heading are brought forward, the writer is, of course, expected to furnish _historical_ instead of _legendary_ evidence in support of such claims. Is this possible? Yes; for evidence of such a nature is plentiful, and has simply to be collected and brought together in order to become overwhelming in the eyes of the unprejudiced.

Once the sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he may find out such evidence for himself. We give _facts_ and show landmarks; let the wayfarer follow them. What is adduced here is amply sufficient for _this_ century.

In a letter to Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies of the “grand old invalid of Ferney” should be attracted to the representatives of “knowledge and wisdom,” the ancient Brâhmans. He then adds a curious statement. He says:

But your Brâhmans are very young in comparison with their archaic
instructors.(1728)

Bailly, who knew nought of the Esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria, believed, nevertheless, unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in several pre‐historic and civilized nations which had disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace. He had studied the ancient classics and _traditions_ extensively, and he saw that the Arts and Sciences known to those we now call the “ancients,” were—

Not the achievements of any of the now or even then existing
nations, nor of any of the historical peoples of Asia....

and that, notwithstanding the learning of the Hindûs, their undeniable priority in the early part of their race had to be referred to a people or a race still more ancient and more learned than were even the Brâhmans themselves.(1729)

Voltaire, the greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist _par excellence_, shared Bailly’s belief. He thought it quite likely that:

Long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations
cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians
overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of
ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure
nature.(1730)

That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly a “question of historical facts.” For, he wrote:

I make great case of ancient traditions preserved through a long
series of generations.

It _was_ possible, he thought, that a _foreign_ nation should, after instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces behind. When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather archaic, nation should not have left at least some recollection in the human mind, he answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and events. But the history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages of old Egypt had preserved it, and “it is so preserved to this day elsewhere.” The priests of Saïs said to Solon, according to Plato:

You are unacquainted with that most noble and excellent race of
men, who once inhabited your country, from whom you and your whole
present state are descended,(1731) though only a small remnant of
this admirable people is now remaining.... These writings relate
what a prodigious force your city once overcame, when a mighty
warlike power, rushing from the Atlantic sea, spread itself with
hostile fury over all Europe and Asia.(1732)

The Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious nation.(1733)

What was this nation? The Secret Doctrine teaches that it was the latest seventh sub‐race of the Atlantean, already swallowed up in one of the early sub‐races of the Âryan stock, one that had been gradually spreading over the continent and islands of Europe, as soon as they had begun to emerge from the seas. Descending from the high plateaux of Asia, where the two races had sought refuge in the days of the agony of Atlantis, it had been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly emerged lands. The immigrant sub‐race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that virgin soil; had divided into many family races, which in their turn divided into nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phœnicians, and the Northern stocks, had thus proceeded from that one sub‐race. Thousands of years later, other races—the remnants of the Atlanteans—“yellow and red, brown and black,” began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers were defeated, and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries. Some of these lands became islands in course of time, owing to new geological convulsions. Being thus forcibly separated from the continents, the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the Atlantean stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.

Did not the Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with _white_ savage chiefs; and has not the presence of African negro types in Europe in the pre‐historic ages been now ascertained? It is this presence of a foreign type associated with that of the negro, and also with that of the Mongolian, which is the stumbling‐block of Anthropology. The individual who lived at an incalculably distant period at La Naulette, in Belgium, is an example. Says an Anthropologist:

The caves on the banks of the Lesse, in South‐Eastern Belgium,
afford evidence of what is, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by
the Naulette jaw. Such man, however, had amulets of stone,
perforated for the purpose of ornament; these are made of a
psammite now found in the basin of the Gironde.(1734)

Thus Belgian man was extremely ancient. The man who was antecedent to the great flood of waters—which covered the highlands of Belgium with a deposit of lehm or upland gravel thirty metres above the level of the present rivers—must have combined the characters of the Turanian and the Negro. The Canstadt, or La Naulette, man may have been black, and he had nothing to do with the Âryan type whose remains are contemporary with those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of the Aquitaine bone‐caves belong to a far later period of history, and may not be as ancient as the former.

