Правдивость Платона была настолько необоснованно оспорена даже такими дружелюбными критиками, как профессор Джоуэтт, когда обсуждалась история Атлантиды, что кажется уместным привести свидетельство специалиста по этому вопросу. Достаточно поставить простых литературных придирок в весьма смешное положение:
«Если бы наше знание об Атлантиде было более полным, несомненно, оказалось бы, что в каждом случае, когда народы Европы согласуются с народами Америки, они оба были в согласии с народами Атлантиды... Будет видно, что в каждом случае, когда Платон дает нам какую-либо информацию в этом отношении относительно Атлантиды, мы находим, что это согласие существует. Оно существовало в архитектуре, скульптуре, навигации, гравировке, письме, установленном священстве, способе поклонения, сельском хозяйстве и строительстве дорог и каналов; и разумно предположить, что то же соответствие распространялось вплоть до всех второстепенных деталей». (Доннелли, «Атлантида», стр. 164. Двадцать четвертое изд.)
1776. Christians ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical destruction of continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of the Earth “standing out of the water, and in the water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished, but [is now] reserved unto fire” (II. iii. 5-7. See also the Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers, p. 4, London, 1815). 1777. See Hesiod's Theogony, 507-509, and Odyssey, i. 51-53. 1778. Mèmoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, p. 176. 1779. Æschylus, Prometheus Vinctus, 351, 429, etc. 1780. iv. 184. 1781. Pyth., i. 20; Decharme, op. cit., p. 315. 1782. This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Northern and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed part of the Continent. 1783. Had not Diocletian burned the Esoteric works of the Egyptians in a.d. 296, together with their books on Alchemy, “περὶ χυμείας ἀργύρου καὶ χρυσοῦ”; Cæsar 700,000 rolls at Alexandria; Leo Isaurus 300,000 at Constantinople (eighth cent.); and the Mahommedans all they could lay their sacrilegious hands on—the world might know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birthplace in Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in Egypt. 1784. Professor Max Müller's Lectures—On the Philosophy of Mythology—are before us. We read his citations of Heracleitus (460 b.c.), declaring that Homer deserved “to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged”; and of Xenophanes “holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece,” and for ascribing “to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men ... unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud.” Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett's translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantus (Republic) that “the young man [in the state] should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father [as Zeus did with Cronus] ... in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods.... In my opinion, these stories are not fit to be repeated.” To this Prof. Max Müller observes that: “the Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief”; while the Christian religion is “an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorized codex and of a settled system of faith” (p. 349). So much the worse if it is “historical,” for surely Lot's incident with his daughters would only gain, were it “allegorical.” 1785. ἁοιδῶν οἶδε δυστῆνοι λόγοι, Hercules Furens, 1346, Dindorf's Edition. 1786. Critias, 421. 1787. Neptune or Poseidon is the Hindû Idas-pati, identical with Nârâyana (the Mover on the Waters) or Vishnu, and like this Hindû God he is shown crossing the whole horizon in three steps. Idas-pati means also the “Master of the Waters.” 1788. Bailly's assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the Egyptian priests do not represent “solar years” is groundless. Bailly knew nothing of Geology and its calculations; otherwise he would have spoken differently. 1789. See Matsya Purâna, which places him among the seven Prajâpatis of the period. 1790. Iliad, xxiv. 79. 1791. Op. cit., p. 126. 1792. The equivalent of this name is given in the original. 1793. Deucalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phœnicia. Now this worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole that the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in latitude 68° it remains dead only for forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of Lemuria, or on that Continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, and which stretched up to the polar regions. This is well shown by de Gebelin's Allegories d'Orient, p. 246, and by Bailly; though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects. 1794. The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, are described (Herod., iv. 33-35; Pausanius, i. 31, 32; v. 7, 8; x. 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the Gods, and of Apollo chiefly. 1795. The Cyclopes are not the only “one-eyed” representatives in tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye. (Géographie Ancienne, ii. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts. 1796. Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of Ææa, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs for their voluptuousness; and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection. Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas (Odys., xii.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the Ocean; thus identifying it with Atlantis. 1797. Hygin., Astron. Poétique, ii. 15. 1798. Nineteenth Century, July, 1887. 1799. Diod. Sic., ii. 307. 1800. To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the Northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the Southern. Thus Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book ii): “The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis.” The Greeks naturalized all the Gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the Mythologists have tried to make of Eridanus the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridanus and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridanus, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the Sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridanus by Jupiter's thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where “the magnolia blossomed” became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ice. This allegory covers then the events of two Pralayas; and if well understood, ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races. 