LEAFLETS FROM ESOTERIC HISTORY.
The foregoing—a long, yet necessary digression—will show that the Asiatic scholar is justified in generally withholding what he may know. That it is not merely on historical facts that hangs the “historical difficulty” at issue; but rather on its degree of interference with time-honored, long established conjectures, often raised to the eminence of an unapproachable historical axiom. That no statement coming from our quarters can ever hope to be given consideration so long as it has to be supported on the ruins of reigning hobbies, whether of an alleged historical or religious character. Yet pleasant it is, after the brainless assaults to which occult sciences have hitherto been subjected, assaults in which abuse has been substituted for argument, and flat denial for calm inquiry, to find that there remains in the West some men who will come into the field like philosophers, and soberly and fairly discuss the claims of our hoary doctrines to the respect due to a truth and the dignity demanded for a science. Those alone whose sole desire is to ascertain the truth, not to maintain foregone conclusions, have a right to expect undisguised facts. Reverting to our subject, so far as allowable, we will now, for the sake of that minority, give them.
The records of the Occultists make no difference between the “Atlantean” ancestors of the old Greeks and Romans. Partially corroborated and in turn contradicted by licensed, or recognised History, their records teach that
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decayed archaic religions and philosophy. Even Tibet, in his opinion, has not escaped “Western influence.” Let us hope to the contrary. It can be proved that Buddhist missionaries were as numerous in Palestine, Alexandria, Persia, and even Greece, two centuries before the Christian era, as the Padris are now in Asia. That the Gnostic doctrines (as he is obliged to confess) are permeated with Buddhism. Basilides, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and especially Manes were simply heretical Buddhists, “the formula of abjuration for those who renounced these doctrines expressly specifies <cwo_greec> and the <cwo_greec> (seemingly a separation of ‘Buddha Śakyamuni’ into two).”30
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of the ancient Latini of classic legend called Itali; of that people, in short, which, crossing the Apennines (as their Indo-Aryan brothers—let this be known—had crossed before them the Hindoo-Koosh) entered from the north the peninsula—there survived at a period long before the days of Romulus but the name and—a nascent language. Profane History informs us that the Latins of the “mythical era,” got so Hellenised amidst the rich colonies of Magna-Graecia that there remained nothing in them of their primitive Latin nationality. It is the Latins proper, it says, those pre-Roman Italians who, by settling in Latium had from the first kept themselves free from the Greek influence, who were the ancestors of the Romans. Contradicting exoteric History, the occult Records affirm that if, owing to circumstances too long and complicated to be related here, the settlers of Latium preserved their primitive nationality a little longer than their brothers who had first entered the peninsula with them after leaving the East (which was not their original home), they lost it very soon, for other reasons. Free from the Samnites during the first period, they did not remain free from other invaders. While the Western historian puts together the mutilated, incomplete records of various nations and people, and makes them into a clever mosaic according to the best and most probable plan and rejects entirely traditional fables, the occultist pays not the slightest attention to the vain self-glorification of alleged conquerors or their lithic inscriptions. Nor does he follow the stray bits of so-called historical information, oft concocted by interested parties and found scattered hither and thither, in the fragments of classical writers, whose original texts themselves have often been tampered with. The Occultist follows the ethnological affinities and their divergences in the various nationalities, races and sub-races, in a more easy way; and he is guided in this as surely as the student who examines a geographical map. As the latter can easily trace by their differently coloured outlines the boundaries of the many countries and their possessions; their geographical superficies and their separations by seas, rivers and mountains;
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so the Occultist can by following the (to him) well distinguishable and defined auric shades and gradations of colour in the inner-man unerringly pronounce to which of the several distinct human families, as also, to what particular respective group, and even small sub-group of the latter belongs such or another people, tribe, or man. This will appear hazy and incomprehensible to the many who know nothing of ethnic varieties of nerve-aura and disbelieve in any “inner-man” theory, scientific but to the few. The whole question hangs upon the reality or unreality of the existence of this inner-man whom clairvoyance has discovered, and whose odyle or nerve emanations von Reichenbach proves. If one admits such a presence and realizes intuitionally that, being closer related to the one invisible Reality, the inner type must be still more pronounced than the outer physical type, then it will be a matter of little, if any difficulty, to conceive our meaning. For, indeed, if even the respective physical idiosyncrasies and special characteristics of any given person make his nationality usually distinguishable by the physical eye of the ordinary observer—let alone the experienced ethnologist: the Englishman being commonly recognizable at a glance from the Frenchman, the German from the Italian, not to speak of the typical differences between human root-families* in their anthropological division— there seems little difficulty in conceiving that the same, though far more pronounced difference of type and characteristics should exist between the inner races that inhabit
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* Properly speaking, these ought to be called “Geological Races,” so as to be easily distinguished from their subsequent evolutions—the root-races. The Occult Doctrine has naught to do with the Biblical division of Shem, Ham and Japhet, and admires, without accepting it, the latest Huxleyan, physiological division of the human races into their quintuple group of Australioids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthochroi, and the 5th variety of Melanochroi. Yet it says that the triple division of the blundering Jews is closer to the truth. It knows but of three entirely distinct primeval races whose evolution, formation and development went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata; namely, the BLACK, the RED-YELLOW, and the BROWN-WHITE RACES.
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these “fleshly tabernacles.” Besides this easily discernible psychological and astral differentiation, there are the documentary records in their unbroken series of chronological tables, and the history of the gradual branching off of races and sub-races from the three geological, primeval Races, the work of the Initiates of all the archaic and ancient temples up to date, collected in our Book of Numbers, and other volumes.
Hence, and on this double testimony (which the Westerns are quite welcome to reject if so pleased), it is affirmed that, owing to the great amalgamation of various sub-races, such as the Iapygian, Etruscan, Pelasgic, and later—the strong admixture of the Hellenic and Kelto-Gaulic, element in the veins of the primitive Itali of Latium—there remained in the tribes gathered by Romulus on the banks of the Tiber about as much Latinism as there is now in the Romanic people of Wallachia. Of course if the historical foundation of the fable of the twins of the Vestal Silvia is entirely rejected, together with that of the foundation of Alba Longa by the son of Aeneas, then it stands to reason that the whole of the statements made must be likewise a modern invention built upon the utterly worthless fables of the “legendary mythical age.” For those who now give these statements, however, there is more of actual truth in such fables than there is in the alleged historical Regal period of the earliest Romans. It is to be deplored that the present statement should clash with the authoritative conclusions of Mommsen and others. Yet, stating but that which to the “Adepts” is fact, it must be understood at once that all (but the fanciful chronological date for the foundation of Rome—April 753 “B. C.”) that is given in old traditions in relation to the Pomerium, and the triple alliance of the Ramnes, Luceres and Tities, of the so-called Romuleian legend, is indeed far nearer truth than what external History accepts as facts during the Punic and Macedonian wars up to, through, and down the Roman Empire to its Fall. The Founders of Rome were decidedly a mongrel people, made up of various scraps and remnants of the many primitive tribes—
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only a few really Latin families, the descendants of the distinct sub-race that came along with the Umbro-Sabellians from the East remaining. And, while the latter preserved their distinct colour down to the Middle Ages through the Sabine element, left unmixed in its mountainous regions—the blood of the true Roman was Hellenic blood from its beginning. The famous Latin league is no fable but history. The succession of kings descended from the Trojan Aeneas is a fact; and, the idea that Romulus is to be regarded as simply the symbolical representative of a people, as Aeolus, Dorius, and Ion were once, instead of a living man, is as unwarranted as it is arbitrary. It could only have been entertained by a class of historiographers bent upon condoning their sin in supporting the dogma that Shem, Ham, and Japhet were the historical, once living ancestors of mankind,—by making a burnt offering of every really historical but non-Jewish tradition, legend, or record which might presume to a place on the same level with these three privileged archaic mariners instead of humbly grovelling at their feet as “absurd myths” and old wives’ tales and superstitions.
