The Secret Doctrine, page 140
(b) How could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindûs is denied by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the ryan Hindûs knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled-for slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear evidence of facts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs743 preserve irrefutable proofs of records embracing more than three-and-a-half Sidereal Years—or about 87,000 years—the Hindû calculations cover nearly thirty-three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad:
These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the (last local) Flood (in Asia), or Age of Horror.
And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the ryan historical memory—the Flood which submerged the last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The Floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.
The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic Continent already described. As a Master says:
Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them ... there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again? 744
Not identically the same Continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river—is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary age. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent—thus corroborating the whole “horse-shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south-easterly line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d'Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.745
The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth-Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third-Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest Occult authority, that:
Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America. 746
The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, ryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “myriads of centuries”;747 and the latter points to the fact that:
Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.748
To this Professor R. Owen adds that:
Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes.
And Winchell states that:
At the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books.
This is quite natural if we are to believe the statement of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years which have elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, notwithstanding its tremendous antiquity. The complete records of the growth, development, social and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the Secret Annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the Seven Sciences; and these Sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the Secret Records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints:
1. The Realistic Plane of Thought.
2. The Idealistic.
3. The purely Divine or Spiritual.
The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely mythical element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For it is symbolical, the archaic mode of thought; emblematical, a later though very ancient mode of thought; parabolical or allegorical; hieroglyphical; or again logogrammical, the most difficult method of all; every letter, as in the Chinese language, representing a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the Vedas, the Book of the Dead, or, to a certain degree, in the Bible, is composed of such logograms. No one not initiated into the mystery of the Occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great may be his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say—i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of solar myth and sexual worship—how is it to be expected that the profane scholar should penetrate into the arcana behind the veil? One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead-letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern Mythologists.
Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah, etc.,—all the head-figures of the World-Deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological—all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such Deluges are based on events that took place in Nature, and stand as historical records, therefore—whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical—of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas.
To speak of a race nine “yatis,” or twenty-seven feet, high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than, let us say, the story of “Jack the Giant-Killer,” is a somewhat unusual proceeding. Where are your proofs?—the writer will be asked. In history and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Dânavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Râkshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldæa, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim.749 Moses speaks of Og, a king whose “bedstead” was nine cubits long (15ft. 4in.) and four wide,750 and Goliath was “six cubits and a span in height” (or 10ft. 7in.). The only difference found between “revealed scripture” and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., is this: While the Pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that Geology and Archæology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants has to be given up.
Of yet standing witnesses to the submerged Continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archæology claims several such on this Earth, though beyond wondering “what these may be”—it has never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Not to speak of the Easter Island statues already mentioned, to what epoch belong the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian? Archæology, as usual, assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity, and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science.
Teapi, Rapa-nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the South American coast.... In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four ... and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of their activity remains.751
But who made the great stone images752 which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? “No one knows,” says a reviewer.
It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants (a handful of Polynesian savages) arrived.... Their workmanship is of a high order, ... and it is believed that the race who formed them were the frequenters of the natives of Peru and other portions of South America.... Even at the date of Cook's visit, some of the statues, measuring twenty-seven feet in height and eight across the shoulders, were lying overthrown, while others still standing appeared much larger. One of the latter was so lofty that the shade was sufficient to shelter a party of thirty persons from the heat of the sun. The platforms on which these colossal images stood averaged from thirty to forty feet in length, twelve to sixteen broad ... all built of hewn stone in the Cyclopean style, very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac, or the ruins of Tia-Huanaco in Peru.753
“There is no reason to believe that any of the statues have been built up, bit by bit, by scaffolding erected around them,” adds the reviewer very suggestively—without explaining how they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. Two of the best of these colossal images are now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like a man asleep. Their types, though all are long-headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths, and chins differ greatly in form; their head-dress, moreover—a kind of flat cap with a piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head—shows that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked, Who made them?—but it is not Archæology nor yet Geology that is likely to answer, even though the latter recognizes in the island a portion of a submerged continent.
But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world?—for Bartholdi's “Statue of Liberty,” now at New York, is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from Shoo-King), the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had “troubled the earth”; the Jesuits are right, and the Archæologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins which are discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. “Masses of enormous human bones” were found “in America, near Munte (?)” a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters.754
Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal-warriors of Nadir Shah? Bamian is a small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Koh-i-baba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian, or Hindu-Kush, Chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis-Khan in the thirteenth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their Vihâras. Such Vihâras are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock-cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. In front of some of these caves five enormous statues—of what is regarded as Buddha—have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, for the famous Chinese traveller Hiouen Thsang speaks of having seen them, when he visited Bamian in the seventh century.
The contention that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 mètres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose legs the largest vessels of those days passed with ease, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second largest statue, which is also cut out in the rock like the first, is only 120 feet or fifteen feet taller than the said “Liberty.”755 The third statue is only 60 feet high, the two others still smaller, the last being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present Race. The first and largest of the colossi represents a man draped in a kind of “toga”; M. de Nadeylac thinks that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, are undeniable indications that Buddha was meant to be represented. But they really prove nothing. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samâdhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to Esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. As a Shloka says:
