Chapter L: Section VII: Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Existence of Several (6)

929 _Ibid._ Remember that the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven
successive renewals of the Globe; that each will last 7,000 years,
the total duration being thus 49,000 years. (See Rabbi Parcha’s
_Wheel_; also Kenealy’s _Book of God_, p. 176.) This refers to seven
Rounds, seven Root‐Races, and sub‐races, the truly Occult figures,
though sorely confused.

930 _Tales of Derbent._

931 Mergain, or Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown
of Oriental descent.

932 Where we find her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the
Knights of the Round Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy‐
hood, if both heroines did not symbolize the same historical event
which passed into a legend?

933 Herbelot, p. 593; _Armenian Tales_, p. 35.

934 To this day the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as
Kap‐kaz, using the consonant _p_ instead of the usual _v_ (Kav‐kaz
or Caucasus). But their bards say that it requires seven months for
a swift horse to reach the “dry land” beyond Kaf, holding North
without ever deviating from one’s way.

935 Bailly thought he saw in this Horse a twelve‐oared ship. The Secret
Doctrine teaches that the early Third Race built boats and flotillas
before it built houses. But the “Horse,” though a much later animal,
has, nevertheless, a more occult primitive meaning. The crocodile
and the hippopotamus were considered sacred and represented divine
symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the Mexicans.
Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form
himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects
of that “Horse,” which is a Cycle.

936 The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the
neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.

937 Cosmas Indicopleustes in _Collect. Novâ Patrum_, t. ii. p. 188; also
see _Journ. des Savants_, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.

938 The two Poles are called the “right” and “left ends” of our
Globe—the Right being the North Pole—or the head and feet of the
Earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the
North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much
connected with and influence “right” and “left” hand magic.

939 The more one approaches the Poles the less rotation is felt; at the
Poles proper, the diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Hence the
expression that the Sphere is “motionless.”

940 It is averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the
North Pole like a skull‐cap, is the only one which prevails during
the whole Manvantara of our Round. All the central continents and
lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this
land will never change.

941 Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestaic name of Fohat is Apâm‐
Napât. In the _Avesta_ he stands between the Fire‐yazatas and the
Water‐yazatas. The literal meaning is “Son of the Waters,” but these
“Waters” are not the liquid we know, but Æther—the Fiery Waters of
Space. Fohat is the “Son of Æther” in its highest aspect, Âkâsha,
the Mother‐Father of the primitive Seven, and of Sound or the Logos.
Fohat is the Light of the Logos.

942 This “Water” is the blood or fluid of Life which animates the Earth,
compared here to a living body.

943 Occult teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the
existence of a Fountain of Life in the bowels of the Earth and in
the North Pole. It is the blood of the Earth, the electro‐magnetic
current, which circulates through all the arteries, and which is
said to be found stored in the “navel” of the Earth.

944 Occultism points to the Himâlayan Chain as that “belt,” and
maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the
Globe. The “navel” is described as situated towards the setting Sun
or to the West of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which
mountain is North of the Himâlaya. Meru is _not_ “the fabulous
mountain _in_ the navel or centre of the earth,” but its roots and
foundations are in that “navel,” while it is in the far North
itself. This connects it with the “Central” Land “that never
perishes”; the land in which “the day of the mortal lasts six months
and his night another six months.” As the _Vishnu Purâna_ has it:
“For the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day
in _other regions_; for Meru is North of all the Dvipas and Varshas”
(islands and countries). (Book ii. chap. viii.) Meru is therefore
neither on Atlas as Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show,
“absolutely in the centre of the globe,” only because “relatively
with the inhabitants of the several portions, to all of whom the
East is that quarter where the sun first appears.”

945 Even the Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The
Globe is likened to the body of a woman, “Mother‐Earth.” From her
neck downward, means from the inland sea now beyond the impassable
barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parâshara says, “is the mother and
nurse, augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the
_comprehender_ of all the worlds.”