It will thus appear that the objectionable statements on pp. 56 and 62 of Esoteric Buddhism, which are alleged to create a “historical difficulty,” were not made by Mr. Sinnett’s correspondent to bolster a Western theory, but in loyalty to historical facts. Whether they can or cannot be accepted in those particular localities, where criticism seems based upon mere conjecture (though honoured with the name of scientific hypothesis), is something which concerns the present writers as little as any casual traveller’s unfavorable comments upon the time-scarred visage of the Sphinx can affect the designer of that sublime symbol. The sentences, “Greeks and Romans were small sub-races . . . of our own Caucasian stock” (p. 56), and they were “the remnants of the Atlanteans, the old Greeks and Romans (the modern belong to the fifth race)” (p. 62), show the real meaning on their face. By the old Greeks “remnants of the Atlanteans” the eponymous ancestors (as they are called by Europeans) of the Aeolians, Dorians
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and Ionians, are meant. By the connection together of the old Greeks and Romans without distinction, was meant that the primitive Latins were swallowed by Magna Graecia. And by “the modern” belonging “to the fifth race”—both these small branchlets from whose veins had been strained out the last drop of the Atlantean blood—it was implied that the Mongoloid 4th race blood had already been eliminated. Occultists make a distinction between the races intermediate between any two Root-races: the Westerns do not. The “old Romans” were Hellenes in a new ethnological disguise; the still older Greeks—the real blood ancestors of the future Romans. As in a direct relation to this, attention is drawn to the following fact—one of the many in its close historical bearing upon the “mythical” age to which Atlantis belongs. It is a fable and may be charged to the account of historical difficulties. It is well calculated, however, to throw all the old ethnological and genealogical divisions into confusion.
Asking the reader to bear in mind that Atlantis, like modern Europe, comprised many nations and many dialects (issues from the three primeval root-languages of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Races), we may return to Poseidonis—its last surviving link 12,000 [years] ago. As the chief element in the languages of the 5th race is the Aryan-Sanskrit of the “Brown-white” geological stock or race, so the predominating element in Atlantis was a language which has now survived but in the dialects of some American Red-Indian tribes, and in the Chinese speech of the inland Chinamen, the mountainous tribes of Kiangsi—a language which was an admixture of the agglutinate and the monosyllabic as it would be called by modern philologists. It was, in short, the language of the “Red-yellow” second or middle geological stock [we maintain the term “geological”]. A strong percentage of the Mongoloid or 4th Root-race was, of course, to be found in the Aryans of the 5th. But this did not prevent in the least the presence at the same time of unalloyed, pure Aryan races in it. A number of small islands scattered around Poseidonis had been
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vacated, in consequence of earthquakes long before the final catastrophe, which has alone remained in the memory of men—thanks to some written records. Tradition says that one of the small tribes (the Aeolians) who had become islanders after emigrating from far Northern countries had to leave their home again for fear of a deluge. If, in spite of the Orientalists and the conjecture of Mr. F. Lenormant,—who invented a name for a people whose shadowy outline he dimly perceived in the far away Past as preceding the Babylonians—we say that this Aryan race that came from Central Asia, the cradle of the 5th race Humanity, belonged to the “Akkadian” tribes, there will be a new historico-ethnological difficulty created. Yet, it is maintained, that these “Akkads” were no more a “Turanian” race than any of the modern British people are the mythical ten tribes of Israel, so conspicuously present in the Bible and—absent from history. With such remarkable pacta conventa between modern exact (?) and ancient occult sciences, we may proceed with the fable. Belonging virtually through their original connection with the Aryan, Central Asian stock, to the 5th race, the old Aeolians yet were Atlanteans, not only in virtue of their long residence in the now submerged continent, covering some thousands of years, but by the free intermingling of blood, by intermarriage with them. Perhaps in this connection, Mr. Huxley’s disposition to account for his Melanochroi (the Greeks being included under this classification or type)—as themselves “the result of crossing between the Xanthochroi and the Australioids”—among whom he places the Southern India lower classes and the Egyptians to a degree is not far off from fact. Anyhow the Aeolians of Atlantis were Aryans on the whole, as much as the Basques—Dr. Prichard’s Allophylians—are now southern Europeans, although originally belonging to the Dravidian S. I. stock [their progenitors having never been the aborigines of Europe prior to the first Aryan immigration, as supposed]. Frightened by the frequent earthquakes and the visible approach of the cataclysm, this tribe is said to have filled a flotilla of arks, to have sailed from beyond