1801. Iliad, xvii. 431-453. 1802. Ibid., 322-336. 1803. See Apollodorus for this number. 1804. See “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island.” 1805. So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii), as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child “cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” A great red Dragon stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man-child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God—the Sun. The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the Earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who kept the commandments of God. (See xii. 1, 17.) Anyone who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognize the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for the man-child of Revelation, “who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” is surely not the meek “Son of God,” Jesus, but the physical Sun, “who rules all nations”; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona “to bring forth”—the Sun to appear. “She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth,” until Neptune, the Ocean, in pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos—the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the Ocean—on which Latona finds refuge, and where the bright God Delius is born, the God, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns—with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the just cited chapter of Revelation. Latona became a powerful Goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his Occult aspect Apollo is patron of number Seven. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times round Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre—the seven rays of the Sun and the seven forces of Nature. But this is only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological. 1806. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi. 1807. Lettres sur l'Atlantide, p. 137. 1808. Hesiod, Opera et Dies, 143. 1809. Hist. Nat., iv. 12. 1810. Marius. 1811. Op. cit., c. 16. 1812. Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 139. 1813. Diod., ii. 225. 1814. Op. cit., xxxvii. 2. 1815. Vol. i. pp. 462-464. 1816. These islands were “found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses,” etc. If there was no man on Earth at that period “how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?”—asks a Master in a letter. (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 67.) The reply is given above in the text. 1817. Op. cit., iv. 239-262. 1818. A good proof that all the Gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the North, which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but, although there was a time when all the nations were of “one lip,” these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is mann, man, a living being, and manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee (Voyage de Rénard en Laponie, i. 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindû Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death—all proceed from the same word or root. 1819. Thus, for instance, Gyges is a hundred-armed and fifty-headed monster, a Demi-god in one case, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king of the country, in another version. The same is found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of Brahmâ are reborn as mortals. 1820. Op. cit., viii. 13. 1821. The continents perish in turn by fire and water; either through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or by sinking and the great displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish by the former cataclysmal process. The incessant earthquakes of the past years may be a warning. 1822. See Decharme's Mythologie de la Grèce Antique. 1823. Denis, the Geographer, tells us that the great sea north of Asia was called glacial, or Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny (iv. 16) corroborate the statement by showing that it was its giant inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by telling us that all the continents were formed from North to South; and that as the sudden change of climate dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so, several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced the tallest men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this day. The tallest men now found are those in Northern countries, while the smallest are Southern Asiatics, Hindûs, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and English, with the inhabitants of Central India and the average European on the continent. Thus also the Giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of Hesiod, are all Northerners. 1824. Having already given several instances of the vagaries of Science, it is delightful to find such agreement in this particular case. Read in connection with the scientific admission (cited elsewhere) of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods, the following passage is highly instructive: “We are not yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent epoch at which our northern hemisphere was covered with glaciers. According to Mr. Wallace, this epoch may have occurred no more than seventy thousand years ago, while others would assign to it an antiquity of at least two hundred thousand years, and there are yet others who urge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion that a million of years is barely enough to have produced the changes which have taken place since that event.” (Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, i. 304, Ed. 1874.) Prof. Lefèvre, again, gives us as his estimate one hundred thousand years. Clearly, then, if Modern Science is unable to estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era as the Glacial Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of Race-Periods and Geological Ages. 1825. Cited in Schmidt's Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, pp. 300, 301. 1826. Philosophy Historical and Critical, p. 508. 1827. Human Species, pp. 428, et seqq. 1828. Art., “The First Volume of the Publications of the 'Challenger,'” p. 2, Nov. 4th, 1880. 1829. Op. cit., Art., “Australia and Europe formerly one Continent” (v. 19, 25). Undoubtedly a fact, and a confirmation of the Esoteric conception of Lemuria, which originally not only embraced great areas in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but projected round South Africa into the North Atlantic. Its Atlantic portion subsequently became the geological basis of the future home of the Fourth Race Atlanteans. 1830. Ibid., i. 143. 1831. Cf., the published reports of the “Challenger” expedition; also Donnelly's Atlantis, p. 468 and pp. 46-56, Chap., “The Testimony of the Sea.” 1832. Even the cautious Lefèvre speaks of the existence of Tertiary men on “upheaved lands, islands and continents then flourishing, but since submerged beneath the waters,” and elsewhere introduces a “possible Atlantis” to explain ethnological facts. Cf., his Philosophy Historical and Critical, pp. 478 and 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with rare intuition that “modern civilization is Atlantean ... the inventive faculty of the present age is taking up the great delegated work of creation where Atlantis left it thousands of years ago” (Atlantis, p. 177. Twenty-fourth Ed.). He also refers the origin of culture to the Miocene times. It is, however, to be sought for in the teachings given to the Third Race men by their Divine Rulers—at a vastly earlier period. 1833. An equally “curious” similarity may be traced between some of the West Indian and West African fauna. 1834. The Pacific portion of the giant Lemurian Continent christened by Dr. Carter Blake, the Anthropologist, “Pacificus.” 1835. “Subsidence and Elevation,” Geological Magazine, pp. 241, 245, June, 1881. 1836. Antiquity of Man, p. 492. 1837. When Howard read, before the Royal Society of London, a paper on the first serious researches that were made on the aerolites, the Geneva Naturalist Pictet, who was present, communicated, on his return to Paris, the facts reported to the French Academy of Sciences. But he was forthwith interrupted by Laplace, the great Astronomer, who cried: “Stop! we have had enough of such fables, and know all about them,” thus making Pictet feel very small. Globular-shaped lightnings or thunder-bolts have been admitted by Science only since Arago demonstrated their existence. Says de Rochat (Forces Non-definies, p. 4): “Every one remembers Dr. Bouilland's misadventure at the Academy of Medicine when he had declared Edison's phonograph ‘a trick of ventriloquism’!” 1838. Principles of Geology, i. 9, 10. 1839. Ibid. 1840. The Cyclic Law of Race-Evolution is most unwelcome to Scientists. It is sufficient to mention the fact of “primeval civilization” to excite the frenzy of Darwinians; it being obvious that the further culture and science is pushed back, the more precarious becomes the basis of the ape-ancestor theory. But as Jacolliot says: “Whatever there may be in these traditions [submerged continents, etc.], and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India, was developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly important for science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they be.” (Histoire des Vièrges; les Peuples et les Continents Disparus, p. 15.) Donnelly has proved the fact from the clearest premises, but the Evolutionists will not listen. A Miocene civilization upsets the “universal Stone age” theory, and that of a continuous ascent of man from animalism. And yet Egypt, at least, runs counter to current hypotheses. There is no Stone age visible there, but a more glorious culture is apparent the further back we are enabled to carry our retrospect. 1841. Myths and Myth-Makers, p. 21. 1842. Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations—if not of all. Elevation and subsidence of continents is always in progress. The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet and settled down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British Islands have been four times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raised again and peopled. The Alps, Himâlayas and Cordilleras were all the result of depositions drifted on to sea-bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces to their present elevation. The Sahara was the basin of a Miocene sea. Within the last five or six thousand years the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, have risen from 200 to 600 feet; in Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries surmounting the shore now eroded by the hungry wave. The North of Europe is still rising from the sea, and South America presents the phenomenon of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a height varying from 100 to 1,300 feet above the sea-level. On the other hand, the coast of Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All these phenomena are certain. Why then may not a gradual change have given place to a violent cataclysm in remote epochs—such cataclysms occurring on a minor scale even now, e.g., the case of Sunda Island with the destruction of 80,000 Malays? 1843. For the opinions of Jacolliot, after long travels through the Polynesian Islands, and his proofs of a former great geological cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his Histoire des Vièrges; les Peuples et les Continents Disparus, p. 308. 1844. August, 1880. 1845. Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, pp. 236, 237. Cf. also his lengthy arguments on the subject, pp. 231-235. 1846. Op. cit., i. 22, 23, Ed. 1869. 1847. Pedigree of Man, p. 73. 1848. Cited in Schmidt's Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 238. 1849. For further facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and their ethnological relations, see Joly, Man before Metals, p. 316. B. Davis is disposed to concede, from an examination of the skulls of the Guanches of the Canary Islands and modern Basques, that both belong to a race proper to those ancient islands, of which the Canaries are the remains! This is a step in advance indeed. De Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro-Magnon men of South France and the Guanches to one type—a proposition which involves a certain corollary which both these writers may not care to father. 1850. Families of Speech. 1851. Cf., Benjamin, The Atlantic Islands, p. 130. 1852. Westminster Review, Jan., 1872. 1853. Schmidt, Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 223. 1854. Professor Retzius, Smithsonian Report, 1859, p. 266. 1855. See the investigations of United States ship “Dolphin” and others. 1856. Scientific American, July 28th, 1877. 1857. See his chart, Atlantis, p. 46, though he deals with only a fragment of the real Continent. 1858. Donnelly, Atlantis, p. 480. 1859. Maçonnerie Occulte, p. 44. 1860. Vide Sir William Thompson and Mr. Huxley.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
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