The island of Delos, the Asteria of Greek Mythology, was never in Greece, for this country, in that day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern Seas. One calls it Basilea, or “Royal”;[1813] the other, Pliny, names it Osericta,[1814] a word which, according to Rudbeck,[1815] had
A significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the Divine Kings or God-kings—
or again the “Royal Island of the Gods,” because the Gods were born there, i.e., the Divine Dynasties of the Kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let Geographers and Geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiöld on his “Vega” voyage in the Arctic regions.[1816] The Secret Books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once, since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a Paradise before they became Hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks, and the cold Realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the Goddess-Queen of the country of the dead, “holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet it was the birthplace of Apollo, who was the brightest of Gods, in Heaven—astronomically—as he was the most enlightened of the Divine Kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad, wherein Apollo is said to have [pg 818] appeared four times in his own form (as the God of the Four Races) and six times in human form,[1817] i.e., as connected with the Divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.
It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries—which have now become uninhabitable—as well as the name given to “man” both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church Fathers for inventing a Hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality.[1818]
It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths—known to and communicating with the Greeks—who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name, it is averred, came from pelagus, the “great sea.” Noah's Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men—or rather of nations—who were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldæan Xisuthrus, the Hindû Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun—the “Beloved of the Gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe—or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the Gods did the same in the North, are all identical as personages. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the Continent and the Island of Atlantis.
The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition viâ Pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote about the Titans—the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the [pg 819] Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, a race which descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birthplace of the first giants. The Commentaries on the Sacred Books explain that the said region was the far North, the Polar Lands now, the Pre-Lemurian earliest Continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.
But who were the Nephilim of Genesis (vi. 4)? There were Palæolithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the Book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race, and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean Race. What is the meaning of Poseidon's amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric Records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of those Lemuro-Atlantean Races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, “monsters,” as the Stanzas have it.
Now Mythology, built upon Hesiod's Theogony, which is but a poetized record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Cronus for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with a hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in Mythology every personage almost is a God or Demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect,[1819] and that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub-races, the Esoteric Commentary will [pg 820] become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole Globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the Earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called the “Eternal or Perpetual Land,” and the Antarctic the “Ever-living” and the “Concealed”; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reäppear in turn, into and above the Great Waters.
From the first appearance of the great Continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants have been imprisoned in their circle by Cronus. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon—or Neptune—hence by the seas, which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad makes it Tartarus.[1820] When the Gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus—the deity of the Fourth Race—the Father of the Gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants that they might help him to conquer the Gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.[1821] The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Râkshasas of Lankâ and the Bhârateans, the mèlée of the Atlanteans and Âryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds, or Peris, became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the Angels of God and the Angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, and one of the latest [pg 821] issues of the Âryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.
But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar—as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire—that Hesiod's Theogony is based upon historical facts,[1822] it becomes easier for the Occult Teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from Mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.