This duodenary number is perfect. It is that of the signs of the Zodiac, which the sun visits in twelve months, and it is to honour that number that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes, established the twelve cakes of the shew-bread, and placed twelve precious stones upon the breast-plate of the pontiffs.[1116]
According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the times fixed by him for the conflagration [pg 713] of the World—Pralaya—and for a deluge, are found to answer to the times given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. Such a catastrophe comes at every renewal of the cycle of the Sidereal Year of 25,868 years. The names of the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the names of the signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians are far earlier than the Chaldæans. Mr. Proctor shows, in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, that the ancient Astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate Astronomy 2,400 years b.c.; the Hindûs date their Kali Yuga from a great periodical conjunction of the Planets thirty-one centuries b.c.; but, withal, it was the Greeks, belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were the instructors of the Âryan Hindûs in Astronomy!
Whether the origin of the Zodiac is Âryan or Egyptian, it is still of an immense antiquity. Simplicius, in the sixth century a.d., writes that he had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and records for a period of 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten Mr. Gerald Massey, who remarks on it that:
If we read this number of years by the month which Euxodus said the Egyptians termed a year, i.e., a course of time, that would still yield the length of two cycles of precession [51,736 years].[1117]
Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great.[1118] Martianus Capella corroborates this by telling posterity that the Egyptians had secretly studied Astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted their knowledge to the world.[1119]
Several valuable quotations are made in Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author's theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla, saying:
One day when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it the sound of a trumpet, so loud, shrill, and mournful, that it affrighted and astonished the world. The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all being different in life and manners; and that Heaven had allotted each its time, which was limited by the circuit of the great year [25,868 years].[1120]
This reminds one strongly of our Seven Races of men, and of the [pg 714] eighth—the “animal man”—descended from the later Third Race; as also of the successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally disposed of almost all that Race. Says Iamblichus:
The Assyrians have not only preserved the memorials of seven-and-twenty myriads of years [270,000 years], as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.[1121]
This is as nearly as possible the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine. For 1,000,000 years are allowed for our present Root-Race (the Fifth), and about 850,000 years have passed since the submersion of the last large island—part of the continent of Atlantis—the Ruta of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans; while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the Glacial Period or thereabouts. But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the Divine Kings, belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity. Wherever twelve are mentioned, they are invariably the twelve signs of the Zodiac.