If the statement be objected to on the ground that Science does not deny the presence of man on Earth from an enormous antiquity, though that antiquity cannot be determined, since such presence is conditioned by the duration of geological periods, the age of which is not ascertained; if it is argued that the Scientists object most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period; or again, that there have ever existed giants, three‐eyed and four‐armed and four‐legged men, androgynes, etc.—then the objectors are asked in their turn, “How do you know? What proof have you besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may be upset any day by new discoveries?” And these future discoveries are sure to prove that, whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthropologists may have been in complexion, he was in no respect _apish_. The Canstadt man, the Engis man, alike possessed essentially human attributes.(1735) People have looked for the missing link at the wrong end of the chain; and the Neanderthal man has long since been dismissed to the “limbo of all hasty blunders.” Disraeli divided man into the associates of the apes and the angels. Reasons are here given in favour of an “angelic theory”—as Christians would call it, as applicable to at least some of the races of men. At all events, if man be held to exist only since the Miocene period, even then humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of the Palæolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they say is mere arbitrary speculative guess‐work, invented by them to answer to, and fit in with, their own fanciful theories.

We speak of events hundreds of thousands of years old, nay, even millions of years old—if man date from the geological periods(1736)—not of any of those events which happened during the few thousand years of the pre‐ historic margin allowed by timid and ever‐cautious history. Yet there are men of Science who are almost of our way of thinking. From the brave confession of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who says that:

Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central America, in
Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these
different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the
Andes, and that he has retained the memory of it—

down to the latest Palæontologists and Anthropologists, the majority of scientific men is in favour of just such an antiquity. _Àpropos_ of Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to determine the ethnological affinities and characteristics of the race which reared those Cyclopean erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a great civilization? At Cuelap, for instance, such are found, consisting—

Of a wall of wrought stones, 3,600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150
feet high, constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this
mass was another, 600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 feet high,
making an aggregate height of 300 feet. In it were rooms and
cells.(1737)

A most suggestive fact is the _startling resemblance between the architecture of these colossal buildings and that of the archaic European nations_. Mr. Fergusson regards the analogies between the ruins of “Inca” civilization and the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece, as a coincidence—

The most remarkable in the history of architecture.... It is
difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation
between them.

The “relation” is simply explained by the derivation of the stocks who devised these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic continent. The acceptance of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of this and similar problems in almost every branch of Modern Science.

Dr. Lartet, treating upon the subject, settles the question by declaring that:

The truth, so long contested, of the coëxistence of man with the
great extinct species [elephas primigenius, rhinoceros
tichorrhinus, hyæna spelæa, ursus spelæus, etc.], appears to me to
be henceforth unassailable and definitely conquered by
science.(1738)

It is shown elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages’ opinion. He says:

Man has in all probability seen Miocene times(1739) and
consequently the entire Pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for
believing that his traces will be found further back still?... He
may then have been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and
go back as far as the Secondary period.(1740)

Egypt is far older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto‐Âryan tribes began to settle on it when the British Islands(1741) and France were not even in existence. It is well known that “the tongue of the Ægyptian Sea,” or the Delta of lower Egypt, became firm land very gradually, and followed the highlands of Abyssinia; unlike the latter, which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it was very slowly formed, through long ages, from successive layers of sea‐slime and mud, deposited annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the present Nile. Yet even the Delta, as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited for more than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Âryan blood in them than their predecessors, arrived from the East, and _conquered_ it from a people whose very name is lost to posterity, except in the Secret Books. It is this natural barrier of slime, which sucked in slowly and surely every boat that approached those inhospitable shores, that was, till within a few thousand years B.C., the best safeguard of the later Egyptians, who had managed to reach it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia, led on by Manu Vînâ in the day of Vishvâmitra.(1742)

So evident does the antiquity of man become with every day, that even the Church is preparing for an _honourable_ surrender and retreat. The learned Abbé Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically declared that pre‐historic Palæontology and Archæology may, without any harm to the Scriptures, discover in the Tertiary beds as many traces as they please of Pre‐Adamite man.

Since it disregards all creations anterior to the last deluge but
one [that which produced the diluvium, according to the Abbé],
Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in
the grey diluvium, in Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the
other hand, however, geologists are not all agreed on regarding
the men who inhabited the globe in these primitive ages as our
ancestors.(1743)

The day on which the Church shall find that its only salvation lies in the Occult interpretation of the _Bible_ may not be so far off as some imagine. Already many an Abbé and ecclesiastic has become an ardent Kabalist, and as many appear publicly in the arena, breaking a lance with Theosophists and Occultists in support of the metaphysical interpretation of the _Bible_. But they commence, unfortunately for them, at the wrong end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon the _metaphysical_ in their Scriptures, to study and master that which relates to the purely _physical_—_e.g._, its hints on Geology and Ethnology. For such allusions to the septenary constitution of the Earth and Man, to the seven Rounds and Races, abound in the _New_ as in the _Old Testament_, and are as visible as the Sun in the heavens to him who reads both symbolically. To what do the laws in chapter xxiii of _Leviticus_ apply? What is the philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadal offerings and symbolical calculations as:

Ye shall count ... from the morrow after the Sabbath ... that ye
brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be
complete.... And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without
blemish, etc.(1744)

We shall be contradicted, no doubt, when we say that all these “wave” and “peace” offerings were in commemoration of the _seven_ “Sabbaths” of the Mysteries. These Sabbaths are seven Pralayas between seven Manvantaras, or what we call Rounds; for “Sabbath” is an elastic word, meaning a period of rest of whatever nature, as explained elsewhere. And if this is not sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which adds:

Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number
fifty days [forty‐nine, 7 × 7, stages of activity, and forty‐nine
stages of rest, on the seven Globes of the Chain, and then comes
the rest of Sabbath, the _fiftieth_]; and ye shall offer _a new
meat offering_ unto the Lord.(1745)

That is, ye shall make an offering of your flesh or “coats of skin,” and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits. This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was an institution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews _viâ_ the “Chaldees,” who were the “wise men” of a _caste_, not of a nation, a community of great Adepts come from their “Serpent‐holes,” who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if this interpretation from _Leviticus_ (full of the disfigured _Laws of Manu_) is found too far‐fetched, then turn to _Revelation_. Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to the famous chapter xvii, with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,” or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the first _to all and every exoteric_ Churchianity—“ceremonial magic” of old, with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce of ritualistic worship. The “mystery” of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul‐killing Churchianity and of Superstition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was when:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English _Bible_ and read chapter iii of the Second _Epistle of Peter_, and he will find there the same ideas:

There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is
the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all
things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God
the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water
and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being
overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth
which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto
fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the
elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look
for new heavens and a new earth.(1765)

If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of “Peter.” What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root‐Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.

It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the _Avesta_ the Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. The _Avesta_ speaks of the three thirds of the Earth because the _Rig Veda_ mentions:

Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the
other, are said to be meant by this.(1766)

But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. The _Avesta_ has not borrowed the idea from the _Rig Veda_, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The “three strata or layers” do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth is _septempartite_, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it is _tripartite_. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of the _Avesta_, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess‐work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth’s Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three “zones,” if this word is read “planes.” As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the “septempartite earth.”(1767) For:

According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, the
_seven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected
parts of the earth_ [which they surely are. For] between them
_there flows the ocean_, so that it is impossible, as stated in
several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.(1768)

The “Ocean” is _Space_, of course, for the latter was called “Waters of Space” before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of the _Yasna_).(1769) But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger’s work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the “incongruities” of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such “incongruities” and “coïncidences” concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in the _Purânas_, namely:

The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean,
surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and]
according to the Iranian view, the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise
situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric
circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar
individual space, and so they group themselves round [above]
Qaniratha.(1770)

Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator, “the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,” and “the other names” do not mean “the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,” but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:

Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two,
Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in
the East and West

—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in the _Book of Dzyan_ (11) thus:

The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The “Earth” (our world) _is_ tripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given in _Vendidâd_ (xix. 39), showing that:

Qaniratha alone is combined with _imat_, “this” (earth), while all
other Karshvares are combined with the word “_avat_,” “that” or
_those_—upper earths.

Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.

The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(1771) Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:

Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as
in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna(1772)—

where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:

That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a
different world—

but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.(1773)

These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.

Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it. _It was the last to produce_ animals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator’s) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.

Grote’s suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.

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 event which he located on one comparatively small island 3,000 stadia long by 2,000 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.(1774) But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato’s narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.(1775) It was not he who invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks in his _Odyssey_ of the Atlantes—who are our Atlanteans—and of their island. 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 Sanchuniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much their accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.

In our own day we witness the extraordinary fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakspere 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—who gave their 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 gives the key to this. 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 the other statement—that they daily “cursed the sun”—this again had 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, and 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 a universal knowledge, and especially _a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean_; for both Continents bore Races instructed by _divine_ Masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reäppearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso—the “watery deep.” 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. He is their “supporter.” And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,(1776) Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and join his brother Iapetus in the depths of Tartarus.(1777) 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.(1778)

For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their horizons on its “shoulders.”

Decharme, in his _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron’s translation of the Homeric word ἕχει 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,(1779) _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 ἕχει, which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning φυλάσσει and ἐπιμελεῖταυ, 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,(1780) and Pindar qualified the later Ætna as the “Celestial Pillar.”(1781) 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_, belonging to the Continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell,(1782) 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.(1783) So secret was the knowledge of the last island 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 Phœnicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; 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.