Nevertheless, this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed by the doctrines of the East. Though, of course, as the very erudite, but still more puzzling author of Phallicism gives it, no uninitiated mortal would ever understand his real drift.
The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva España of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, as follows: “In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this land [Cholula] was in obscurity and darkness ... but immediately after the light of the sun arose in the East, there appeared gigantic men ... who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered after that to all parts of the earth.”
“A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of Giants called Quinanes,” says the author of Atlantis (p. 204).
Genesis, v. Treating of the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Charles Gould, in his Mythical Monsters (p. 212), writes: “Its mythologies, histories, religions, popular stories, and proverbs, all teem with references to a mysterious being who has a physical nature and spiritual attributes. Gifted with an accepted form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for the assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather, producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising tempests and allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the scattered legends which everywhere abound relating to this subject.”
This “mysterious being” is the mythical Dragon, i.e., the symbol of the historical and actual Adept, the Master and Professor of Occult Sciences of old. It has already been stated elsewhere, that the great “Magicians” of the Fourth and Fifth Races were generally called “Serpents” and “Dragons” after their Progenitors. All these belonged to the Hierarchy of the so-called “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, answering to the Agnishvâtta Pitris, the Maruts and Rudras generally, as the issue of Rudra their father, who is identified with the God of Fire. More is said in the text. Now Clement, an initiated Neo-Platonist, knew, of course, the origin of the word “Dragon,” and why the initiated Adepts were so called, as he knew the secret of the Agathodæmon, the Christ, the seven-vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new faith required the transformation of all the rivals of Jehovah—the Angels supposed to have rebelled against that “Elohim,” as the Titan Prometheus rebelled against Zeus, the usurper of his father's kingdom—and that “Dragon” was the mystic appellation of the “Sons of Wisdom”; from this knowledge came his definition, as cruel as it was arbitrary, “serpents and giants signify demons,” i.e., not “Spirits,” but Devils, in Church parlance.
Our best modern novelists, although they are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, nevertheless begin to have very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams; witness Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist Mr. Rider Haggard also had a prophetic, or rather a retrospective, clairvoyant dream before he wrote She? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead, whose surviving inhabitants sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost a whole nation, seems, in its general outlines, to step out from the imperishable pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests “that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians”; and then seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a Master quoted in Esoteric Buddhism, for, she says: “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This [the nation of Kor] is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in.... Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. But the barbarians ... came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones” (pp. 180, 181).
Here the clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity. Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head of humanity—as descendants of Homo Primigenius—the ape-man, of which “no fossil remains are as yet known to us,” though they “were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day” (Hæckel). In answer to whose “probably,” Occultists point to another and a greater probability—viz., the one given in our text.
It is said by the incarnate Logos, Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, “The seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang [emanated or were born] the human race and the world” (x. 6).
Here, by the seven Great Rishis, the seven great Rûpa Hierarchies or Classes of Dhyân Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the seven Rishis, Saptarshi, are the Regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, and therefore, of the same nature as the Angels of the Planets, or the seven Great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn as men on Earth in various Kalpas and Races. Moreover, “the four preceding Manus” are the four Classes of the originally Arûpa Gods—the Kumâras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.; who are also said to have incarnated. They are not Prajâpatis, as are the first, but their informing “principles”—some of which have incarnated in men, while others have made other men simply the vehicles of their “reflections.” As Krishna truly says—the same words being repeated later by another vehicle of the Logos—“I am the the same to all beings ... those who worship me [the sixth principle or the divine Intellectual Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas] are in me, and I am in them.” (Ibid., x. 29.) The Logos, being no “personality” but the Universal Principle, is represented by all the divine Powers, born of its Mind—the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism, the “Intellectual Breaths”—those Angels who are said to have made themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and quiescent, into the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is recognized, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba Row's excellent Lecture on the Bhagavad Gîtâ (Theosophist, April, 1887, p. 444).
For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the Commentary as a place of no latitude (Niraksha), the Abode of the Gods. As a scholiast says in the Sûrya Siddhânta (xii. 42-44):