and also that they are in the Cyclopean style. The first large cities, however, were built in that region of the Continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection on the former, and Karma—its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, [pg 332] who, instead of vivifying the Spark projected into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long generations of bestiality.[714] Whereas the Âryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated.[715]
It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements—his brothers, more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them, built cities, and cultivated Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, notwithstanding civilization, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, the “builders” could now obtain their powers only gradually; even those they did obtain being generally used for conquest over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one's own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking.
“There is no such thing as magic” philosophizes “She”—the author forgetting that “magic” in early days still meant the great Science of Wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought—“though,” she adds, “there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.”[716] But they have become “Secrets” only in our Race, and were public property with the Third.
Gradually, mankind decreased in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save only the Hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—called later the “Sons of the Fire-Mist.”
Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub-race. But, as said in the Commentary:
The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island [the primitive Shveta-dvîpa] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria's] Elect, had taken shelter on the Sacred Island [now the “fabled” Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert], while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground [“cave-men”], when the golden yellow Race [the Fourth] became in its turn “black with sin.”From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Shveta-dvîpa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya [?], east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted.... The Demi-Gods of the Third had made room for the Semi-Demons of the Fourth Race. Shveta-dvîpa,[717] the White Island, had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dvîpa (Pushkara) and Râkshasas from the seventh climate replaced the Sâdhus and the Ascetics of the Third Age, who had descended to them from other and higher regions....
In their dead letter, the Purânas, in general, read like an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. And if one were to read the first three chapters of Book II of Vishnu Purâna and accept verbatim the geography, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata's seven sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvîpas (Islands or [pg 334] Continents); and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnîdhra, the King of Jambu-dvîpa, apportioned Jambu-dvîpa among his nine sons; and then how Nâbhi, his son, had a hundred sons and apportioned lands to all these in his turn—he would most likely throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the student of Esotericism will understand that, when the Purânas were written, their true meaning was intended to be clear only to the Initiated Brâhmans, and so the compilers wrote these works allegorically and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will, further, explain to the Orientalists—who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, have made and still are making such a mess of it—that the first three chapters purposely confuse the following subjects and events:
I. The series of Kalpas, or Ages, and also of Races, are never taken into account; and events which have happened in one are allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying:
Whenever any contradictions in different Purânas are observed, they are ascribed ... to differences of Kalpas and the like.
II. The several meanings of the words “Manvantara” and “Kalpa” or Age, are withheld, the general signification only being given.