The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 The Synthesis of...

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:

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, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere 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,[pg 802]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:

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:

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 [pg 803] the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771 Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:

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.