Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or Proto-Chaldæans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together.
Here, the Akkadians are called “non-Semitic,” as we had insisted they were in Isis Unveiled, which is another corroboration. Nor are we less right in always maintaining that the Jewish biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people's history in Jewish garb—Genesis excluded, which is Esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir, and beyond, that Science has to search for the cradle—or rather one of the chief cradles—of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the College of the Astrologers and Magi, the Aleim.
But this College and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Âdi-Varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is ἡδονὴ, signifying “voluptuousness.” In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra's Heaven, Svarga, on Mount Meru, and even the Paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews, for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 b.c., had such a primitive Garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the Initiates. And according to Klaproth, the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopædia in the book of Foĕ-kouĕ-ki[460] places its “Garden [pg 214] of Wisdom” on the Plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himâlayan ranges; and, describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers—Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo—flowing from a common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.”
But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former—Eden Illa-ah—means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvâna, a Paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual Man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; man being the Knower thereof.
Renan and Barthélemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity “in the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the Journal Asiatique[461] concludes that:
All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Âryans [Zoroastrians] established their Airyana Vaêjô or the Meru [?]. They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join Lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.
That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “Four-mouthed Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first Mind-born Sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine Man. It was the Paradesha, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “Bower of Voluptuousness” of the Chaldæans, for the latter was but the reminiscence of it; nor again was it there that the “Fall of Man” occurred after the “separation.” The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldæan copy.
That the Fall of Man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what Science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve's incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the [pg 215] antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not a Jewish but a universal idea.
Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamaël, the supposed Satan, to seduce Eve, was a kind of “flying camel”—καμηλόμορφον.[462]
A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description; for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having after the Fall lost its nature and its name, and is described as a huge serpent with a camel's neck.