This page in the Timæus is the first glimpse that history properly so-called affords of the immense chaos of the antediluvian period. Modern researches and discoveries have confirmed it step by step. To quote Roisel, who devoted a remarkable book to the Atlanteans, a work less well-known than those of Scott Elliott and Rudolf Steiner, but one that does not admit of the slightest doubt:
“It is proved that, long before the historic ages, the Atlanticans had acquired a marvellous science whose elements mankind is hardly beginning to reconstitute and whose mighty relics are found in ancient Gaul, Egypt, Persia, India and the central portion of the American continent. More than ten thousand years before our era, they knew the precession of the equinoxes, the slow changes which many stars experience in their courses and the thousand secrets of nature. They had processes of which modern industry has not yet fathomed the mysteries.”
9
The outcome of these studies is that humanity never underwent a disaster to be compared with the disappearance of Atlantis. It will perhaps need thousands of years to repair that loss and to reascend to the level of a civilization which had certainties of which we laboriously glean the scattered remnants, regarding the origin and movements of the universe, the energy of matter, the unknown forces of this and other worlds, the life beyond the grave and a social organization and political economy similar to those of the bees. Nothing could better prove the uselessness of man’s effort than this unparalleled loss, if we did not strive to hope in spite of all.
A nation of wonderful metallurgists, who had discovered the means of tempering copper for which we are still seeking, a nation of fabulous engineers, whose geometry, as Professor Smyth tells us, began where Euclid’s ends, they lifted and transported to enormous distances, by mysterious methods, rocks weighing fifteen hundred tons and strewed the world with those fantastic moving stones known as “mad stones” and “stones of truth,” stones weighing five hundred tons and so ingeniously poised on one of their corners that a child can move them with its finger, whereas the united impetus of two hundred men would be incapable of overturning them, stones which, from the geological point of view, never belong to the spot where they are found. A nation of explorers who had traversed and colonized the whole surface of the earth, a nation of scholars, mathematicians and astronomers, they appear to have been above all things ruthless rationalists and logicians, endowed with, so to speak, a metallic brain, the lateral lobes of which were much more highly developed than ours. They applied their incomparable faculties exclusively to the study of the exact sciences; and the sole object of their energies was the conquest of truth. But the study of the invisible and the infinite, under their powerful scrutiny, itself becomes an exact science; and the main idea of their cosmogony, by virtue of which everything issues from the ocean of cosmic matter or from the boundless waves of the eternal ether, soon to return and to reemerge, disfigured and overladen with numberless myths by the imagination of their degenerate descendants or settlers: this main idea forms the base of every religion. It is improbable that man will ever discover one to equal it or replace it.
10
It is in the sacred books of India that we find the surest and most plentiful traces of this cosmogony or of this revelation. Less than a century ago, men were almost wholly unaware of the existence of these sacred books. Their interpreters have taken two different paths. On the one hand, scholars whom we may describe as official have supplied translations of a certain number of texts, which might also be called official, texts which they do not always understand and which their readers understand even less. On the other hand, initiates, genuine or pretended, with the assistance of adepts of an occult fraternity, have suggested a new and more impressive interpretation of these same texts or of others still more secret. They still, rightly or wrongly, inspire a certain distrust. We are obliged to admit the authenticity and the antiquity of certain traditions, of certain primitive and essential writings, though it is impossible to assign an approximate date to them, so completely are they merged in the mists of the prehistoric ages. But they are almost incomprehensible without keys and commentaries; and it is here that our doubts and hesitations begin. A large number of those commentaries are likewise very ancient and in their turn need keys; others appear to be more recent; lastly, others seem to be contemporary; and it is often difficult to draw a dividing line between that which may well exist in the original and that which the interpreters believe to exist in the original or which they more or less deliberately add to it. Now the most striking, the most impressive and in any case the most lucid part of the doctrine is often contained in the commentaries.
Next, as I have observed, comes the question of the keys, which is intimately connected with the foregoing. These keys are more or less workable and command more or less respect; sometimes they seem fanciful or arbitrary; they are delivered only with curious precautions, singly and grudgingly; and they are apt to unlock several superimposed meanings. And all this is accompanied by fantastic reticences, by so-called dangerous or terrible secrets, withheld at the decisive moment, and by revelations which, it is contended, cannot be communicated until many centuries have elapsed. Doors through which we were about to pass are slammed in our faces just as we were at last catching a glimpse of a long-promised horizon; and behind each of them hides a supreme initiate, a still living master, the sacred guardian of the ultimate mysteries, who knows all things, but can or will say nothing.
Observe, moreover, that a host of more or less intelligent illuminati, of elderly women and unbalanced spinsters, of simple-minded people who accept, blindly and off-hand, that which they do not understand, of discontented, unsuccessful, vain or crafty persons who fish in troubled waters, in a word, all the usual suspect mob that gathers round any more or less mysterious doctrine, science or phenomenon, has discredited these first esoteric interpretations, of which the very source is none too dear. Lastly, let us add that the burning of the famous library of Alexandria, in which all the knowledge of the east was amassed, the destruction in the sixteenth century, under the Mogul Akbar, of thousands of Sanskrit volumes, the systematic and merciless demolition, especially during the first few centuries of the Church and in the Middle Ages, of all that referred or alluded to this dreaded and embarrassing revelation, have deprived us of our best means of control. The adepts, it is true, assert on the other hand that the true texts, as well as the ancient commentaries which alone enable them to be understood, still exist in the secret crypts and subterranean libraries of Thibet or the Himalayas, libraries of books more innumerable than any which we possess in the west, and that they will reappear in a more enlightened age. It is possible, but in the meanwhile they are of no help to us.