Page 97 (part 5)

Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a "sage" in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.**** His adventure with the latter -- a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey -- is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Deukalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phoenicia. Now the worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole where the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in latitude 68 [[degrees]] it remains dead only for forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of Lemuria, or on that continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, and which stretched up to the Polar regions. This is well shown by de Gebelin's " Allegories d ' Orient, " p. 246, and by Bailly; though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects. ** The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, were described ( Herod, IV., 33-35; Pausanias, 1 , 31, 2; V., 7, 8; ad X., 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the gods, and of Apollo chiefly. *** The Cyclopes are not the only "one-eyed" representatives in tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye. ( Geographie ancienne, Vol. II, p. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts. ( See supra. ) **** Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of AEaea, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs for their voluptuousness ; and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection ( Odyssey and elsewhere ) . Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas ( Odys. Book XII. ) , and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the ocean: thus identifying it with Atlantis. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 770 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. the Third Race to lose their all-penetrating spiritual eye. That other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclops to avenge the death of his son Asclepios, does not refer to the three races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the "Wisdom-eye." The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the south as much as in the north; the latter, were confined to the north solely. Thus Apollo -- pre-eminently the god of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration -- killed them -- his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal -- and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions. ( Hygin. " Astron. Poetique, " Book ii. c. 15) . Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean god is the Sun personified, which during the course of the sidereal year (25,868 y.) changes the climates on the earth's surface, making of tropical, frigid regions, and vice versa. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his "Greater Gods of Olympos," "the qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athene) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology" ( Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.) The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo's mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phoebus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle ( Diod. Sic. II. 307). Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its race -- geologically.* [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the southern. Thus Apollodorus says ( Mythology, Book II. ): "The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis." The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the mythologists have tried to make of Eridan the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridan and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridan, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridan by Jupiter's thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where "the magnolia blossomed" became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ices. This allegory covers then the events of two pralayas ; and if well understood ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 771 THE CHILDREN OF NIOBE. 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 AEneas to the battle field ( II.