If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story that, from the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and the descendants of the Atlantean Noah, a mixed race of righteous and wicked sprang up. On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, various Buddhas, its numerous “Saviours,” and great hierophants; on the other hand, its “natural magicians”who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual enlightenment, ... perverted their gifts to evil purposes.
We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and traditions. In L'Histoire des Vierges: les Peuples et les Continents Disparus, Louis Jacolliot says:
One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense continent, which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia.
The high plateaux of Hindûstan and Asia, according to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those distant epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent.... According to the Brâhmans, this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindûstan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the peoples which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from their speech was derived the Sanskrit. The Indo-Hellenic tradition, preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from the plains of India, also relates the existence of a continent and a people to which it gives the name of Atlantis and Atlantides, and which it locates in the Atlantic in the northern portion of the Tropics.
Apart from this fact, the supposition of an ancient continent in those latitudes, the vestiges of which may be found in the volcanic islands and mountainous surface of the Azores, the Canaries and Cape de Verd Islands, is not devoid of geographical probability. The Greeks, who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond the Pillars of Hercules, on account of their dread of the mysterious Ocean, appeared too late in antiquity for the stories preserved by Plato to be anything else than an echo of the Indian legend. Moreover, when we cast a look on a planisphere, at the sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia, from the Straits of Sunda to Easter Island, it is impossible, upon the hypothesis of continents preceding those which we inhabit, not to place there the most important of all.
A religious belief, common to Malacca and Polynesia, that is to say, to the two opposite extremes of the Oceanic world, affirms “that all these islands once formed two immense countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify them, the latter swallowed up the two continents, and, since then, it has been impossible to make him give up his captives. Alone, the mountain-peaks and high plateaux escaped the flood, by the power of the gods, who perceived too late the mistake they had committed.”
Whatever there may be in these traditions, 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 to Science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they may be.[516]
This Oceanic tradition corroborates the legend given from the “Records of the Secret Doctrine.” The war mentioned between the yellow [pg 234] and the black men, relates to a struggle between the “Sons of Gods” and the “Sons of Giants,” or the inhabitants and magicians of Atlantis.
The final conclusion of the author, who personally visited all the islands of Polynesia, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows:
As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer.