Page 69 (part 6)

Yet, it is a mistake to call these "sacred islands" Atlantean -- as done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Swayambhuva Manu, to his seven sons -- was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose continent had been submerged in its turn. When originally mentioned by Parasara ( Vishnu Purana ) the seven refer to an esoteric doctrine which is explained further on. Of all the seven islands, Jambu-dwipa is the only one that is terrestrial, for it is our globe. In the Puranas every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region; which, when the magnolia blossomed there where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a continent again. Science speaks of an ancient continent which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse-shoe-like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi-circle. This continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains re-appeared again on the face of the Oceans. Therefore, though it can be said without departing from truth that Atlantis is included in the Seven great insular continents, since the Fourth Race Atlanteans got some of the Lemurian relics, and, settling on the islands, included them among their lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on that remnant of Lemuria only to perish thereon, when destroyed in one day by its volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain geographers and geologists; to the Occul- [[Vol. 2, Page]] 327 ON FOOT ACROSS THE OCEANS. tists it is history. What does Science know to the contrary? "Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India . . . . . Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, were connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre-historic ages . . . . was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the 'Brahmans of Upper India' stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached -- hardly wetting his feet -- the Alaskan peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America." ( But see " Five years of Theosophy, " art. " Leaflets from Esoteric History, " pp. 338 and 340.) This was written from the words of a M ASTER -- a rather doubtful authority for the materialists and the sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather -- Ernest Haeckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost verbatim: . . . . "It would seem that the region on the earth's surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the CLOSELY RELATED CATARRHINE APES (! !) took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished -- H.P.B.] or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, which, lying to the South of the Asia of to-day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa." ( See supra and compare " The Pedigree of Man, " p. 80-81.) In the epoch we are treating of, the Continent of "Lemuria," had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. There was, nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe in those days, all these slumbering yet on the Ocean floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the cis-Himalayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond this stretched the "lotus leaves" of Sveta-dwipa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc., etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Isle, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilisation of the Third [[Vol. 2, Page]] 328 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Race. Submerged with the rest, a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the Ocean floor, raised the small relic of the Archaic ages untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of northern polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race. In this we are again corroborated to a degree by materialistic Science. Haeckel, when speaking of Blumenbach's brown or Malay race and the Australians and Papuans, remarks: -- "There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island-world, that seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent. " (" Pedigree of Man, " p. 82. But see footnote supra and the Addenda. ) It certainly was, since it stretched, during the Third Race, east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie, and since the present Australia is but a portion of it, as are also a few surviving islands sown hither and thither on the face of the Pacific and a large bit of California, which belonged to it.