Five Years of Theosophy

by Unknown

If, in that generally tabooed work, "Isis Unveiled," the "English F.T.S." turns to page 589, vol. I., he may find therein narrated another old Eastern legend. An island …. (where now the Gobi desert lies) was inhabited by the last remnants of the race that preceded ours: a handful of "Adepts"—the "Sons of God," now referred to as the Brahman Pitris; called by another yet synonymous name in the Chaldean Kabala. "Isis Unveiled" may appear very puzzling and contradictory to those who know nothing of Occult Sciences. To the Occultist it is correct, and while perhaps left purposely sinning (for it was the first cautious attempt to let into the West a faint streak of Eastern esoteric light), it reveals more facts than were ever given before its appearance. Let any one read these pages and he may comprehend. The "six such races" in Manu refer to the sub-races of the fourth race (p. 590). In addition to this the reader must turn to the paper on "The Septenary Principle in Esotericism" (p. 187 ante), study the list of the "Manus" of our fourth Round (p. 254), and between this and "Isis" light may, perchance, be focused. On pages 590-6 of the work mentioned above, he will find that Atlantis is mentioned in the "Secret Books of the East" (as yet virgin of Western spoliating hand) under another name in the sacred hieratic or sacerdotal language. And then it will be shown to him that Atlantis was not merely the name of one island but that of a whole continent, of whose isles and islets many have to this day survived. The remotest ancestors of some of the inhabitants of the now miserable fisherman's hovel "Aclo" (once Atlan), near the gulf of Uraha, were allied at one time as closely with the old Greeks and Romans as they were with the "true inland China-man," mentioned on p. 57 Of "Esoteric Buddhism." Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India; and strange to him who does not follow the mysterious working of the human mind and its unconscious approximations to hidden truths—even the aborigines of the new continent, the Red-skinned tribes, the "Mongoloids" of Mr. Huxley, were named Indians. Names now attributed to chance: elastic word that! Strange coincidence, indeed, to him who does not know—science refusing yet to sanction the wild hypothesis—that there was a time when the Indian peninsula was at one end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the prehistoric ages was not only within the region at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, but there was even in the days of history, and within its memory, an upper, a lower, and a western India: and still earlier it was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the "Brahmans of Upper India" stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveler, furnished with a canoe and starting from the south, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America. On pp. 592-3 of "Isis," vol. I., the Thevetatas—the evil, mischievous gods that have survived in the Etruscan Pantheon—are mentioned, along with the "sons of God" or Brahman Pitris. The Involute, the hidden or shrouded gods, the Consentes, Complices, and Novensiles, are all disguised relics of the Atlanteans; while the Etruscan arts of soothsaying their Disciplina revealed by Tages comes direct and in undisguised form from the Atlantean king Thevetat, the "invisible" Dragon, whose name survives to this day among the Siamese and Burmese, as also, in the Jataka allegorical stories of the Buddhists as the opposing power under the name of Devadat. And Tages was the son of Thevetat, before he became the grandson of the Etruscan Jupiter-Tinia. Have the Western Orientalists tried to find out the connection between all these Dragons and Serpents; between the "powers of Evil" in the cycles of epic legends, the Persian and the Indian, the Greek and the Jewish; between the contests of Indra and the giant; the Aryan Nagas and the Iranian Aji Dahaka; the Guatemalian Dragon and the Serpent of Genesis—&c. &c. &c.? Professor Max Muller discredits the connection. So be it. But the fourth race of men, "men" whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once, the hidden as the unrevealed, is mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, the sacred books of the Guatemalians; and the Babylonian Xisuthrus, the far later Jewish Noah, the Hindu Vaivaswata, and the Greek Deukalion, are all identical with the great Father of the Thlinkithians, of Popol-Vuh who, like the rest of these allegorical (not mythical) Patriarchs, escaped in his turn and in his days, in a large boat at the time of the last great Deluge—the submersion of Atlantis.

To have been an Indo-Aryan, Vaivaswata had not, of necessity, to meet with his Saviour (Vishnu, under the form of a fish) within the precincts of the present India, or even anywhere on the Asian continent; nor is it necessary to concede that he was the seventh great Manu himself (see catalogue of the Manus, in the paper on "The Septenary Principle in Esotericism" cited above), but simply that the Hindu Noah belonged to the clan of Vaivaswata and typifies the fifth race. Now the last of the Atlantean islands perished some 11,000 years ago; and the fifth race headed by the Aryans began its evolution, to the certain knowledge of the "Adepts" nearer one million than 900,000 years ago. But the historian and the anthropologist with their utmost stretch of liberality are unable to give more than from twenty to one hundred thousand years for all our human evolution. Hence we put it to them as a fair question: at what point during their own conjectural lakh of years do they fix the root-germ of the ancestral line of the "old Greeks and Romans?" Who were they? What is known or even "conjectured" about their territorial habitat after the division of the Aryan nations? And where were the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races? It is not enough for purposes of refutation of other peoples' statements to say that the latter lived separate from the former, and then come to a full stop—a fresh hiatus in the ethnological history of mankind. Since Asia is sometimes called the Cradle of Humanity, and it is an ascertained fact that Central Asia was likewise the cradle of the Semitic and Turanian races (for thus it is taught in Genesis), and we find the Turans agreeably to the theory evolved by the Assyriologists preceding the Babylonian Semitists, where, at what spot of the globe, did these Semito-Turanian nations break away from the parent stock, and what has become of the latter? It cannot be the small Jewish tribe of Patriarchs; and unless it can be shown that the garden of Eden was also on the Oxus or the Euphrates, fenced off from the soil inhabited by the children of Cain, philologists who undertake to fill in the gaps in Universal History with their made-up conjectures, may be regarded as ignorant of this detail as those they would enlighten.

Logically, if the ancestors of these various groups had been at that remote period massed together, then the self-same roots of a parent common stock would have been equally traceable in their perfected languages as they are in those of the Judo-Europeans. And so, since whichever way one turns, one is met with the same troubled sea of speculation, margined by the treacherous quicksands of hypothesis, and every horizon bounded by inferential landmarks inscribed with imaginary dates. Again, the "Adepts" ask why should any one be awed into accepting as final criterion that which passes for science of high authority in Europe? For all this is known to the Asiatic scholar—in every case save the purely mathematical and physical sciences—as little better than a secret league for mutual support, and, perhaps, admiration. He bows with profound respect before the Royal Societies of Physicists, Chemists, and, to a degree, even of Naturalists. He refuses to pay the slightest attention to the merely speculative and conjectural so-called "sciences" of the modern Physiologist, Ethnologist, Philologist, &c., and the mob of self-styling Oedipuses to whom it is not given to unriddle the Sphynx of Nature, and who therefore throttle her.

