Hālau 'Aha Hui Lānākila

PROOFS OF THE
EXISTENCE OF SUBMERGED CONTINENTS

   IT may not be amiss — for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of a lost Miocene Atlantis into an “antiquated myth,” to append a few scientific admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely indifferent to such questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit that, in any case, a cautious agnosticism as to geological problems concerning the remote past is far more philosophical than a priori denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient data.

Meanwhile two very interesting instances, that have been lately met with, may be pointed out as “confirming” certain passages in the letter of a Master, published in “Esoteric Buddhism.” The eminence of the authorities will not be questioned:

Extract from p. 61 of “Esoteric Buddhism.”

No. 1

“The sinking of the Atlantis (the group of continents and islands) began during the Eocene period . . . and it culminated in the Miocene, first in the final disappearance of the largest, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps, and second in the sinking of the last of the fair islands mentioned by Plato.”

No. 2

“Lemuria cannot any more be confounded with the Atlantis continent than Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned with all their ‘gods’; yet, between the two catastrophes a short period of about some 700,000 years elapsed; Lemuria flourishing and ending her career just about that trifling lapse of time before the early Eocene Age, since its Race was the Third. Behold the relics of that once great race in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your AUSTRALIA.” (“Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 55.)

Extract from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.

No. 1

“Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis — a continent or Archipelago of large islands occupying the area of the North Atlantic? There is, perhaps, nothing unphilosophical in the hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, ‘The Alps have acquired 4,000 and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene epoch‘ (Lyell’s Principles, 2nd Ed. p. 256.) — a post-Miocene depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths.” ¹

No. 2

“It would be premature to say, because no evidence has yet been adduced, that men may not have existed in the Eocene Age, especially as it can be shown that a race of men, the lowest we know of, co-exists with that remnant of the Eocene flora which still survives on the continent and islands of Australia.” (Extract from an article in “Popular Science Review,” Vol. V. p. 18, by Professor Seemann, Ph.D., F.L.S., P.A.S.). Hæckel, who fully accepts the reality of a former Lemuria, also regards the Australians as direct descendants of the Lemurians. “Persistent forms (of both his Lemurian stems,) are in all probability still surviving . . . Papuans and Hottentots  . . .  Australians . . . one division of the Malays.”

With regard to a former civilization, of which a portion of these degraded Australians are the last surviving offshoot, the opinion of Gerland is strongly suggestive. Commenting upon the religion and mythology of the tribes, he writes, “The statement that the Australian civilization (?) indicates a higher grade, is nowhere more clearly proved than here, where everything resounds like the expiring voices of a previous and richer age. The idea that the Australians have no religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated.“(Cited in Schmidt’s “Doctrine of Descent of Darwinism,” pp. 301-2.) As to his other statement, namely, that the Australians are a “division of the Malays” (Vide his ethnological theories in the “Pedigree of Man“), Hæckel is in error, if he classes the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a mixed stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub-races with the Seventh sub-race of the Third Root-Race. Like the Hottentots, they are of indirectLemuro-Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact — to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma — that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the globe, among those races, whose “time is up” — among just those stocks, be it remarked, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. “Nothing,” says even the materialist Lefevre, “can savethose that have run their course. . . . It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle. . . . The peoples that have been most spared . . . Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion.” (“Philosophy,” p. 508.)

True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the “destined cycle” and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their “appointed hour”? The answer that it is due to a “mental disproportion” between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden “checks to fertility“which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks, “the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three great human types” (before the Sixth Root-Race dawns), the white (Aryan, Fifth Root-Race), the yellow, and the African negro — with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc., etc. — all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root-Race runs through a gamut of seven sub-races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the “why.” The tide-wave of incarnating EGOS has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity. Some extraordinary andunexplained statistics as to Race extinction are given in de Quatrefages’ “Human Species,” p. 428et seq. No solution, except on the occult lines, is able to account for these.

But we have digressed from our direct subject. Let us hear now what Professor Huxley has to say on the subject of former Atlantic and Pacific Continents.

He writes in “Nature,” Nov. 4th, 1880: “There is nothing, so far as I am aware, in the biological or geological evidence at present accessible, to render untenable the hypothesis that an area of the mid–Atlantic or Pacific sea-bed as big as Europe, should have been uplifted as high as Mont Blanc, and have subsided again, any time since the Palæozoic epoch, if there were any grounds for entertaining it.”

That is to say, then, that there is nothing which can militate against positive evidence to the fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postulates of the Esoteric Philosophy. Dr. Seemann assures us in the “Popular Science Review” (Vol. V., p. 18), article “Australia and Europe formerly one Continent,” ² that:

“The facts which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in demonstrating the former existence of large tracts of solid land in parts now occupied by the great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the present flora of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental connection between South-Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis, which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests on a solid historical basis. . . . Europe of the Eocene period received the plants which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river-banks (from Asia generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the East. The west also furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show, at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a late period, was to facilitate communication between the two continents in such a remarkable manner. At that time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just rising (?) above the ocean.”

¹ Having already given several instances of the vagaries of Science, it is delightful to find such agreement in this particular case. Read in connection with the scientific admission (cited elsewhere) of the geologists’ ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods, the following passage is highly instructive: “We are not yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent epoch at which our Northern Hemisphere was covered with glaciers. According to Mr. Wallace, this epoch may have occurred seventy thousand years ago, while others would assign to it an antiquity of at least two hundred thousand years, and there are yet others who urge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion that a million of years is barely enough to have produced the changes which have taken place since that event.” (Fiske, “Cosmic Philosophy,” Vol. II., p. 304). Prof. Lefevre, again, gives us as his estimate 100,000 years. Clearly, then, if modern Science is unable to estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era as the Glacial Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of Race-Periods and Geological Ages.
² Undoubtedly a fact and a confirmation of the esoteric conception of the Lemuria which originally not only embraced great areas in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but projected round South Africa into the North Atlantic. Its Atlantic portion subsequently became the geological basis of the future home of the Fourth Race Atlanteans.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 778–781
H. P. Blavatsky