Tag: The Sanctuarium

THE REALITY OF LEMURIA AND ATLANTIS

Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists — the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary. With regard, however, to the former, it is found that:

(1) The Miocene flora of Europe have their most numerous and striking analogues in the flora of the United States. In the forests of Virginia and Florida are found the magnolias, tulip-trees, evergreen oaks, plane trees, etc., etc., etc., which correspond with European Tertiary flora term for term. How was the migration effected, if we exclude the theory of an Atlantic Continent bridging the ocean between America and Europe? The proposed “explanation” to the effect that the transition was by way of Asia and the Aleutian islands is a mere uncalled-for theory, obviously upset by the fact that a large number of these flora only appear EAST of the Rocky Mountains. This also negatives the idea of a trans-Pacific migration. They are now superseded by European continents and islands to the North.

(2) Skulls exhumed on the banks of the Danube and Rhine bear a striking similarity to those of the Caribs and Old Peruvians (Littre). Monuments have been exhumed in Central America, which bear representations of undoubted negro heads and faces. How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What is now N. W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands, few of which now remain.

(3) According to Farrar (“Families of Speech“) the”isolated language” of the Basques has no affinities with the other languages ¹ of Europe, but with “the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent (America) and those alone.” Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.

Palæolithic European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a pure Atlantean, as we have previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a much later date than this, but their affinities, as here shown, go far to prove the original extraction of their remote ancestors. The “mysterious” affinity between their tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India will be understood by those who have followed our outline of continental formations and shiftings.

(4) Stones have been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured symbols similar to those found on the shore of Lake Superior. Berthollet was induced by such evidence to postulate the unity of race of the early men of Canary Islands and America (Cf. Benjamin, the “Atlantic Islands,” p. 130.)

The Guanches of the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the Atlanteans. This fact will account for the great stature evidenced by their old skeletons, as well as by those of their European congeners, the Cro-Magnon Palæolithic men.

(5) Any experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along the Canary Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of volcanic and rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every side by that vast watery space. Such frequent questions led finally to the expedition of the famous Leopold von Buch, which took place in the first quarter of the present century. Some geologists maintained that the volcanic islands had been raised right from the bottom of the ocean, the depth of which in the immediate vicinity of the island varies from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these groups, including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verdes — the remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united Africa with America. The latter men of science supported their hypothesis by a mass of evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient “myths.” Hoary “superstitions,” such as the fairy-like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden of Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them mythoi connected with the peak of Teneriffe, did not go far with sceptical Science. The identity of animal and vegetable species — showing either a previous connection between America and the remaining groups of the islands — (the hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the Old World by the waves was too absurd to stand long) — found more serious consideration. But it is only quite lately, and after Donnelly’s book had been published several years, that the theory has greater chances than ever of becoming an accepted fact. Fossils found on the Eastern Coast of South America have now been proved to belong to the Jurassic formations, and are nearly identical with the Jurassic fossils of Western Europe and Northern Africa. The geological structure of both coasts is also almost identical;the resemblance between the smaller marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of South America, the Western African, and the South European coasts, is also very great. All such facts are bound to bring naturalists to the conclusion that there has been, in distant pre-historic ages, a continent which extended from the coast of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands and North Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.

(6) The great resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South America, North Africa, and Western Europe is a striking enough fact in itself, and admits of no explanation, unless the ocean is bridged with an Atlantis. But why, also, is there so marked a similarity between the fauna (animal life) of the — now — isolated Atlantic islands? Why did the specimens of Brazilian fauna dredged up by Sir C. Wyville Thompson resemble those of Western Europe? Why does a resemblance exist between many of the West African and West Indian animal groups? Again:

“When the animals and plants of the Old and New World are compared, one cannot but be struck with their identity;all, nearly all belong to the same genera, while many, even of the species, are common to both continents . . . indicating that they radiated from a common centre” (Atlantis), (“Westminster Review,” Jan., 1872).

The horse, according to Science, originated in America. At least, a large proportion of the once “missing links” connecting it with inferior forms have been exhumed from American strata. How did the horse penetrate into Europe and Asia, if no land communication bridged the oceanic interspaces? Or if it is asserted that the horse originated in the New World, how did such forms as the hipparion, etc., get into America in the first instance on the migration hypothesis?

Again “Buffon had . . . remarked in the repetition of the African in the American fauna, how, for example, the lama is a juvenescent and feeble copy of the camel, and how the puma of the New represented the lion of the Old World” (Schmidt, “Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,“ p. 223).

(7) The following quotation runs with No. (2), but its significance is such and the writer cited so authoritative, that it deserves a place to itself:

“With regard to the primitive dolichocephalæ of America, I entertain a hypothesis still more bold, namely, that they are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks, Copts, which Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian-Atlantidæ. We find one and the same form of skull in the Canary Islands, in front of the African coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The colour of the skin on both sides of the Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a reddish-brown.” (Professor Retzius, “Smithsonian Report,” 1859, p. 266.)

If, then, Basques and Cro-Magnon Cave-Men are of the same race as the Canarese Guanches, it follows that the former are also allied to the aborigines of America. This is the conclusion which the independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de Quatrefages necessitate. The Atlantean affinities of these three types become patent.

(8) The sea-soundings undertaken by H.M.S. “Challenger” and the “Dolphin,” have established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in length, projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the Atlantic, extends from a point near the British Islands southwards, curving round near Cape de Verde, and running in a south-easterly direction along the West African Coast. This elevation averages some 9,000 feet in height, and rises above the waves at the Azores, Ascension, and other places. In the ocean depths around the neighbourhood of the former the ribs of a former massive piece of land have been discovered (vide investigations of United States Ship “Dolphin” and others). “The inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface could never have been produced in accordance with any known laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation;but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water-level.” (Scientific American, July 28th, 1877). It is most probable that necks of land formerly existed knitting Atlantis to South America, somewhere above the mouth of the Amazon; to Africa near Cape de Verde, while a similar point of juncture with Spain is not unlikely, as contended for by Donnelly. (Vide his chart, “Atlantis,” p. 47, Eng. Ed., 1884, though he deals with only a fragment of the real continent.) Whether the latter existed or not, is of no consequence, as the fact that (what is now) N. W. Africa was — before the elevation of the Sahara and the rupture of the Gibraltar connection — an extension of Spain. Consequently no difficulty can be raised as to how the migration of the European fauna (etc.) took place.

Enough has now been said from the purely scientific standpoint, and it is needless, in view of the manner in which the subject has now been developed on the lines of esoteric knowledge, to swell the mass of testimony further. In conclusion, the words of one of the most intuitive writers of the day may be cited as admirably illustrative of the opinions of the occultist, who awaits in patience the dawn of the coming day:

“We are but beginning to understand the past; one hundred years ago the world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the lingual tie that binds together the Indo-European nations; nothing of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow-headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of to-day.” ²

And now to conclude.

¹ For further facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and their ethnological relations, cf. Joly, “Man before Metals,“p. 316. B. Davis is disposed to concede, from an examination of the skulls of the Guanches of the Canary Islands and modern Basques, that both belong to a race proper to those ancient islands, of which the Canaries are the remains!! This is a step in advance indeed. De Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro-Magnon men of South France and the Guanches to one type — a proposition which involves a certain corollary which both these writers may not care to father.
² Donnelly, “Atlantis; the Ante-Diluvian World,” p. 480.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 789–794
H. P. Blavatsky

THE CYCLES OF TIME

   When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine — Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of birds, the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels — then the bright god assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of Seership, when he sends the astral double of Æneas to the battle field (II. 431-53), and has the gift of appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present — (Iliad, xvii., 322-36) — a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans, was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the north-wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe (the Atlantean race) — the mother of seven sons and seven daughters personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches (see Apollodorus for this number) — allegorizes the history of the two continents. The wrath of “the sons of god,” or of “Will and Yoga,” at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great (See “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island“); and the destruction of the “children of Niobe” by the children of Latona — Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the earth’s axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms — is thus very clear.¹ The fable about the never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain — Atlantis covered with water — is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades (or Atlantides) the grand-daughter of Atlas therefore, (See “Metamorphoses of Ovid,” Book VI.), because she represents the last generations of the doomed continent.

A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous influence on antiquity. “If these names,” he adds, “are mere allegories, then all that those fables contain of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real tradition — however altered — then the whole of the ancient history is still in it.” (Lettres sur l‘Atlantide, p. 137.)

So much so, that all ancient writings — prose and poetry — are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical races, though the Third and the Fourth in number. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet (Hesiod, in oper. and dieb. v. 143). Such were the giants of the first physical races. The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans inYasna ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the “Sons of God,” or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge, to rid the earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zoroaster as one of the “Sons of God.”  It says: “Thou, O Zarathustra, didst make all demons (i.e., Sorcerers), who before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth” (i.e., helped them to get submerged).

The Lemurians, as also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes — the “Sons of Night” or Darkness, and the “Sons of the Sun,” or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, from whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and “tried to wrench the lord of light” from their better favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months’ duration in the Polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the north where the year was divided into a day and night of six months’ duration each, for Pliny says so in his Fourth Book, c. 12. They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mæotis(between 45° and 50° latitude). Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians, which nation stopped near Tanais, having crossed Asia.“These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year” (in Mario). As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor (c. 16), “sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves.”

Even the writers of the Zohar knew of the fact (as shown in iii., fol. 10a), as it is written: “In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . . . there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants.” (Isaac Myer’s “Qabbalah,” p. 139).

The island of Delos, the Asteria of the Greek mythology, was never in Greece, a country which, in its day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern seas. One calls itBasilea or “royal” (Vol. II., p. 225 of Diod.); the other, Pliny, names it Osericta (Book xxxvii, c.2), a word, according to Rudbeck (Vol. I., p. 462-464), having had “a significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the divine Kings or god-Kings,” or again the “royal island of the gods,” because the gods were born there, i.e., the divine dynasties of the kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let geographers and geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiold on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions. ² The secret books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a paradise before they became hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks and the cold realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the goddess-Queen of the country of the dead, “holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet, it was the birth-place of Apollo, who was the brightest of gods, in heaven — astronomically — as he was the most enlightened of the divine kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad IV., 239-62, Vide “The Greater gods” — wherein Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the god of the four races) and six times in human form, i.e., as connected with the divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries (which have now become uninhabitable), as well as the name given to man both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church fathers for inventing a hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality. ³

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths — known to and communicating with the Greeks — who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name it is averred came from pelagus, the great sea. Noah’s Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men — or rather of nations — which were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Hindu Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun — the “beloved of the gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe — or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the gods did the same in the north, are all identical as a personage. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the continent and the island of Atlantis.

¹ So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii.) as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child “cries, travailing in birth, pained to be delivered.” A great red Dragon, etc., stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God (the Sun). The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who keep the commandment of God, etc. (See xii., 1, 17.) Anyone, who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognise the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for “the man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” of Revelation, is surely not the meek “Son of God,” Jesus, but the physical Sun, “who rules all nations”; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona “to bring forth” — (the Sun to appear). “She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth,” until Neptune (the ocean), moved with pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos (the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the ocean) on which Latona finds refuge and where the bright god Dhvlio”  is born, the god, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns — with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the chapter just cited of the Apocalypse. Latona became a powerful goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his occult aspect Apollo is patron of Number 7. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times around Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre — the seven rays of the sun and the seven forces of nature. But this only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.
² These islands were “found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bTHE CYCLES OF TIME
When the astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine — Apollo and Athene transforming themselves into the form of birds, the symbol and glyph of the higher divinities and angels — then the bright god assumes divine creative powers. Apollo becomes the personification of Seership, when he sends the astral double of Æneas to the battle field (II. 431-53), and has the gift of appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present — (Iliad, xvii., 322-36) — a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.

The King of the Hyperboreans, was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the north-wind, and the High Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe (the Atlantean race) — the mother of seven sons and seven daughters personifying the seven sub-races of the Fourth Race and their seven branches (see Apollodorus for this number) — allegorizes the history of the two continents. The wrath of “the sons of god,” or of “Will and Yoga,” at seeing the steady degradation of the Atlanteans was great (See “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island”); and the destruction of the “children of Niobe” by the children of Latona — Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the earth’s axis, deluges and other cosmic cataclysms — is thus very clear.1 The fable about the never-ceasing tears of Niobe, whose grief causes Zeus to change her into a fountain — Atlantis covered with water — is no less graphic as a symbol. Niobe, let it be remembered, is the daughter of one of the Pleiades (or Atlantides) the grand-daughter of Atlas therefore, (See “Metamorphoses of Ovid,” Book VI.), because she represents the last generations of the doomed continent.

A true remark, that of Bailly, which says that Atlantis had an enormous influence on antiquity. “If these names,” he adds, “are mere allegories, then all that those fables contain of truth comes from Atlantis; if the fable is a real tradition — however altered — then the whole of the ancient history is still in it.” (Lettres sur l’Atlantide, p. 137.)

So much so, that all ancient writings — prose and poetry — are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical races, though the Third and the Fourth in number. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ash-wood and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet (Hesiod, in oper. and dieb. v. 143). Such were the giants of the first physical races. The Iranians have a reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the “Sons of God,” or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage of the Deluge, to rid the earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The said verse addresses Zoroaster as one of the “Sons of God.” It says: “Thou, O Zarathustra, didst make all demons (i.e., Sorcerers), who before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth” (i.e., helped them to get submerged).

