His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable ... he does not go in company and does not live in herds [he is an ascetic].... He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree [Karma]; at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains [invisible].
And Lü-lan asserts that Confucius said:
The Dragon feeds in the pure (water) [of Wisdom] and disports in the clear (water) [of Life].[820]
Our Divine Instructors.
Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan Isle are not the only records left of the Deluge. China has also her tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma-li-ga-si-ma, and which Kæmpfer and Faber spell “Maurigasima,” for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their [pg 382] own. Kæmpfer, in his Japan,[821] gives the tradition: The island, owing to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiruun, the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the Gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the Divine Dynasties of Kings as frequently as do those of any other nation.
At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even multigeneric evolution of human beings—spiritual, psychic, intellectual, and physical—just as is described in the present work. A few of these claims have now to be considered.
Our races—they all show—have sprung from Divine Races, by whatever name the latter may be called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese Chim-nang and Tchan-gy—their “Divine Man” and Demi-gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul-lil—the Creative God and the “Gods of the Ghost-world”; with the Egyptian Isis-Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew Elohim; or again with Manco-Capac and his Peruvian progeny—the story varies nowhere. Every nation has either the seven and ten Rishi-Manus and Prajâpatis; the seven and ten Ki-y; or ten and seven Amshaspands[822] (six exoterically); ten and seven Chaldæan Annedoti; ten and seven Sephiroth, etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyân Chohans of the Esoteric Doctrine, or the “Builders” of the Stanzas of Volume I. From Manu, Thot-Hermes, Oannes-Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato Panodorus, all tell us of seven Divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven primitive and dual Gods who descend from their Celestial Abode[823] and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as Gods and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as “Divine Kings and Rulers.” But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Basnage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that Science had flourished in their country only since the time of Isis-Osiris, whom they continued to adore as Gods, “though they had become princes in human form.” And he adds of the Divine Androgyne:
It is said that this prince [Isis-Osiris] built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry.
When Abul Feda, in his Historia Anteïslamitica,[824] says that the “Sabæan language” was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch)—he means Astronomy. In the Melelwa Nahil,[825] Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodæmon. And in another account,[826] Agathodæmon is mentioned as a “King of Egypt.” The Celepas Geraldinus gives us some curious traditions about Henoch, who is called the “Divine Giant.” In his Book of the Various Names of the Nile, the historian Ahmed Ben Yusouf Eltiphas tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth, who became later the Egyptian Typhon, Set, had been one of the Seven Angels, or Patriarchs, in the Bible; then he became a mortal and Adam's son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris), “the author of thirty books,” was “Sabæan by origin”—i.e., belonged to the Saba, “a Host”: