The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.[pg 796]And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.1759That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the“tombs”is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.Cremation was universaltill a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,1760and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,1761or rather the ashes of generations of giants.Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,”both good and bad.It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejectingà priorithe actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after allisAncient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that[pg 797]makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively andde factoside by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities“Los Campos de los Gigantes,”the“Fields of Giants,”are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches.“All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,”and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.[pg 798]If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In theJournal of the Anthropological Institute1762such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of theBiblecan never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by“giants,”and further adding that they were“hairy”men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these“satyrs”—some alive, others“pickled”and“preserved.”The word“giants”being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians[pg 799]were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the“Great Dragons,”and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the“Gods”and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the“Mighty Serpent,”the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the“Magi of the Gauls and Britons.”But they were more than that. The author ofIndian Antiquitiesfinds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;1763others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of“worlds,”as also in that of seven“creations”(of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In theBook of Godwe read:The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any EnglishBibleand read chapter iii of the SecondEpistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of“Peter.”What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In theAvestathe Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. TheAvestaspeaks of the three thirds of the Earth because theRig Vedamentions:[pg 801]Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. TheAvestahas not borrowed the idea from theRig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The“three strata or layers”do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it istripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of theAvesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three“zones,”if this word is read“planes.”As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the“septempartite earth.”1767For:According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768The“Ocean”isSpace, of course, for the latter was called“Waters of Space”before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of theYasna).1769But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the“incongruities”of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such“incongruities”and“coïncidences”concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in thePurânas, namely:The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,“the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,”and“the other names”do not mean“the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,”but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in theBook of Dzyan(11) thus:Illustration: The Chain of EarthThe Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The“Earth”(our world)istripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given inVendidâd(xix. 39), showing that:Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting[pg 803]the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.1773These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it.It was the last to produceanimals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.[pg 804]
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.[pg 796]And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.1759That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the“tombs”is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.Cremation was universaltill a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,1760and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,1761or rather the ashes of generations of giants.Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,”both good and bad.It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejectingà priorithe actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after allisAncient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that[pg 797]makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively andde factoside by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities“Los Campos de los Gigantes,”the“Fields of Giants,”are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches.“All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,”and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.[pg 798]If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In theJournal of the Anthropological Institute1762such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of theBiblecan never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by“giants,”and further adding that they were“hairy”men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these“satyrs”—some alive, others“pickled”and“preserved.”The word“giants”being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians[pg 799]were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the“Great Dragons,”and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the“Gods”and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the“Mighty Serpent,”the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the“Magi of the Gauls and Britons.”But they were more than that. The author ofIndian Antiquitiesfinds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;1763others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of“worlds,”as also in that of seven“creations”(of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In theBook of Godwe read:The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any EnglishBibleand read chapter iii of the SecondEpistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of“Peter.”What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In theAvestathe Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. TheAvestaspeaks of the three thirds of the Earth because theRig Vedamentions:[pg 801]Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. TheAvestahas not borrowed the idea from theRig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The“three strata or layers”do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it istripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of theAvesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three“zones,”if this word is read“planes.”As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the“septempartite earth.”1767For:According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768The“Ocean”isSpace, of course, for the latter was called“Waters of Space”before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of theYasna).1769But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the“incongruities”of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such“incongruities”and“coïncidences”concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in thePurânas, namely:The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,“the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,”and“the other names”do not mean“the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,”but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in theBook of Dzyan(11) thus:Illustration: The Chain of EarthThe Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The“Earth”(our world)istripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given inVendidâd(xix. 39), showing that:Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting[pg 803]the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.1773These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it.It was the last to produceanimals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.[pg 804]