946 For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the
Commentary as _a place of no latitude_ (Niraksha), the Abode of the
Gods. As a scholiast says in the _Sûrya Siddhânta_ (xii. 42‐44):

“Above them goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have
neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (_akshonnati_).

“In both directions from Meru are two pole‐stars (_dhruvatârâ_),
fixed in the midst of the sky, to those _who are situated in places
of no latitude_ (_niraksha_), both these have their place in the
horizon.

“Hence there is, in those cities [in that land], no elevation of the
poles, the two pole‐stars being situated in their horizon; but their
degrees of co‐latitude (_lambaka_) are ninety: at Meru the degrees
of latitude (_aksha_) are of the same number.” (See _Vishnu Purâna_,
Wilson’s Trans., ii. 208.)

947 Wilford makes many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Shveta‐
dvîpa, the White Island, the “island in the northern part of
Toyambhudi,” with England, and then tries to identify it with Atala.
(a nether region) and Atlantis. Now the Shveta‐dvîpa is the abode of
Vishnu (exoterically), and Atala is a hell. He also places it in the
Euxine or Ikshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it, in
another place, with Africa and Atlas.

948 _Asiatick Researches_, viii. 280.

949 _Op. cit._, _ibid._, p. 201.

950 Every name in the _Purânas_ has to be examined at least under two
aspects, geographically and metaphysically, in its allegorical
application; _e.g._, Nîla, the (blue) mountain which is one of the
boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sought
geographically in a mountain range in Orissa, and yet again in a
mountain quite different from the others, in Western Africa. Jambu‐
dvîpa is Vishnu’s dominion—the World, limited in the _Purânas_ to
our Globe, the region which contains Meru _only_, and again it is
divided to contain Bharata‐varsha (India), its _best_ division, and
the fairest, says Parâshara. Likewise with Pushkara and all others.

951 _Ibid._, p. 202.

952 _Sûrya Siddhânta_, Whitney’s Trans., v. 5.

953 _Asiatick Researches_, iii. 300.

954 Jambu, Plaksha, Shâlmali, Kusha, Krauncha, Shâka, and Pushkara.

955 Such as Shâka and Pushkara, for instance, which do not yet exist,
but into which will enter such lands as some portions of America, of
Africa, and Central Asia, with the Gobi region. Let us bear in mind
that Upadvîpas mean “root” islands, or the dry land in general.

956 They were called Demons, Asuras, Giants, and monsters, because of
their wickedness; and thus their country was likened to Atala—a
Hell.

957 Not on the river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the
Atlas range.

958 _Asiatick Researches_, iii. 225.

959 See vols. viii, x, and xi, of _Asiatick Researches_.

960 _Op. cit._, iii. 326.

961 _Ibid._

962 Says Wilford of the division of Atlantis and Bhârata or India,
confusing the two accounts and Priyavrata with Medhâtithi: “This
division was made by Priyavrata.... He had ten sons, and it was his
intention to divide the whole world between them equally.... In the
same manner Neptune divided the Atlantis between his ten sons: one
of them had ... the extremity of the Atlantis”—which “is probably
the old continent, at the extremity of which is Gades.... This
Atlantis was overwhelmed with a flood; and it seems that _by the
Atlantis, we should understand the antediluvian Earth_, over which
ten princes were born to rule, according to the mythology of the
West [and of the East, also] but _seven_ of them only sate upon the
throne.” (_Op. cit._, viii. 286.) Some also are of opinion that of
the seven Dvîpas _six_ were destroyed by a flood. Wilford takes it
to be “Gades which included Spain,” but it was Plato’s
island—rather.

963 America, the “new” world, is thus, though not _much_, older—still it
_is_ older—than Europe, the “old” world.

964 If Div or Dev‐sefid’s (the Târadaitya’s) abode was on the _seventh
stage_, it is because he came from Pushkara, the Pâtâla (antipodes)
of India, or from America. The latter touched the walls, so to say,
of Atlantis, before the latter finally sank. The word Pâtâla meaning
both the antipodal countries and infernal regions, these became
synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.

