Now though Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before that of Europe, nevertheless it came up later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. The whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea. This was made known, firstly, by Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and others, and, secondly, through Geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island, and the Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their Gods from the north-east.
When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, to record the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between Leo and Libra, has found its Œdipus to understand the riddle of its signs, and justify the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus, that their Initiates taught (a) that the poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, and (b) that even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic.
Bailly had not sufficient words at command to express his surprise at the sameness of all such traditions about the Divine Races, and exclaims:
What are finally all those reigns of Indian Devas and [Persian] Peris; or, those reigns of the Chinese legends; those Tien-hoang or the Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti-hoang, or Kings on Earth, and the Gin-hoang, the King men, distinctions which are in perfect accord with those of the Greeks and Egyptians, in enumerating their Dynasties of Gods, of Demi-gods and Mortals.[832]
As says Panodorus:
Now, it is during these thousand years [before the Deluge], that the Reign of the Seven Gods who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those benefactors of humanity descended on Earth and taught men to calculate the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic.[833]
Nearly five hundred years before the present era, the priests of Egypt showed Herodotus the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs-Piromis—the Arch-prophets or Mahâ Chohans of the temples, born one from the other, without the intervention of woman—who had reigned before Menes, their first human King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and forty-five in number, each of which had its name, history and annals. They also assured Herodotus—unless [pg 386] the most truthful of historians, the “father of history,” is now to be accused of fibbing, just in this instance—that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the three Dynasties that preceded the human—namely, the Dynasties of the Gods, of the Demi-gods, and of the Heroes, or Giants.[834] These “three” Dynasties are the three Races.
Translated into the language of the Esoteric Doctrine, these three Dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of the Kimpurushas, and of the Dânavas and Daityas—otherwise Gods, Celestial Spirits, and Giants or Titans. “Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of Gods, as men in Bhârata-varsha!”—exclaim the incarnated Gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bhârata is generally India, but in this case it symbolizes the Chosen Land of those days, which was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu-dvîpa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence; the land of Initiation and of Divine Knowledge.[835]
Can one fail to recognize in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, although he was almost unacquainted with the Âryan Hindû philosophies, which were but little known in his day, we find him writing:
We modern Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the Spirits of the Sun, Moon, etc. But we repeat again, the natural good sense and the upright judgment of the ancient peoples, quite foreign to our entirely material ideas of mechanics and physical sciences ... could not see in the stars and planets nothing but simple masses of light, or opaque bodies moving in circuits in sidereal space, merely according to the laws of attraction or repulsion; they saw in them living bodies, animated by spirits as they saw the same in every kingdom of nature.... This doctrine of spirits, so consistent and conformable to nature, from which it was derived, formed a grand and unique conception, wherein the physical, the moral, and the political aspects were all blended together.[836]