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.[pg 796]And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.1759That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the“tombs”is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.Cremation was universaltill a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,1760and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,1761or rather the ashes of generations of giants.Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,”both good and bad.It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejectingà priorithe actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after allisAncient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that[pg 797]makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively andde factoside by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities“Los Campos de los Gigantes,”the“Fields of Giants,”are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches.“All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,”and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.[pg 798]If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In theJournal of the Anthropological Institute1762such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of theBiblecan never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by“giants,”and further adding that they were“hairy”men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these“satyrs”—some alive, others“pickled”and“preserved.”The word“giants”being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians[pg 799]were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the“Great Dragons,”and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the“Gods”and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the“Mighty Serpent,”the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the“Magi of the Gauls and Britons.”But they were more than that. The author ofIndian Antiquitiesfinds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;1763others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of“worlds,”as also in that of seven“creations”(of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In theBook of Godwe read:The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any EnglishBibleand read chapter iii of the SecondEpistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of“Peter.”What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In theAvestathe Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. TheAvestaspeaks of the three thirds of the Earth because theRig Vedamentions:[pg 801]Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. TheAvestahas not borrowed the idea from theRig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The“three strata or layers”do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it istripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of theAvesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three“zones,”if this word is read“planes.”As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the“septempartite earth.”1767For:According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768The“Ocean”isSpace, of course, for the latter was called“Waters of Space”before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of theYasna).1769But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the“incongruities”of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such“incongruities”and“coïncidences”concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in thePurânas, namely:The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,“the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,”and“the other names”do not mean“the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,”but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in theBook of Dzyan(11) thus:Illustration: The Chain of EarthThe Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The“Earth”(our world)istripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given inVendidâd(xix. 39), showing that:Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting[pg 803]the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.1773These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it.It was the last to produceanimals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.[pg 804]
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.[pg 796]And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.1759That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the“tombs”is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.Cremation was universaltill a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,1760and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,1761or rather the ashes of generations of giants.Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,”both good and bad.It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejectingà priorithe actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after allisAncient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that[pg 797]makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively andde factoside by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities“Los Campos de los Gigantes,”the“Fields of Giants,”are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches.“All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,”and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.[pg 798]If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In theJournal of the Anthropological Institute1762such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of theBiblecan never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by“giants,”and further adding that they were“hairy”men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these“satyrs”—some alive, others“pickled”and“preserved.”The word“giants”being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians[pg 799]were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the“Great Dragons,”and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the“Gods”and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the“Mighty Serpent,”the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the“Magi of the Gauls and Britons.”But they were more than that. The author ofIndian Antiquitiesfinds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;1763others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of“worlds,”as also in that of seven“creations”(of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In theBook of Godwe read:The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any EnglishBibleand read chapter iii of the SecondEpistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of“Peter.”What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In theAvestathe Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. TheAvestaspeaks of the three thirds of the Earth because theRig Vedamentions:[pg 801]Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. TheAvestahas not borrowed the idea from theRig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The“three strata or layers”do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it istripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of theAvesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three“zones,”if this word is read“planes.”As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the“septempartite earth.”1767For:According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768The“Ocean”isSpace, of course, for the latter was called“Waters of Space”before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of theYasna).1769But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the“incongruities”of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such“incongruities”and“coïncidences”concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in thePurânas, namely:The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,“the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,”and“the other names”do not mean“the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,”but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in theBook of Dzyan(11) thus:Illustration: The Chain of EarthThe Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The“Earth”(our world)istripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given inVendidâd(xix. 39), showing that:Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting[pg 803]the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.1773These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it.It was the last to produceanimals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.[pg 804]
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.
The tombs alone are gigantic, and not the bones they contain.
And Archæology has but to bow and submit to the decision.1759
That no gigantic skeletons have been hitherto found in the“tombs”is no reason for saying that the remains of giants were never in them.Cremation was universaltill a comparatively recent period—some 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. The real giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, classical writers, as we have shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons being excavated in their day. Moreover, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet. No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50,000 or 60,000 years,1760and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, from the time of the third sub-race of the Âryan stock, which sub-race—born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions—had become European. Since then, as we have said, it has been steadily decreasing. It is truer, therefore, to say that the tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have contained giants,1761or rather the ashes of generations of giants.
Nor were all such cyclopean structures intended for sepulchres. It is with the so-called Druidical remains, such as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in Great Britain, that the travelling Initiates above alluded to had to do. And these gigantic monuments are all symbolic records of the World's history. They are not Druidical, but universal. Nor did the Druids build them, for they were only the heirs of the cyclopean lore left to them by generations of mighty builders and—“magicians,”both good and bad.
