Page 61 (part 2)

" But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former -- Eden Illa-ah -- means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good and evil: man being the Knower thereof. Renan and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves "on the most solid inductions," think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity "on the region of the Timaus." Finally, the Asiatic Journal* concludes that: "All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced." That "primitive humanity" was in its Fifth Race, when the "four-mouthed Dragon," the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the "Sons of Wisdom," the first mind-born sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the " bower of voluptuousness" of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man occurred after the "separation." The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldean copy. That the Fall of man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve's incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only a Jewish but an universal idea. [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * " Journal Asiatique, " seventh year, 1855. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 205 FLYING CAMELS. Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel [[ kamelomorphon]]. A "flying camel" is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S . Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description:* for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS . Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall "its nature and its name, " and is described as a huge serpent with a camel's neck. "There are no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons," asserts Salverte,** " . . . grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents." There are none now ; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to "flying camels." Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, "if anything can justify the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus. "*** We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, "the Pterodactyl" (found in Germany), "78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body." That fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the "flying camel" of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability to build a "flying camel," or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia. And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed palaeontography and paleontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * See Moses Maimonides, " More Nevochim. " ** " Science Occulte, " p. 646. *** " Revolution du Globe, " vol. v., p. 464. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 206 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. and monuments, and in the Imperial library at Pekin, many a traveller has seen and recognised perfect representations of Plesiosauri and Pterodactyls in the multiform Chinese dragons.* Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents,** and Job mentions the Leviathan.*** Now the following questions are put very directly: -- I. How could the ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of the carboniferous and Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them orally and pictorially, unless they had either seen those monsters themselves or possessed descriptions of them in their traditions, which descriptions necessitate living and intelligent eye-witnesses? II. And if such eye-witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palaeolithic men be no earlier than about the middle of the tertiary period?