The Lemurians, as also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes — the “Sons of Night” or Darkness, and the “Sons of the Sun,” or Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the former, leaving their land of Darkness, from whence the Sun departed for long months, descended from their inhospitable regions and “tried to wrench the lord of light” from their better favoured brothers of the equatorial regions. We may be told that the ancients knew nothing of the long night of six months’ duration in the Polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned than the rest, only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the north where the year was divided into a day and night of six months’ duration each, for Pliny says so in his Fourth Book, c. 12. They speak of the Cimmerians and of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former inhabited the Palus Mæotis (between 45° and 50° latitude). Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great nation driven away by the Scythians, which nation stopped near Tanais, having crossed Asia. “These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year” (in Mario). As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor (c. 16), “sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the evening, and store them during the night in their caves.”

Even the writers of the Zohar knew of the fact (as shown in iii., fol. 10a), as it is written: “In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . . . there are some countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness; these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some instants.” (Isaac Myer’s “Qabbalah,” p. 139).

The island of Delos, the Asteria of the Greek mythology, was never in Greece, a country which, in its day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form. Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus Siculus place it in the Northern seas. One calls it Basilea or “royal” (Vol. II., p. 225 of Diod.); the other, Pliny, names it Osericta (Book xxxvii, c. 2), a word, according to Rudbeck (Vol. I., p. 462-464), having had “a significance in the northern languages, equivalent to the Island of the divine Kings or god-Kings,” or again the “royal island of the gods,” because the gods were born there, i.e., the divine dynasties of the kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let geographers and geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by Nordenskiold on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions. 2 The secret books inform us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once since the first men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a paradise before they became hell; the dark Hades of the Greeks and the cold realm of Shades where the Scandinavian Hel, the goddess-Queen of the country of the dead, “holds sway deep down in Helheim and Niflheim.” Yet, it was the birth-place of Apollo, who was the brightest of gods, in heaven — astronomically — as he was the most enlightened of the divine kings who ruled over the early nations, in his human meaning. The latter fact is borne out in the Iliad IV., 239-62, Vide “The Greater gods” — wherein Apollo is said to have appeared four times in his own form (as the god of the four races) and six times in human form, i.e., as connected with the divine Dynasties of the earlier unseparated Lemurians.

It is those early mysterious peoples, their countries (which have now become uninhabitable), as well as the name given to man both dead and alive, which have furnished an opportunity to the ignorant Church fathers for inventing a hell, which they have transformed into a burning instead of a freezing locality. 3

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths — known to and communicating with the Greeks — who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name it is averred came from pelagus, the great sea. Noah’s Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men — or rather of nations — which were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Hindu Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun — the “beloved of the gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe — or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the gods did the same in the north, are all identical as a personage. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the continent and the island of Atlantis.

1 So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii.) as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child “cries, travailing in birth, pained to be delivered.” A great red Dragon, etc., stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God (the Sun). The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who keep the commandment of God, etc. (See xii., 1, 17.) Anyone, who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognise the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for “the man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” of Revelation, is surely not the meek “Son of God,” Jesus, but the physical Sun, “who rules all nations”; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona “to bring forth” — (the Sun to appear). “She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth,” until Neptune (the ocean), moved with pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos (the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the ocean) on which Latona finds refuge and where the bright god Dhvlio” is born, the god, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns — with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the chapter just cited of the Apocalypse. Latona became a powerful goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his occult aspect Apollo is patron of Number 7. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times around Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre — the seven rays of the sun and the seven forces of nature. But this only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.

2 These islands were “found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses,” etc. If there was no man on earth at that period “how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?” asks a master in a letter. (“Esoteric Buddhism,” 67). The reply is given above in the text.

 
3 A good proof that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north, which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were “of one lip,” these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, (Voyage de Renard en Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death — all proceed from the same root or word.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 771-774
H. P. Blavatskyones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses,” etc. If there was no man on earth at that period “how came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?” asks a master in a letter. (“Esoteric Buddhism,” 67). The reply is given above in the text.

³ A good proof that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north, which was also the cradle ofphysical man, lies in several suggestive words which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were “of one lip,” these words have received a different meaning with the Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, (Voyage de Renard en Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu, the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete, judge of the infernal regions after his death — all proceed from the same root or word.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 771-774
H. P. Blavatsky