It will always be a subject of regret that History, rejectingà priorithe actual existence of giants, has preserved to us so little of the records of antiquity concerning them. Yet in nearly every Mythology—which after allisAncient History—the giants play an important part. In the old Norse Mythology, the giants, Skrymir and his brethren, against whom the sons of the Gods fought, were potent factors in the histories of deities and men. The modern exegesis, that[pg 797]makes these giants the brethren of the dwarfs, and reduces the combats of the Gods to the history of the development of the Âryan Race, will only receive credence amongst the believers in the Âryan theory as expounded by Max Müller. Granting that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark, round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced Scandinavians, or Æsir, the Gods being like unto men, there still exists neither in history nor in any other scientific work any anthropological proof whatever of the existence in Time or Space of a race of giants. Yet that such exist, relatively andde factoside by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next neighbours, several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans, are giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans, for their women are all above six and a half feet high.
In Cornwall and in ancient Britain the traditions of these giants are, on the other hand, excessively common; they are said to have lived even down to the time of King Arthur. All this shows that giants lived to a later date amongst the Celtic than among the Teutonic peoples.
If we turn to the New World, we have traditions of a race of giants of Tarija on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in Ecuador, who combated Gods and men. These old beliefs, which term certain localities“Los Campos de los Gigantes,”the“Fields of Giants,”are always concomitant with the existence of Pliocene mammalia and the occurrence of Pliocene raised beaches.“All the giants are not under Mount Ossa,”and it would be poor Anthropology indeed that would restrict the traditions of giants to Greek and Bible mythologies. Slavonian countries, Russia especially, teem with legends about the Bogaterey (mighty giants) of old; and Slavonian folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national histories, the oldest songs, and the most archaic traditions, speaks of the giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men, whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races, appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the strongest men of modern times.
Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.
Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,Such men as live in these degenerate days.
Not twice ten men the mighty bulk could raise,
Such men as live in these degenerate days.
If the fossil footprints at Carson, Nevada, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men, and of their genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modern and scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of Geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that he saw giants fifty-six feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.
That which is known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left distinct traces. In theJournal of the Anthropological Institute1762such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed Neolithic flints in the Jordan valley, and preserved an ancient Semitic language quite distinct from the square Hebrew character, were of very large stature. The English translations of theBiblecan never be relied upon, even in their modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim, translating the word by“giants,”and further adding that they were“hairy”men, probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently described by patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these“satyrs”—some alive, others“pickled”and“preserved.”The word“giants”being once adopted as a synonym of Nephilim, the commentators have since identified them with the sons of Anak. The filibusters who seized on the Promised Land found a preëxisting population far exceeding their own in stature, and called it a race of giants. But the races of really gigantic men had disappeared ages before the birth of Moses. These tall people existed in Canaan, and even in Bashan, and may have had representatives in the Nabatheans of Midian. They were of far greater stature than the undersized Jews. Four thousand years ago their cranial conformation and large stature separated them from the children of Heber. Forty thousand years ago their ancestors may have been of still more gigantic size, and four hundred thousand years earlier they must have been in proportion to men in our days as the Brobdingnagians[pg 799]were to the Lilliputians. The Atlanteans of the middle period were called the“Great Dragons,”and the first symbol of their tribal deities, when the“Gods”and the Divine Dynasties had forsaken them, was that of a giant serpent.
The mystery veiling the origin and the religion of the Druids is as great as that of their supposed fanes to the modern Symbologist, but not to the initiated Occultists. Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were Eastern priests, akin to the Chaldæans and Indians, though little more. It may be inferred that they symbolized their deity as the Hindûs do their Vishnu, as the Egyptians did their Mystery God, and as the builders of the Ohio great Serpent Mound worshipped theirs—namely under the form of the“Mighty Serpent,”the emblem of the eternal deity Time—the Hindû Kâla. Pliny called them the“Magi of the Gauls and Britons.”But they were more than that. The author ofIndian Antiquitiesfinds much affinity between the Druids and the Brâhmans of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close analogy between them and the Magi of Persia;1763others will see an identity between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace—simply because they were connected, in their Esoteric Teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.
Like the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans—we speak of the Initiates—the Chaldees and the Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of“worlds,”as also in that of seven“creations”(of new continents) and transformations of the face of the Earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each Earth or Globe. Wherever the serpent with the egg is found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it. This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the Esotericism of various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the Âryan Hindûs and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews and early Christians, whose modern stocks hardly comprehend now what they read in their Scriptures. In theBook of Godwe read:
The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.
