Like as a dragon-snake uncoils slowly its body, so the Sons of Men, led on by the Sons of Wisdom, opened their folds, and spreading out, expanded like a running stream of sweet waters ... many of the faint-hearted among them perished on their way. But most were saved.
Yet the pursuers, “whose heads and chests soared high above the [pg 447] water,” chased them “for three lunar terms” until finally reached by the rising waves, they perished to the last man, the soil sinking under their feet and the Earth engulfing those who had desecrated her.
This sounds a good deal like the original material upon which the similar story in Exodus was built many hundred thousands of years later. The biography of Moses, the story of his birth, childhood and rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, is now shown to have been adapted from the Chaldæan narrative about Sargon. And if so, the Assyrian tiles in the British Museum being a good proof of it, why not that of the Jews robbing the Egyptians of their jewels, the death of Pharaoh and his army, and so on? The gigantic Magicians of Ruta and Daitya, the “Lords of the Dark Face,” may, in the later narrative, have become the Egyptian Magi, and the yellow-faced nations of the Fifth Race, the virtuous sons of Jacob, the “chosen people”! One more statement has to be made. There have been several Divine Dynasties—a series for every Root-Race beginning with the Third, each series according and adapted to its Humanity. The last seven Dynasties referred to in the Egyptian and Chaldæan records belonged to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Âryan, was not entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethnology gives other names. It would be impossible, in view of the limited space at our disposal, to go any further into the description of the Atlanteans, in whom the whole East believes as much as we believe in the ancient Egyptians, but whose existence the majority of the Western Scientists deny, as they have denied, before this, many a truth, from the existence of Homer down to that of the carrier pigeon. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater than even that of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato's Atlantis, who built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainty before the advent of the “Eastern Æthiopians,” as Herodotus calls the Egyptians. This may be well inferred from the statement made by Ammianus Marcellinus, who says of the Pyramids that:
There are also subterranean passages and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful in the ancient mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost.
These men who “divined the coming of floods” were not Egyptians, who never had any, except the periodical rising of the Nile. Who were they? The last remnants of the Atlanteans, we maintain; those [pg 448] races which are dimly suspected by Science, and thinking of which Mr. Charles Gould, the well-known Geologist, says:
Can we suppose that we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in fact, penetrated yet beyond its antechambers? Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and of China, shadowy mementoes of pre-historic man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands from others, which, like the fabled (?) Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization.[998]
After this one can turn with more confidence to the words of a Master who wrote, several years before these words were penned by Mr. Gould:
The Fourth Race had its periods of the highest civilization. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian civilizations are nothing compared to the civilizations that began with the Third Race [—after its separation].
But if this civilization and the mastery of arts and sciences are denied to the Third and Fourth Races, no one will deny that between the great civilizations of antiquity, such as those of Egypt and India, there stretched the dark ages of crass ignorance and barbarism ever since the beginning of the Christian era up to our modern civilization, during which period all recollection of these traditions was lost. As said in Isis Unveiled:
Why should we forget that, ages before the prows of the adventurous Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phœnician vessels had circumnavigated the Globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What Archæologist will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did not erect the monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia; or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin; or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums—last mementoes of the long “lost arts”—speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century.