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the pillars of Hercules, and to have landed, sailing along the coasts after several years of travel, on the shores of the Aegean Sea in the land of Pyrrha (now Thessaly) to which they gave the name of Aeolia. Thence they proceeded on business with the gods to Mount Olympus. It may be stated here at the risk of creating a “geographical difficulty,” that in that mythical age Greece, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, and many other islands of the Mediterranean were simply the far away possessions, or colonies of Atlantis. Hence, the “fable” proceeds to state that all along the coasts of Spain, France, and Italy the Aeolians often halted, and the memory of their “magical feats” still survives among the descendants of the old Massilians, of the tribes of the later Carthago Nova, and the seaports of Etruria and Syracuse. And here again it would not be a bad idea, perchance, even at this late hour, for the archæologists to trace with the permission of the anthropological societies the origin of the various autochtones through their folklore and fables, as they may prove both more suggestive and reliable than their “undecipherable” monuments. History catches a misty glimpse of these particular autochtones thousands of years only after they had been settled in old Greece; namely, at the moment when the Epireans cross the Pindus bent on expelling the black magicians from their home to Bœotia. But, history never listened to the popular legends which speak of the “accursed sorcerers” who departed but after leaving as an inheritance behind them more than one secret of their infernal arts the fame of which crossing the ages has now passed into history—or, classical Greek and Roman fable, if so preferred. To this day, a popular tradition narrates how the ancient forefathers of the Thessalonians, so renowned for their magicians, had come from behind the Pillars, asking for help and refuge from the great Zeus, and imploring the father of the gods to save them from the Deluge. But the “Father” expelled them from the Olympus allowing their tribe to settle only at the foot of the mountain, in the valleys and by the shores of the Aegean Sea.
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Such is the oldest fable of the ancient Thessalonians. And now, what was the language spoken by the Atlantean Aeolians? History cannot answer us. Nevertheless, the reader has to be only reminded of some of the accepted and a few as yet unknown facts, to cause the light to enter any intuitional brain. It is now proved that man in the antiquity was universally conceived as born of the earth. Such is now the profane explanation of the term autochtones. In nearly every vulgarized, popular fable, from the Sanskrit Arya “born of the earth,” or Lord of the Soil in one sense; the Erechtheus of the archaic Greeks, worshipped in the earliest days of the Akropolis and shown by Homer as “he whom the earth bore” (Iliad, II, 548); down to Adam fashioned of “red earth,” the genetical story has a deep occult meaning, and an indirect connection with the origin of man and of the subsequent races. Thus, the fables of Hellen, the son of Pyrrha the red—the oldest name of Thessaly; and of Mannus, the reputed ancestor of the Germans, himself the son of Tuisto, “the red son of the earth,” have not only a direct bearing upon our Atlantic fable, but they explain moreover the division of mankind into geological groups as made by the Occultists. It is only this, their division, that is able to explain to Western teachers the apparently strange, if not absurd, coincidence of the Semitic Adam—a divinely revealed personage—being connected with red earth, in company with the Aryan Pyrrha, Tuisto, etc.—the mythical heroes of “foolish” fables. Nor will that division made by the Eastern Occultists—who call the 5th race people “the Brown-white,” and the 4th race, the “Red-yellow,” Root-races—connecting them with geological strata—appear at all fantastic to those who understand verse III. 34, 9 of the Veda and its occult meaning, and another verse in which the Dasyus are called “Yellow.” Hatvî dasyûn prâryam varnam âvat—is said of Indra who, by killing the Dasyus, protected the colour of the Aryans; and again Indra “unveiled the light for the Aryas and the Dasyu was left on the left hand” (II. 11, 18).31 Let the student of Occultism bear in mind that the Greek Noah, Deukalion,
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the husband of Pyrrha, was the reputed son of Prometheus who robbed Heaven of its fire (i.e., of secret Wisdom “of the right hand” or occult knowledge); that Prometheus is the brother of Atlas; that he is also the son of Asia and of the Titan Iapetus—the antitype from which the Jews borrowed their Japhet for the exigencies of their own popular legend to mask its kabalistic, Chaldean, meaning; and that he is also the antitype of Deukalion. Prometheus is the creator of man out of earth and water,* who after stealing fire from Olympus—a mountain in Greece—is chained on a mount in the far off Caucasus. From Olympus to Mount Kazbek there is a considerable distance. The occultists say that while the 4th race was generated and developed on the Atlantean continent—our Antipodes in a certain sense—the 5th was generated and developed in Asia. [The ancient Greek geographer Strabo, for one, calls by the name of Ariana, the land of the Aryas, the whole country between the Indian ocean in the south, the Hindu Kush and Parapamisos32 in the north, the Indus on the east, and the Caspian gates, Karmania and the mouth of the Persian gulf, on the west.] The fable of Prometheus relates to the extinction of the civilized portions of the 4th race, whom Zeus, in order to create a new race, would destroy entirely, and Prometheus (who had the sacred fire of knowledge) saved partially “for future seed.” But the origin of the fable antecedes the destruction of Poseidonis by more than seventy thousand years—however incredible it may seem. The seven great continents of the world, spoken of in the Vishnu Purana (Bk. II, Chap. 2) include Atlantis, though, of course, under another name. Ila and Ira are synonymous Sanskrit terms (see Amarakosha), and both mean earth or native soil; and Ilavrita is a portion of Ila the central point of India (Jambudvipa), the latter being itself the centre of the seven great continents before the submersion of the great continent of Atlantis, of which Poseidonis was but an insignificant remnant. And now, while every Brahmin will
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* Behold Moses saying that it requires earth and water to make a living man.
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understand the meaning, we may help the Europeans with a few more explanations.
If, in that generally tabooed work, Isis Unveiled, the “English F.T.S.” turns to page 589, Vol. I, he may find therein narrated another old Eastern legend. “An island . . . [where now the Gobi desert lies] was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours”: a handful of “Adepts”—the “sons of God,” now referred to as the Brahma Pitris; called by another, yet synonymous name in the Chaldean Kabala. Isis Unveiled may appear very puzzling and contradictory to those who know nothing of Occult Sciences. To the occultist it is correct, and, while perhaps, left purposely sinning (for it was the first cautious attempt to let into the West a faint streak of Eastern esoteric light), it reveals more facts than were ever given before its appearance. Let any one read these pages and he may comprehend. The “six such races” in Manu refer to the sub-races of the fourth race (p. 590). In addition to this the reader must turn to the July number of The Theosophist, and acquainting himself with the article “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” study the list of the “Manus” of our fourth Round (p. 254).33 And between this and Isis light may, perchance, be focussed. On pages 590-6, he will find that Atlantis is mentioned in the “Secret Books of the East” (as yet virgin of Western spoliating hand) under another name in the sacred hieratic or sacerdotal language. And then it will be shown to him that Atlantis was not merely the name of one island but that of a whole continent, of whose isles and islets many have to this day survived. The remotest ancestors of some of the inhabitants of the now miserable fisherman’s hovel “Acla” (once Atlan), near the gulf of Urabá, were allied at one time as closely with the old Greeks and Romans as they were with the “true inland Chinaman,” mentioned on page 57 of Esoteric Buddhism. Until the appearance of a map published at Bâsle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India; and strange to him who
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does not follow the mysterious working of the human mind and its unconscious approximations to hidden truths—even the aborigines of the new continent, the Red-skinned tribes, the “Mongoloids” of Mr. Huxley, were named Indians. Names now attributed to chance: elastic word that! Strange coincidence, indeed, to him, who does not know—science refusing yet to sanction the wild hypothesis—that there was a time when the Indian peninsula was at one end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the prehistoric age was not only within the region at the sources of the Oxus and Iaxartes, but there was even in the days of history and within its memory, an upper, a lower, and a western India; and still earlier, it was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the “Brahmans of Upper India” stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Shamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller furnished with a canoe and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America. On page 593 of Isis, Vol. I, the Thevetatas—the evil, mischievous gods that have survived in the Etruscan Pantheon—are mentioned, along with the “sons of god” or Brahma Pitris. The Involute, the hidden or shrouded gods, the Consentes, Complices, and Novensiles, are all disguised relics of the Atlanteans; while the Etruscan arts of soothsaying their Disciplina revealed by Tages comes direct, and in undisguised form from the Atlantean King Thevetat, the “invisible” Dragon, whose name survives to this day among the Siamese and Burmese, as also, in the Jataka allegorical stories of the Buddhists as the opposing power under the name of Devadat. And Tages was the son of Thevetat, before he became the grandson of the Etruscan Jupiter-Tinia. Have the Western Orientalists tried to find out the connection between all
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these Dragons and Serpents; between the “powers of Evil” in the cycles of epic legends, the Persian and the Indian, the Greek and the Jewish; between the contests of Indra and the giant; the Aryan Nagas and the Iranian Aji Dahaka; the Guatemalan Dragon and the Serpent of Genesis—etc., etc., etc.? Professor Max Müller discredits the connection. So be it. But—the fourth race of men, “men” whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once, the hidden as the unrevealed, is mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, the sacred books of the Guatemalans; and the Babylonian Xisuthros, the far later Jewish Noah, the Hindu Vaivaswata, and the Greek Deukalion, are all identical with the great Father of the Thlinkithians, of Popol-Vuh, who, like the rest of these allegorical (not mythical) Patriarchs, escaped in his turn and in his days, in a large boat, at the time of the last great Deluge—the submersion of Atlantis.
To have been an Indo-Aryan, Vaivaswata had not, of necessity, to meet with his Saviour (Vishnu, under the form of a fish) within the precincts of the present India, or even anywhere on the Asian continent; nor is it necessary to concede that he was the seventh great Manu himself (see catalogue of the Manus, The Theosophist, for July), but simply that the Hindu Noah belonged to the clan of Vaivaswata and typifies the fifth race. Now the last of the Atlantean islands perished some 11,000 years ago; and the fifth race headed by the Aryans began its evolution, to the certain knowledge of the “adepts” nearer one million than 900,000 years ago. But the historian and the anthropologist with their utmost stretch of liberality are unable to give more than from twenty to one hundred thousand years for all our human evolution. Hence we put it to them as a fair question: at what point during their own conjectural lakh of years do they fix the root-germ of the ancestral line of the “old Greeks and Romans”? Who were they? What is known, or even “conjectured” about their territorial habitat after the division of the Aryan nations? And where were the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races? It is not enough for
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purposes of refutation of other peoples’ statements to say that the latter lived separate from the former, and then come to a full stop—a fresh hiatus in the ethnological history of mankind. Since Asia is sometimes called the Cradle of Humanity, and it is an ascertained fact that Central Asia was likewise the cradle of the Semitic and Turanian races (for thus it is taught in Genesis), and we find the Turans agreeably to the theory evolved by the Assyriologists preceding the Babylonian Semitists, where, at what spot of the globe, did these Semito-Turanian nations break away from the Parent stock, and what has become of the latter? It cannot be the small Jewish tribe of Patriarchs; and unless it can be shown that the garden of Eden was also on the Oxus or the Euphrates, fenced off from the soil inhabited by the children of Cain, philologists who undertake to fill in the gaps in Universal History with their made-up conjectures, may be regarded as ignorant of this detail as those they would enlighten.
Logically if the ancestors of these various groups had been at that remote period massed together, then the self-same roots of a parent common stock would have been equally traceable in their perfected languages as they are in those of the Indo-Europeans. And so, since whichever way one turns, he is met with the same troubled sea of speculation, margined by the treacherous quicksands of hypothesis, and every horizon bounded by inferential landmarks inscribed with imaginary dates, again the “Adepts” ask why should any one be awed into accepting as his final criterion that which passes for science of high authority in Europe? For all this is known to the Asiatic scholar—in every case save the purely mathematical, and physical sciences—as little better than a secret league for mutual support, and perhaps, admiration. He bows with profound respect before the Royal Societies of Physicists, Chemists, and to a degree—even of Naturalists. He refuses to pay the slightest attention to the merely speculative and conjectural so-called “sciences” of the modern Physiologist, Ethnologist, Philologist, &c., and the mob of self-
T. SUBBA ROW, H. P. BLAVATSKY AND M. KRISHNAMACHARI
(the latter standing; also known as Dharbagiri Nath and Bawaji)
Originally published in The Word, Vol. I, No. 4, January, 1905
WILLIAM QUAN JUDGE AND COL. HENRY S. OLCOTT
Reproduced from The American Theosophist, Vol. XV, May, 1914
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styling Oedipuses, to whom it is not given to unriddle the Sphinx of nature, and who, therefore, throttle her.
With an eye to the above, as also with a certain prevision of the future, the defendants in the cases under examination believe that the “historical difficulty” with reference to the non-historical statement, necessitated more than a simple reaffirmation of the fact. They knew that with no better claims to a hearing than may be accorded by the confidence of a few, and in view of the decided antagonism of the many, it would never do for them to say “we maintain” while Western professors maintain to the contrary. For a body of, so to say, unlicensed preachers and students of unauthorized and unrecognized sciences to offer to fight an august body of universally recognized oracles, would be an unprecedented piece of impertinence. Hence their respective claims had to be examined on however small a scale to begin with (in this as in all other cases) on other than psychological grounds. The “Adepts” in Occult Arts had better keep silence when confronted with the “A. C. S.’s”—Adepts in Conjectural Sciences, unless they could show, partially at least, how weak is the authority of the latter and on what foundations of shifting sands their scientific dicta are often built. They may thus make it a thinkable conjecture that the former may be right after all. Absolute silence, moreover, as at present advised, would have been fatal. Besides risking to be construed into inability to answer, it might have given rise to new complaints among the faithful few, and lead to fresh charge of selfishness against the writers. Therefore, have the “Adepts” agreed to satisfy the English members of the London Lodge, as far as permissible, by smoothing in part at least, a few of the most glaring difficulties and showing a highway to avoid them in future by studying the non-historical but actual, instead of the historical but mythical portions of Universal History. And this they have achieved, they believe (at any rate with a few of their querists), by simply showing, or rather reminding them, that since no historical fact can stand as such against the “assumption”
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of the “Adepts”—historians being confessedly ignorant of pre-Roman and Greek origines beyond the ghostly shadows of the Etruscans and Pelasgians—no real historical difficulty can be possibly involved in their statement. From objectors outside the Society, the writers neither demand nor do they expect mercy. The Adept has no favours to ask at the hands of conjectural sciences, nor does he exact from any member of the “London Lodge” blind faith: it being his cardinal maxim that faith should only follow enquiry. The “Adept” is more than content to be allowed to remain silent, keeping what he may know to himself, unless worthy seekers wish to share it. He has so done for ages, and can do so for a little longer. Moreover, he would rather not “arrest attention” or “command respect” at present. Thus he leaves his audience to first verify his statements in every case by the brilliant though rather wavering light of modern science: after which his facts may be either accepted or rejected, at the option of the willing student. In short, the “Adept”—if one indeed—has to remain utterly unconcerned with, and unmoved by, the issue. He imparts that which it is lawful for him to give out, and deals but with facts.
The philological and archæological “difficulties” next demand attention.
NOTE.—The continuation of Mr. Subba Row’s replies to the 7th and 8th questions will appear in the next issue of The Theosophist. As he finds it necessary to examine carefully the new inscriptions on the strength of which Major-General Cunningham and the Orientalists who followed him have thought it fit to reject the date assigned by Buddhists and Hindus to Buddha’s death, and as the reply to question VI, has become very lengthy, we have thought it proper to publish the answers to the two succeeding questions in the November issue of out journal.—Ed. Theos.