Page 82 (part 2)

It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been unriddled, and the modern mythologists and Orientalists see in it no longer what their fathers saw on the authority of the whole of classical antiquity. They only find therein something far more appropriate to the spirit of the age, namely, a phallic element. But the name of Phoroneus, as well as that of Prometheus, bears not one, nor even two, but a series of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the seven celestial fires; to Agni Abhimanin, his three sons, and their forty-five sons, constituting the forty-nine fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the terrestrial mode of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindu Aryan mind never soar above such purely sensual conceptions? that mind which is declared by Prof. Max Muller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined on the whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an inkling of the truth. We are told that one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational thought, to explain the name of Prometheus as the old Greeks did. The latter, it seems, "basing themselves on the false analogy of [[ prometheus ]] with the verb [[ Promanthanein ]] , saw in him the type of the 'foreseeing' man, to whom, for the sake of symmetry, a brother was added -- Epimetheus, or 'he who takes counsel after the event.' " But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the real meaning of the two names better than those who invented them. The legend is based upon an event of universal importance. It was built "to commemorate a great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the imagination of the first witnesses to it, and its remembrance has never since faded out from popular memory." What is it? Laying aside every poetical fiction, all those dreams of the golden age, let us imagine -- argue the modern scholars -- in all its gross realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking picture of which was traced for us after AEschylus by Lucretius, and the exact truth of which is now confirmed by science; and then one may understand better that a new life really began for man, on that day when he saw the first spark produced by the friction of two pieces of wood, or from the veins of a flint. How could man help feeling gratitude to that mysterious and marvellous being which they were henceforth enabled to create at their will, and which was no sooner born, than it grew and expanded, developing with singular power. "This terrestrial flame, [[Vol. 2, Page]] 522 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. was it not analogous in nature to that one which they received from above, or that other which frightened them in the thunderbolt?" "Was it not derived from the same source? And if its origin was in heaven, it must have been brought down some day on earth. If so, who was the powerful being, the beneficent being, god or man, who had conquered it? Such are the questions which the curiosity of the Aryans offered in the early days of their existence, and which found their answer in the myth of Prometheus"; ( Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 258). The philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above reflections, and points them out. The miserable state of Humanity described by AEschylus and Prometheus was no more wretched then, in the early days of the Aryans, than it is now. That "state" was limited to the savage tribes; and the now-existing savages are not a whit more happy or unhappy than their forefathers were a million years ago. It is an accepted fact in Science that "rude implements, exactly resembling those in use among existing savages," are found in river-gravels and caves geologically "implying an enormous antiquity." So great is that resemblance that, as the author of "The Modern Zoroastrian" tells us: "If the collection in the Colonial Exhibition of stone celts and arrow-heads used now by the Bushmen of South Africa were placed side by side with one from the British Museum of similar objects from Kent's Cavern or the Caves of Dordogne, no one but an expert could distinguish between them" ( p . 145). And if there are Bushmen existing now, in our age of the highest civilization, who are no higher intellectually than the race of men which inhabited Devonshire and Southern France during the Palaeolithic age, why could not the latter have lived simultaneously with, and have been the contemporary of, other races as highly civilized for their day as we are for ours? That the sum of knowledge increases daily in mankind, "but that intellectual capacity does not increase with it," is shown when the intellect, if not the physical knowledge, of the Euclids, Pythagorases, Paninis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys and Haeckels. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Craniologist, worked out in 1868 ( Trans. of the Royal Society of London ) , with regard to the internal capacity of the skull -- its volume being taken as the standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities -- Dr. Pfaff finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest rank of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus "perceptibly smaller than that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches"; which shows that it is the quality and not the quantity of the brain that is the cause of intellectual capacity. The [[Vol. 2, Page]] 523 THE BOON GIVEN BY PROMETHEUS. average index of skulls among various races having been now recognized to be "one of the most characteristic marks of difference between different races," the following comparison is suggestive: "The index of breadth among the Scandinavians (is) at 75: among the English at 76; among Holsteiners at 77; in Bresgau at 80; Schiller's skull shows an index of breadth even of 82 . . . the Madurese also 82!" Finally, the same comparison between the oldest skulls known and the European, brings to light the startling fact "that most of these old skulls, belonging to the stone period, are above rather than below the average of the brain of the now living man in volume." Calculating the measures for the height, breadth, and length in inches from the average measurements of several skulls, the following sums are obtained: -- 1. Old Northern skulls of the stone age . . . . 18.877 ins. 2. Average of 48 skulls of the same period from England . . . . 18.858 " 3. Average of 7 skulls of the same period from Wales . . . . 18.649 " 4. Average of 36 skulls of the stone age from France . . . .