With an eye to the above, as also with a certain prevision of the future, the defendants in the cases under examination believe that the "historical difficulty" with reference to the non-historical statement, necessitated more than a simple reaffirmation of the fact. They knew that with no better claims to a hearing than may be accorded by the confidence of a few, and in view of the decided antagonism of the many, it would never do for them to say "we maintain" while Western professors maintained to the contrary. For a body of, so to say, unlicensed preachers and students of unauthorized and unrecognized sciences to offer to fight an August body of universally recognized oracles, would be an unprecedented piece of impertinence. Hence their respective claims had to be examined on however small a scale to begin with (in this as in all other cases) on other than psychological grounds. The "Adepts" in Occult Arts had better keep silence when confronted with the "A.C.S.'s"—Adepts in Conjectural Sciences—unless they could show, partially at least, how weak is the authority of the latter and on what foundations of shifting sands their scientific dicta are often built. They may thus make it a thinkable conjecture that the former may be right after all. Absolute silence, moreover, as at present advised, would have been fatal. Besides risking to be construed into inability to answer, it might have given rise to new complaints among the faithful few, and lead to fresh charges of selfishness against the writers. Therefore have the "Adepts" agreed to smooth in part at least a few of the most glaring difficulties and showing a highway to avoid them in future by studying the non-historical but actual, instead of the historical but mythical, portions of Universal History. And this they have achieved, they believe (at any rate with a few of their querists), by simply showing, or rather reminding them, that since no historical fact can stand as such against the "assumption" of the "Adepts"— historians being confessedly ignorant of pre-Roman and Greek origins beyond the ghostly shadows of the Etruscans and Pelasgians—no real historical difficulty can be possibly involved in their statement. From objectors outside the Society, the writers neither demand nor do they expect mercy. The "Adept" has no favours to ask at the hands of conjectural science, nor does he exact from any member of the "London Lodge" blind faith: it being his cardinal maxim that faith should only follow inquiry. The "Adept" is more than content to be allowed to remain silent, keeping what he may know to himself, unless worthy seekers wish to share it. He has so done for ages, and can do so for a little longer. Moreover, he would rather not "arrest attention" or "command respect" at present. Thus he leaves his audience to first verify his statements in every case by the brilliant though rather wavering light of modern science: after which his facts may be either accepted or rejected, at the option of the willing student. In short, the "Adept"—if one indeed—has to remain utterly unconcerned with, and unmoved by, the issue. He imparts that which it is lawful for him to give out, and deals but with facts.

The philological and archeological "difficulties" next demand attention.

Philological and Archeological "Difficulties"

Two questions are blended into one. Having shown the reasons why the Asiatic student is prompted to decline the guidance of Western History, it remains to explain his contumacious obstinacy in the same direction with regard to philology and archeology. While expressing the sincerest admiration for the clever modern methods of reading the past histories of nations now mostly extinct, and following the progress and evolution of their respective languages, now dead, the student of Eastern occultism, and even the profane Hindu scholar acquainted with his national literature, can hardly be made to share the confidence felt by Western philologists in these conglutinative methods, when practically applied to his own country and Sanskrit literature. Three facts, at least, out of many are well calculated to undermine his faith in these Western methods:—

1. Of some dozens of eminent Orientalists, no two agree, even in their verbatim translation of Sanskrit texts. Nor is there more harmony shown in their interpretation of the possible meaning of doubtful passages.

2. Though Numismatics is a less conjectural branch of science, and when starting from well-established basic dates, so to say, an exact one (since it can hardly fail to yield correct chronological data, in our case, namely, Indian antiquities); archeologists have hitherto failed to obtain any such position. On their own confession, they are hardly justified in accepting the Samvat and Salivahana eras as their guiding lights, the real initial points of both being beyond the power of the European Orientalists to verify; yet all the same, the respective dates "of 57 B.C. and 78 A.D." are accepted implicitly, and fanciful ages thereupon ascribed to archeological remains.

3. The greatest authorities upon Indian archeology and architecture— General Cunningham and Mr. Fergusson—represent in their conclusions the two opposite poles. The province of archeology is to provide trustworthy canons of criticism, and not, it should seem, to perplex or puzzle. The Western critic is invited to point to one single relic of the past in India, whether written record or inscribed or uninscribed monument, the age of which is not disputed. No sooner has one archeologist determined a date—say the first century—than another tries to pull it forward to the 10th or perhaps the 14th century of the Christian era. While General Cunningham ascribes the construction of the present Buddha Gaya temple to the 1st century after Christ—the opinion of Mr. Fergusson is that its external form belongs to the 14th century; and so the unfortunate outsider is as wise as ever. Noticing this discrepancy in a "Report on the Archeological Survey of India" (vol. viii. p. 60), the conscientious and capable Buddha-Gaya Chief Engineer, Mr. J.D. Beglar, observes that "notwithstanding his (Fergusson's) high authority, this opinion must be unhesitatingly set aside," and forthwith assigns the building under notice to the 6th century. While the conjectures of one archeologist are termed by another "hopelessly wrong," the identifications of Buddhist relics by this other are in their turn denounced as "quite untenable." And so in the case of every relic of whatever age.