965 Neither Atlantis, nor yet Shankha‐dvîpa, was ever called “White
Island.” When tradition says that “the White Island became black on
account of the sins of the people,” it only means the denizens of
the “White Island,” or Siddhapura, or Shveta‐dvîpa, who descended to
the Atlantis of the Third and Fourth Races, to “inform the latter;
and who, having incarnated, became black with sin” figure of speech.
All the Avatâras of Vishnu are said to come originally from the
White Island. According to Tibetan tradition the White Island is the
only locality which escapes the general fate of other Dvipas; it can
be destroyed by neither fire nor water, for—it is the “Eternal
Land.”

966 _Asiatick Researches_, xi. 27.

967 _Genesis_, ix. 1.

968 How wise and grand, how far‐seeing and morally beneficent are the
laws of Manu on connubial life, when compared with the licence
tacitly allowed to man in civilized countries. That those laws have
been neglected for the last two millenniums does not prevent us from
admiring their forethought. The Brâhman was a Grihasta, a family
man, till a certain period of his life, when, after begetting a son,
he broke with married life and became a chaste Yogi. His very
connubial life was regulated by his Brâhman astrologer in accordance
with his nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjâb, for
instance, where the lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of
European, licentiousness, has hardly touched the orthodox Âryan
castes, one still finds the finest men—so far as stature and
physical strength go—on the whole Globe; whereas the mighty men of
old have found themselves replaced in the Deccan, and especially in
Bengal, by men whose generation becomes with every century—and
almost with every year—dwarfed and weakened.

969 Diseases and over‐population are facts that can never be denied.

970 In Mrs. Anna Swanwick’s volume, _The Dramas of Æschylus_, it is said
of “Prometheus Bound” (“Bohn’s Classical Library,” p. 334), that
Prometheus truly appears in it “as the champion and benefactor of
mankind, whose condition: ... is depicted as weak and miserable in
the extreme.... Zeus, it is said, proposed to annihilate these puny
ephemerals, and to plant upon the earth a new race in their stead.”
We see the Lords of Being doing likewise, and exterminating the
first product of Nature and the Sea, in the Stanzas. “Prometheus
_represents_ himself as having frustrated this design, and as being
consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to the most
agonizing pain, inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of Zeus. We
have, thus, the Titan, the symbol of finite reason and free will [of
intellectual humanity, or the higher aspect of Manas], depicted _as
the sublime philanthropist_, while Zeus, the Supreme Deity of
Hellas, is portrayed as the cruel and obdurate despot, a character
peculiarly revolting to Athenian sentiment.” The reason for it is
explained further on. The “Supreme Deity” bears, in every ancient
Pantheon—including that of the Jews—a _dual_ character, composed of
light and shadow.

971 The animal world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its
_seasons of procreation_, and the sexes become neutralized during
the rest of the year. Therefore, the free animal knows sickness but
once in its life—before it dies.

972 Introduction to “Prometheus Bound,” p. 340.

973 From προ‐μῆτις, “forethought.” “Professor Kuhn,” we are told in the
above‐named volumes, _The Dramas of Æschylus_, “considers the name
of the Titan to be derived from the Sanskrit word Pramantha, the
instrument used for kindling fire. The root _mand_ or _manth_,
implies rotatory motion, and the word _manthâmi_, used to denote the
process of fire kindling, acquired the secondary sense of snatching
away; hence we find another word of the same stock, _pramatha_,
signifying theft.” This is very ingenious, but perhaps not
altogether correct; besides, there is a very prosaic element in it.
No doubt in physical nature, the higher forms may develop from the
lower ones, but it is hardly so in the world of thought. And as we
are told that the word _manthâmi_ passed into the Greek language and
became the word _manthanô_, to learn—that is to say, to appropriate
knowledge, whence _prometheia_, fore‐knowledge, fore‐thought—we may
find, in searching, a more poetical origin for the “fire‐bringer”
than that displayed in its Sanskrit origin. The Svastica, the sacred
sign and the instrument for kindling _sacred_ fire, may explain it
better. “Prometheus, the fire‐bringer, is the Pramantha
personified,” continues the author, “and finds his prototype in the
Âryan Mâtarishvan, a divine ... personage, closely associated with
Agni, the fire‐god of the Vedas.” Matih, in Sanskrit, is
“understanding,” and a synonym of Mahat and Manas, and must be of
some account in the origin of the name; Pramatih is the son of
Fohat, and has his story also.

974 Cronus is “Time,” and thus the allegory becomes very suggestive.

975 It is complained by the author of the version and translator of
“Prometheus Bound” that in this tracing of Io’s wanderings, “no
consistency with our own known geography is attainable” (p. 379).
There may be good reason for it. First of all it is the journey and
wandering from place to place of the _Race_ from which the “tenth,”
or Kalki Avatâra, so called, is to issue. This he calls the “kingly
race born in _Argos_” (888). But Argos has no reference here to
Argos in Greece. It comes from _arg_ or _arka_—the female generative
power symbolized in the Moon—the navi‐formed Argha of the Mysteries,
meaning the Queen of Heaven. Eustathius shows that, in the dialect
of the Arg‐ians, Io signified the Moon; while Esotericism explains
it as the divine Androgyne, or the mystic Ten (10); in Hebrew 10 is
the perfect number, or Jehovah. Arghya in Sanskrit is the libation
cup, the navi‐form or boat‐shaped vessel in which flowers and fruit
are offered to the Deities. Arghyanâth is a title of the Mahâ
Chohan, meaning the “Lord of Libations”; and Arghyavarsha, the “Land
of Libations,” is the mystery name of that region which extends from
Kailâsa mountain nearly to the Shamo Desert—from within which the
Kalki Avatâra is expected. The Airyâna‐Varsedya of the Zoroastrians,
as a locality, is identical with it. It is now said to have been
situated between the Sea of Aral, Baltistan, and Little Tibet; but
in olden times its area was far larger, as it was the birth‐place of
_physical_ humanity, of which Io is the mother and symbol.

976 _Op. cit._, p. 385, note.

977 i. 569, 570.

978 Alexander, who was better acquainted with Attock than with India—for
he never entered India proper—could not have failed to hear the
Indus, near its very sources, called Nîl and Nîlâ. The mistake—if
mistake it is—is thus easily accounted for.

979 That Io is identical, allegorically, with Isis and the Moon is shown
by her being “cow‐horned.” The allegory undeniably reached Greece
from India, where Vâch—the “melodious Cow” of the _Rig Veda_, “from
whom mankind was produced” (_Bhâgavata Purâna_) is shown in the
_Aitareya Brâhmana_ as pursued by her father Brahmâ, who was moved
by an illicit passion, and changed her into a Deer. Hence Io,
refusing to yield to Jupiter’s passion, becomes “horned.” The Cow
was in every country the symbol of the passive generative power of
nature, Isis, Vâch, Venus—the mother of the prolific God of Love,
Cupid, but, at the same time, that of the Logos whose symbol, with
the Egyptians and the Indians, became the Bull, as testified to by
the Apis and the Hindû Bulls in the most ancient temples. In
Esoteric Philosophy the Cow is the symbol of Creative Nature, and
the Bull (her calf) the Spirit which vivifies her, or the “Holy
Spirit,” as Dr. Kenealy shows. Hence the symbol of the horns. These
were sacred also with the Jews, who placed on the altar horns of
Shittim wood, by seizing which a criminal ensured his safety.

980 _Tuscul. Quæst._, I. ii. 20.

981 _Strom._, I. ii, _Oper._, i. 467, Ed. Potter’s.

982 Herodotus and Pausanias supposed that the cause of the condemnation
was that Æschylus, adopting the Theogony of the Egyptians, made
Diana the daughter of Ceres, and not of Latona. (See Ælian, _Var.
Hist._, I. v. xviii; i. 433, Edition Gronov.) But Æschylus _was_
initiated.

983 The Sabasia was a periodical festival with Mysteries enacted in
honour of some Gods, a variant on the Mithraic Mysteries. The whole
evolution of the Races was performed in these Mysteries.

984 Mrs. A. Swanwick, _op. cit._

985 See the foot‐note (p. 431) concerning the etymology of προ‐μῆτις or
_forethought_. Prometheus confesses it in the drama when saying:

O holy ether, swiftly‐wingèd gales....
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure.

And yet what say I? _Clearly I foreknow_
All that must happen....
... The Destined it behoves,
As best I may, to bear, for well I wot
How incontestable the strength of Fate.... (105)

“Fate” stands here for Karma, or Nemesis.

986 Mankind is obviously divided into God‐informed men and lower human
creatures. The intellectual difference between the Âryan and other
civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is
inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, no
generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human
specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African
tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Âryans, the Semites,
and the Turanians so‐called. The “Sacred Spark” is missing in them,
and it is they who are the only _inferior_ races on the Globe, now
happily—owing to the wise adjustment of Nature which ever works in
that direction—fast dying out. Verily mankind is “of one blood,”
_but not of the same essence_. We are the hot‐house, artificially
quickened plants in Nature, having in us a spark, which in them is
latent.

987 The philosophical view of Indian metaphysics places the Root of Evil
in the differentiation of the Homogeneous into the Heterogeneous, of
the Unit into Plurality.

988 _Sap._, i. 13.

989 Gautama Buddha, named Shâkya Thüb‐pa, is the _twenty‐seventh_ of the
last group, as most of these Buddhas belong to the Divine Dynasties
which instructed mankind.

990 Of these Buddhas, or the “Enlightened,” the far distant predecessors
of Gautama, the Buddha, who represent, we are taught, once living?
men, great Adepts and Saints, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had
incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatâras of
the Celestial Beings—eleven only belong to the Atlantean Race, and
twenty‐four to the Fifth Race, from its beginnings. They are
identical with the Tirthankaras of the Jainas.

991 This may account for the similarity of the artificial mounds in the
United States of America, and the tumuli in Norway. It is this
identity that has led some American Archæologists to suggest that
Norwegian mariners had _discovered_ America about one thousand years
ago. (See Holmboe’s _Traces de Bouddhisme en Norvège_, p. 23.) There
is no doubt that America is that “far distant land into which pious
men and heavy storms had transferred the sacred doctrine,” as a
Chinese writer suggested by his description to Neumann. But neither
Professor Holmboe, of Stockholm, nor the American Archæologists,
have guessed the right age of the mounds, or the tumuli. The fact
that Norwegians may have re‐discovered the land that their long‐
forgotten forefathers believed to have perished in the general
submersion, does not conflict with the other fact that the Secret
Doctrine of the land which was the cradle of physical man, and of
the Fifth Race, had found its way into the so‐called New World ages
and ages before the “Sacred Doctrine” of Buddhism.

992 See _Physiological Selection_, by G. J. Romanes, F.R.S.

993 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 65.

994 _Exodus_, xi.

995 Wrote the late Brahmachârî Bawa, a Yogî of great renown and
holiness: “Extensive works on ‘Ashtar Vidiâ’ and such other sciences
were at different times compiled in the languages of the times from
the Sanskrit originals. But they, together with the Sanskrit
originals, were lost at the time of the partial deluge of our
county.” (The _Theosophist_, June, 1880, “Some Things the Âryans
Knew.”) For Agnyastra, see Wilson’s _Specimens of the Hindû
Theatre_, i. 297.

996 Some wonderful, artificially‐made beast, similar in some way to
Frankenstein’s creation, which spoke and warned his master of every
approaching danger. The master was a “Black Magician,” the
mechanical animal was informed by a Djin, an Elemental, according to
the accounts. The blood of a pure man alone could destroy him. See