The world, says Seneca, being melted and having reëntered into the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas.[pg 800]Afterwards we see a new world spring from him, perfect in all its parts. Animals are produced anew. An innocent race of men is formed.
And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he teaches us that:
When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764
When the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa, and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis.The affrighted Sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return into their original chaos.1764
One might imagine oneself reading the Paurânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any EnglishBibleand read chapter iii of the SecondEpistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas:
There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765
There shall come in the last days scoffers ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire ... the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth.1765
If the interpreters choose to see in this a reference to the creation, the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they shall live in a New Jerusalem in Heaven, this is no fault of“Peter.”What the writer of the Epistle meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of the Epistles were all learned in symbology if not in science.
It has been mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our Chain was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathushtra. It is time to prove it to those Parsîs who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In theAvestathe Earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies. TheAvestaspeaks of the three thirds of the Earth because theRig Vedamentions:
Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766
Three earths.... Three strata or layers, one lying above the other, are said to be meant by this.1766
But he is quite mistaken, as are all exoteric profane translators. TheAvestahas not borrowed the idea from theRig Veda, but simply repeats the Esoteric Teaching. The“three strata or layers”do not refer to our Globe alone, but to three layers of the Globes of our Terrestrial Chain—two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six Spheres or Globes above our Earth, the seventh and the fourth, the Earth isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane—it istripartite. This meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text of theAvesta, and even by the speculations—most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work—of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the Earth, or rather the Earth's Chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three“zones,”if this word is read“planes.”As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old—the oldest of all—since the Gâthas already speak of the“septempartite earth.”1767For:
According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768
According to the statements of the later Parsî Scriptures, theseven Kêrshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts of the earth[which they surely are. For] between themthere flows the ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to pass from one Kêrshvar to another.1768
The“Ocean”isSpace, of course, for the latter was called“Waters of Space”before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered as Dvîpa, and Hvaniratha is rendered by Jambudvîpa (Neryosangh, the translator of theYasna).1769But this fact is not taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian and Parsî by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work, passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on the“incongruities”of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures. One of such“incongruities”and“coïncidences”concerns the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven Dvîpas—islands, or continents, rather—as met with in thePurânas, namely:
The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770
The Dvîpas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambudvîpa, which is situated in the centre, [and] according to the Iranian view,[pg 802]the Kêrshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest, they form no concentric circles, but each of them [the six other Karshvars] is a peculiar individual space, and so they group themselves round [above] Qaniratha.1770
Now Qaniratha—better Hvaniratha—is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,“the country inhabited by the Irânian tribes,”and“the other names”do not mean“the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East,”but signify our Globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that:
Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West
Two, Vorubarshti and Voruzarshti, lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West
—is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the Chain of our Planet, the Earth, represented in theBook of Dzyan(11) thus:
Illustration: The Chain of Earth
The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those used in the Secret Doctrine to present us with the Esoteric tenet. The“Earth”(our world)istripartite, because the Chain of the Worlds is situated on three different planes above our Globe; and it is septempartite because of the seven Globes or Spheres which compose the Chain. Hence the further meaning given inVendidâd(xix. 39), showing that:
Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.
Qaniratha alone is combined withimat,“this”(earth), while all other Karshvares are combined with the word“avat,”“that”orthose—upper earths.
Nothing could be plainer. The same may be said of the modern comprehension of all other ancient beliefs.
The Druids, then, understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, when, all other fires being extinguished on the first of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians. And like the early Fifth Race and later Chaldees, like the Greeks, and again like the Christians—who do the same to this day, without suspecting[pg 803]the real meaning—they greeted the Morning Star, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer.1771Strabo speaks of an island near to Britannia:
Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—
Where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace and this island was Sacred Ierna1772—
where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not as Lucian explains:
That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—
That the same spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world—
but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men, after determinate periods, would pass into other bodies.1773
These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end. Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as well as of their giant size. We find the repetition of those records in every age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from antiquity.
Ælian preserved an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it.It was the last to produceanimals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived till they were twice as old. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such cities held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being found there in great abundance.
Grote's suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage—clouds on a dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea—is too disingenuous to be further noticed.