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

When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine—Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of “birds,” the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels—then the bright God assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of seership, when he sends the astral double of Æneas to the battle field,1801 and has the gift of appearing to his seers without being visible to other persons present,1802 a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the North Wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe—the Atlantean Race—the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and [pg 815] their seven branches1803 allegorizes the history of the two Continents. The wrath of the “Sons of God,” or of “Will and Yoga,” at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great;1804 and the destruction of the children of Niobe by the children of Latona—Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the Earth's axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms—is thus very clear.1805 The fable about the never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain—Atlantis covered with water—is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades, or Atlantides, the grand-daughter of Atlas therefore,1806 because she represents the last generations of the doomed Continent.

So much so, that all ancient writings—prose and poetry—are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical Races, though the Third and the Fourth in number in the evolution of Fourth Round Humanity on our Globe. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the Age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot, they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet.1808 Such were the giants of the first physical Races.

The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna, ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the “Sons of God,” or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge to rid the Earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zarathushtra as one of the “Sons of God.” It says:

The Lemurians, and also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes—the “Sons of Night” or Darkness, and the “Sons of the Sun” or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and “tried to wrench the Lord of Light” from their better-favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the Ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months' duration in the polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the North where the year was divided into a day and night each of six months' duration, for Pliny distinctly says so.1809 They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mæotis—between 45° and 50° latitude. Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians—which nation stopped near the Tanais, after having crossed Asia.

In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old [or the Ancient], we learn ... there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants.1812

The island of Delos, the Asteria of Greek Mythology, was never in Greece, for this country, in that day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern Seas. One calls it Basilea, or “Royal”;1813 the other, Pliny, names it Osericta,1814 a word which, according to Rudbeck,1815 had

or again the “Royal Island of the Gods,” because the Gods were born there, i.e., the Divine Dynasties of the Kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let Geographers and Geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiöld on his “Vega” voyage in the Arctic regions.1816 The Secret Books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once, since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a Paradise before they became Hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks, and the cold Realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the Goddess-Queen of the country of the dead, “holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet it was the birthplace of Apollo, who was the brightest of Gods, in Heaven—astronomically—as he was the most enlightened of the Divine Kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad, wherein Apollo is said to have [pg 818] appeared four times in his own form (as the God of the Four Races) and six times in human form,1817 i.e., as connected with the Divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries—which have now become uninhabitable—as well as the name given to “man” both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church Fathers for inventing a Hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality.1818

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

The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition viâ Pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote about the Titans—the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the [pg 819] Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, a race which descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birthplace of the first giants. The Commentaries on the Sacred Books explain that the said region was the far North, the Polar Lands now, the Pre-Lemurian earliest Continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.

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

Now Mythology, built upon Hesiod's Theogony, which is but a poetized record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Cronus for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with a hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in Mythology every personage almost is a God or Demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect,1819 and that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub-races, the Esoteric Commentary will [pg 820] become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole Globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the Earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called the “Eternal or Perpetual Land,” and the Antarctic the “Ever-living” and the “Concealed”; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reäppear in turn, into and above the Great Waters.

From the first appearance of the great Continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants have been imprisoned in their circle by Cronus. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon—or Neptune—hence by the seas, which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad makes it Tartarus.1820 When the Gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus—the deity of the Fourth Race—the Father of the Gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants that they might help him to conquer the Gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.1821 The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Râkshasas of Lankâ and the Bhârateans, the mèlée of the Atlanteans and Âryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds, or Peris, became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the Angels of God and the Angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas.

Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, and one of the latest [pg 821] issues of the Âryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.

But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar—as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire—that Hesiod's Theogony is based upon historical facts,1822 it becomes easier for the Occult Teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from Mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.

Such symbols as are found in all the exoteric creeds are so many landmarks of pre-historic truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then Hyperborean and Saturnine;1823 thus showing the Golden Age and Reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many-sided in its character indeed—climatically, ethnologically and morally. For the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling-places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations, and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations, we may seek for some more corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.