The answer that the history of this world since its formation and to its end is “written in the stars,” i.e., is recorded in the Zodiac and Universal Symbolism, whose keys are in the keeping of the Initiates, will hardly satisfy the doubters. The antiquity of the Zodiac in Egypt is much doubted, and it is denied point-blank with regard to India. “Your conclusions are often excellent, but your premises are always doubtful,” the writer was once told by a profane friend. To this, the answer came that it was at least one point gained on scientific syllogisms, for, with the exception of a few problems from the domain of purely Physical Science, both the premises and conclusions of men of Science are as hypothetical as they are almost invariably erroneous. And if they do not so appear to the profane, the reason is simply this: the said profane are very little aware, taking as they do their scientific data on faith, that both premises and conclusions are generally the product of the same brains, which, however learned, are not infallible—a truism demonstrated daily by the shifting and re-shifting of scientific theories and speculations.
However it may be, the records of the temples, zodiacal and traditional, as well as the ideographic records of the East, as read by the Adepts of the Sacred Science or Vidyâ, are not a whit more doubtful than the so-called ancient history of the European nations, now edited, corrected, and amplified by half a century of archæological discoveries, and the very problematical readings of the Assyrian tiles, cuneiform fragments, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Our data also are based upon the same “readings”—in addition to an almost inexhaustible number of secret works of which Europe knows nothing—plus the perfect knowledge [pg 458] by the Initiates of the symbolism of every word so recorded. Some of these records belong to an immense antiquity. Every Archæologist and Palæontologist is acquainted with the ideographic productions of certain semi-savage tribes, who from time immemorial have aimed at rendering their thoughts symbolically. This is the earliest mode of recording events and ideas. And how old this knowledge is in the human race may be inferred from some signs, evidently ideographic, found on hatchets of the Palæolithic period. The Red Indian tribes of America, only a few years ago, comparatively speaking, petitioned the President of the United States to grant them possession of four small lakes, the petition being written on the tiny surface of a piece of fabric, which was covered with barely a dozen representations of animals and birds. The American savages have a number of such different kinds of writing, but not one of our Scientists is yet familiar with, or even knows of, the early hieroglyphic cypher, still preserved in some Fraternities, and named in Occultism the Senzar. Moreover, all those who have decided to regard such modes of writing—e.g., the ideographs of the Red Indians, and even the Chinese characters—as “attempts of the early races of mankind to express their untutored thoughts,” will decidedly object to our statement, that writing was invented by the Atlanteans, and not at all by the Phœnicians. Indeed, such a claim as that writing was known to mankind many hundreds of millenniums ago, in the face of the Philologists who have decreed that writing was unknown in the days of Pânini, in India, as also to the Greeks in the time of Homer, will be met by general disapprobation, if not with silent scorn. All denial and ridicule notwithstanding, the Occultists will maintain the claim, and simply for this reason: from Bacon down to our modern Royal Society, we have too long a period full of the most ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing in modern scientific assumptions rather than in the statements of our Teachers. Writing, our Scientists say, was unknown to Pânini; and this Sage nevertheless composed a grammar which contains 3,996 rules, and is the most perfect of all the grammars that were ever made! Pânini is made out to have lived barely a few centuries b.c., by the most liberal; and the rocks in Iran and Central Asia—whence the Philologists and Historians show us the ancestors of the same Pânini, the Brâhmans, coming into India—are covered with writing, two and three thousand years old, at least, and twelve thousand, according to some fearless Palæontologists.
Writing was an ars incognita in the days of Hesiod and Homer, agreeably to Grote, and was unknown to the Greeks so late as 770 b.c.; and the Phœnicians who had invented it, and knew writing as far back as 1,500 b.c. at the earliest,[1017] were living among the Greeks, and elbowing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory conclusions disappeared, however, into thin air, when Schliemann discovered (a) the site of ancient Troy, whose actual existence had been so long regarded as a fable, and (b) excavated from that site earthenware vessels with inscriptions in characters unknown to Palæontologists and the all-denying Sanskritists. Who will now deny Troy, or these archaic inscriptions? As Professor Virchow witnesses:
I was myself an eye-witness of two such discoveries, and helped to gather the articles together. The slanderers have long since been silenced, who were not ashamed to charge the discoverer with an imposture.[1018]
Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du Chaillu, Gordon Cumming, Madame Merian,[1019] Bruce, and a host of others were charged with lying.
Says the author of Mythical Monsters, who gives this information in the Introduction:[1020]
Madame Merian was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her description of a bird-eating spider nearly two hundred years ago. But now-a-days ... reliable observers have confirmed it in regard to South America, India, and elsewhere.
Audubon was similarly accused by botanists of having invented the yellow water-lily, which he figured in his Birds of the South under the name of Nymphæa lutea, and after having lain under the imputation for years, was confirmed at last by the discovery of the long-lost flower in Florida ... in ... 1876.[1021]
And, as Audubon was called a liar for this, and for his Haliætus Washingtonii,[1022] so Victor Hugo was ridiculed for his marvellous word-painting of the devil-fish, and his description of a man becoming its helpless victim.
The thing was derided as a monstrous impossibility; yet within a few years were discovered, on the shores of Newfoundland, cuttle-fishes with arms extending to [pg 460]thirty feet in length, and capable of dragging a good-sized boat beneath the surface; and their action has been reproduced for centuries past ... by Japanese artists.[1023]