Page 96 (part 4)

The "mystery" of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul-killing Churchianity and of S UPERSTITION. "The beast that was, and is not, and yet is." "And here is the Mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains (seven continents and seven races) on which the woman sitteth," the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have covered that symbol "with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs" who protested and do protest. "And there are seven Kings (seven races); five are fallen (our fifth race included), and one is (the fifth continues), and the other (the sixth and the seventh races) is not yet come. . . . And when he (the race "King") cometh, he must continue a short space" (v. 10). There are many such Apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find them out for himself. These five Kings were mentioned before. If the Bible combines with archaeology and geology to show that human civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological epochs -- why should not the statements of the Secret Doctrine be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific too, to disbelieve, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the famous Thenay flints* "were carved by the Dryopithecus monkey "; or, with the Occultist, that the anthro- [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * "The flints of Thenay bear unmistakable trace of the work of human hands." ( G. de Mortillet, " Promenades au Musee de St. Germain, " p. 76.) [[Vol. 2, Page]] 749 THE APE LATER THAN MAN. pomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically demonstrated, that "there was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species of mammal identical with species now extant" (Albert Gaudry " Les Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps geologiques " p. 240); and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are,* -- then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch,** is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent naturalists. "Thus, in the savage of quaternary ages who had to fight against the mammoth with stone weapons, we find all those craniological characters generally considered as the sign of great intellectual development" ( de Quatrefages, " The Human Species, p. 312.) Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe the learned Abbe Bourgeois ( Vide infra, footnote**). As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the "Mentone man" (6 ft. 8 in.), others may yet be excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that "in a tomb of the neolithic age . . . . a skeleton of extraordinary size was found in 1807," and that it was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus. And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7 ft. to even 9 ft. and 11 ft. high, this only proves -- on the law of atavism, or the reappearance of ancestral features of character -- that there was a time when 9 ft. and 10 ft. was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-European race. But as the subject was sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what the moderns know now. The great nation mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred, had been destroyed by the Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race of Palaeolithic savages. Nevertheless, already in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and Initiates, no one seems [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Speaking of the reindeer hunters of Perigord, Joly says of them that "they were of great height, athletic, with a strongly built skeleton . . ." etc. (" Man before Metals, " p. 353) . ** "On the shores of the lake of Beauce," says the Abbe Bourgeois, "man lived in the midst of a fauna which completely disappeared ( Aceratherium, Tapir, Mastodon ) . With the fluviatile sands of Orleanais came the anthropomorphous monkey (pliopithecus antiquus); therefore, later than man." ( See Comptes Rendus of the " Prehistoric Congress " of 1867 at Paris. ) [[Vol. 2, Page]] 750 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. to have preserved any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages; they were themselves descended from an alien race, and had settled in Egypt some 400,000 years before,* but their Initiates had preserved all the records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the statues of 341 kings who had reigned over their little Atlanto-Aryan Sub-race ( Vide about the latter " Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 66, Fifth Edition.) If one allows only twenty years as an average figure for the reign of each King, the duration of the Egyptian Empire has to be pushed back, from the day of Herodotus, about 17,000 years. Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern archaeologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years; and generously concede to Thebes with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests -- Initiates -- journeying in a North-Westerly direction, by land, via what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phoenician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still travelling by land, on the North-Western promontory of the New Continent.** What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits?