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Legendary lore could not distort facts so effectually as to reduce them to unrecognisable shape. Between the traditions of Egypt and Greece on the one hand, and Persia on the other — a country ever at war with the former — there is too great a similarity of figures and numbers to allow such coincidence to be due to simple chance. This was well proven by Bailly. Let us pause for a moment to examine these traditions from every available source, to compare the better those of the Magi with the so-called Grecian “ fables.”
Those legends have now passed into popular tales, the folklore of Persia, as many a real fiction has found its way into our universal History. The stories of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are also fairy tales to all appearance ; yet they are based on facts, and pertain to the History of England. Why should not the folklore of Iran be part and parcel of the history and the pre-historic events of Atlantis ? That folklore says as follows : —
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Before the creation of Adam, two races lived and succeeded each other on Earth ; the Devs who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who reigned but 2,000, during the existence of the former. The Devs were giants, strong and wicked ; the Peris were smaller in stature, but wiser and kinder.
Here we recognize the Atlantean giants and the Aryans, or the Râkshasas of the Ramayana and the children of Bharata Varsha, or India ; the ante- and the post-diluvians of the Bible.
Gyan (or rather Gnan, true or occult Wisdom and knowledge), also called Gian-ben-Gian (or Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris. * He had a shield as famous as that of Achilles, only instead of serving against an enemy in war, it served as a protection against black magic, the sorcery of the Devs. Gian-ben-Gian had reigned 2,000 years when Iblis, the devil, was permitted by God to defeat the Deos and scatter them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield, which, produced on the principles of astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments, and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate (or Karma). † They count ten kings in their last metropolis called Khanoom, and make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam. These kings answer to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given by Berosus.
Distorted as those legends are now found, one can hardly fail to identify them with the Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew traditions. The latter, disdaining in its exclusiveness to speak of pre-adamite nations, yet allows these to be clearly inferred, by sending out Cain — one of the two only living men on earth — into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city (Gen. iv.), etc.
Now if we compare the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the 9,000 years, which Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the last Atlantis, a very strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked, but distorted it by his interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may restore the figures to their true meaning. “ First of all,” we read in “ Critias ” that “ one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed since the war of the nations, which lived above and outside the Pillars of Hercules, and those which peopled the lands on this side.”
* Some derive the word from Paras which produced Pars, Persia, Pars ; but it may be equally derived from Pitar or Pitris, the Hindu progenitors of the Fifth Race — the Fathers of Wisdom or the Sons of “ Will and Yoga ” — who were called Pitar, as were the divine Pitars of the First Race.
† See for these traditions the “ Collection of Persian Legends,” in Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Persian ; Herbelot’s narrative Legendes Persanes, “ Bibliothèque Orientale,” p. 298, 387, etc., and Danville’s Mémoires. We give in a condensed narrative that which is scattered in hundreds of volumes in European and Asiatic languages, as well as in oral traditions.
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In “ Timæus ” Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Aryans were 200,000 years old when the first great “ island ” or continent was submerged, there hardly seems any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato, being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had the Magi of Chaldea and Persia, through whose exoteric revelations the Persian legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, one finds the Hebrews calling a week “ seven days,” and “ a week of years ” when each of its days represents 360 solar years, and the whole “ week ” is 2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years — in their secret calculations of the Sods. We of the present times call an age a century. They of Plato’s day, the initiated writers, at any rate, meant by a millenium, not a thousand but 100,000 years ; Hindus, more independent than any, never concealed their chronology. Thus, when saying 9,000 years, the Initiates will read 900,000 years, during which space of time — i.e, from the first appearance of the Aryan race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great Atlantis began gradually sinking * and other continents to appear on the surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato’s small island of Atlantis, the Aryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded the Kali Yug, and was the Mahabhâratean war so famous in Indian History. Such blending of the events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years that had elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years were the correct figures given. The latter event has never been kept a secret, and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their records complete, because isolated ; for, being surrounded by sea and desert, they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums before our era.
History, for the first time, catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great mysteries through Herodotus, if we do not take into account the Bible, and its queer chronology. † And how little Herodotus could tell is
* The main continent perished in the Miocene times, as already stated.
† From Bede downwards all the chronologists of the Church have differed among themselves, and contradicted each other. “ The chronology of the Hebrew text has been grossly altered, especially in the interval next after the Deluge ” : — says Whiston (Old Test., p. 20).
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confessed by himself when speaking of a mysterious tomb of an Initiate at Sais, in the sacred precinct of Minerva. There, he says “ behind the chapel . . . is the tomb of One, whose name I consider it impious to divulge . . . In the enclosure stand large obelisks and there is a lake near, surrounded with a stone wall formed in a circle. In this lake they perform by night, that person’s adventures, which they call Mysteries : on these matters, however, though I am accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I must observe a discreet silence ” (ii. 170).
On the other hand, it is well to know that no secret was so well preserved and so sacred with the ancients, as that of their cycles and computations. From the Egyptians down to the Jews it was held as the highest sin to divulge anything pertaining to the correct measure of time. It was for divulging the secrets of the Gods, that Tantalus was plunged into the infernal regions ; the keepers of the sacred Sibylline Books were threatened with the death penalty for revealing a word from them. Sigalions (images of Harpocrates) were in every temple — especially in those of Isis and Serapis — each pressing a finger to the lips ; while the Hebrews taught that to divulge, after initiation into the Rabbinical mysteries, the secrets of Kabala, was like eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge : it was punishable by death.
And yet, we Europeans accepted the exoteric chronology of the Jews ! What wonder that it has influenced and coloured ever since all our conceptions of science and the duration of things !
The Persian traditions, then, are full of two nations or races, now entirely extinct, as some think ; whereas, they are only transformed. They are ever speaking of, and describing the mountains of Kaf (Kafaristan ?), which contain a gallery built by the giant Argeak, wherein the statues of the ancient men under all their forms are preserved. They call them Sulimans (Solomons), or the wise kings of the East, and count seventy-two kings of that name. * Three among them reigned for 1,000 years each. (Herbelot, p. 829.)
Siamek, the beloved son of Kaimurath (Adam), their first king, died murdered by his giant brother. The father had a perpetual fire preserved on the tomb which contained his cremated ashes ; hence — the origin of fire-worship, as some Orientalists think.
Then came Huschenk, the prudent and the wise. It was his dynasty which re-discovered metals and precious stones, which had been concealed by the Devs or Giants in the bowels of the earth ; how to make brass-work, to cut canals, and improve agriculture. As usual, it is Huschenk, again, who is credited with having written the work called
* Thence King Solomon, whose traces are nowhere to be found outside of the Bible, and the description of whose magnificent palace and city dovetail with those of the Persian tales ; though they were unknown to all pagan travellers, even to Herodotus.
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“ Eternal Wisdom,” and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and Ispahan, though they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is built on six other older cities, so these just-named cities may be built on emplacements of other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it can only be inferred from another legend.
In the same tradition that wise prince is credited with having made war against the giants on a twelve-legged horse, whose birth is attributed to the amours of a crocodile with a female hippotamus. This dodecaped was found on the “ dry island ” or new continent ; much force and cunning had to be used to secure the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk mounted him, than he defeated every enemy. No giants could withstand his tremendous power. Notwithstanding, this king of kings was killed by an enormous rock thrown at him by the giants from the great mountains of Damavend. *
Tahmurath is the third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the best of, and who kills, the Dragon. He is the great enemy of the Devs who, in his day, dwelled in the mountains of Kaf, and occasionally made raids on the Peris. The old French chronicles of the Persian folklore call him the Dev-bend, the conqueror of the giants. He, too, is credited with having founded Babylon, Nineveh, Diarbek, etc., etc. Like his grand-sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz) also had his steed, only far more rare and rapid — a bird called Simorgh-Anke. A marvellous bird, in truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious. (See Orient. Collect. ii., 119.) What says that Persian Phœnix ? It complains of its old age, for it is born cycles and cycles before the days of Adam (also Kaimurath). It has witnessed the revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the birth and the close of twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied esoterically will give us again 840,000 years. † ( Orient. Collect. ii., 119 et seq. ) Simorgh is born with the last deluge of the pre-Adamites, says the “ romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif ” ! (Tales of Derbent.)
What says the “ Book of Numbers ” ? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the lunar Spirit (Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris) and his three Sons — Ka-yin, Habel, and Seth — represent the three races, as already explained. Noah-Xisuthrus represents in his turn (in the cosmo-geological key) the 3rd Race separated, and his three sons, its last three races ; Ham, moreover, symbolizing that race which uncovered the “ nakedness ” of the Parent Race, and of the “ Mindless,” i.e., committed sin.
* Orient. Trad., p. 454. See also Bailly’s “ Lettres sur l’Atlantide.”
† Remember that the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe ; that each will last 7,000 years, the total duration being thus 49,000 years (See Rabbi Parcha’s “ wheel ” ; also Kenealy’s “ Book of God,” p. 176). This refers to 7 Rounds, 7 Root-races, and sub-races, the truly occult figures, though sorely confused.
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Tahmurath visits on his winged steed (Ahriman) the Mountains of Koh-Kaf or Kaph. He finds there the Peris ill-treated by the giants, and slays Argen, and the giant Demrusch. Then he liberates the good Peri, Mergiana *, whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner, and takes her over to the dry island, i.e., the new continent of Europe. † After him came Giamschid, who builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns 700 years, and believes himself, in his great pride, immortal, and demands divine honours. Fate punishes him, he wanders for 100 years in the world under the name of Dhulkarnayn “ the two horned.” But this epithet has no connection with the “ two-horned ” gentleman of the cloven foot. The “ two-horned ” is the epithet given in Asia, uncivilized enough to know nothing of the attributes of the devil, to those conquerors who have subdued the world from the East to the West.
Then come the usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who vanquishes the former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend. These are followed by many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new dynasty.
Such is the legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. What are the mountains of Kaf to begin with ?
Whatever they may be in their geographical status, whether they are the Caucasian or Central Asian mountains, it is far beyond these mountains to the North, that legend places the Devs and Peris ; the latter the remote ancestors of the Parses or Farses. Oriental tradition is ever referring to an unknown glacial, gloomy sea, and to a dark region, within which, nevertheless, are situated the Fortunate Islands, wherein bubbles, from the beginning of life on earth, the fountain of life (Herbelot, p. 593 ; Armenian Tales, p. 35). But the legend asserts, moreover, that a portion of the first dry island (continent), having detached itself from the main body, has remained, since then, beyond the mountains of Koh-kaf, “ the stony girdle that surrounds the world.” A journey of seven months’ duration will bring him who is possessed of “ Soliman’s ring ” to that “ fountain,” if he keeps on journeying North straight before him as the bird flies. Journeying therefore from Persia straight north, will bring one along the sixtieth degree of longitude, holding to the west, to Nova Zemblia ; and from the Caucasus to the eternal ice beyond the Arctic circle would land one between 60 and 45 degrees of longitude, or between Nova Zemblia and Spitzbergen. This, of course, if one has the dodecapedian horse of
* Mergain, or Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown of Oriental descent.
† Where we find her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the Knights of the Round Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy-hood, if both heroines did not symbolize the same historical event which had passed into a legend ?
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Huschenk or the winged Simorgh of Tahmurath (or Taimuraz), upon which to cross over the Arctic Ocean. *
Nevertheless, the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will maintain, to this day, that far beyond the snow-capped summits of Kap, or Caucasus, there is a great continent now concealed from all. That it is reached by those who can secure the services of the twelve-legged progeny of the crocodile and the female hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings † ; or by those who have the patience to wait for the good pleasure of Simorgh-anke, who promised that before she dies she will reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once more visible and within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs will build between that portion of the “ dry island ” and its severed parts. ‡ This relates, of course, to the seventh race, Simorgh being the Manvantaric cycle.
It is very curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century A.D., should have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt at first in a country beyond the Ocean, a proof of which had been given him in India, by a learned Chaldean (Cosmas Indicopleustes in Collect. novâ Patrum, t. ii, p. 188 ; also see Journ. des Savants, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.) He says : “ The lands we live in are surrounded by the ocean, but beyond that ocean there is another land which touches the walls of the sky ; and it is in this land that man was created and lived in paradise. During the Deluge, Noah was carried in his ark into the land his posterity now inhabits.” ( Ibid. ) The twelve-legged horse of Huschenk was found on that continent named the dry island. (Supra, p. 154.)
The “ Christian topography ” of Cosmas Indicopleustes and its merits are well known ; but here the good father repeats a universal tradition, now, moreover, corroborated by facts. Every arctic traveller suspects a continent or a “ dry island ” beyond the line of eternal ice. Perhaps now the meaning of the following passage from one of the Commentaries may become clearer.
* To this day the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as Kap-kaz, using the consonant p instead of the usual v (Kavkaz or Caucasus). But their bards say that it requires seven months for a swift horse to reach the “ dry land ” beyond Kaf, holding north without ever deviating from one’s way.
† Bailly thought he saw in this horse a twelve-oared ship. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the early Third Race built boats and flotillas before it built houses. But the “ horse,” though a much later animal, has, nevertheless, a more occult primitive meaning. The crocodile and the hippopotamus were held sacred and represented divine symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the Mexicans. Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects of that “ horse,” which is a cycle.
‡ The severed parts must be Norway and other lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.
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“ In the first beginnings of (human) life, the only dry land was on the Right end * of the sphere, where it (the globe) is motionless. † The whole earth was one vast watery desert, and the waters were tepid . . . . There man was born on the seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara. ‡ There was eternal spring in darkness. (But) that which is darkness to the man of today, was light to the man of his dawn. There, the gods rested, and Fohat § reigns ever since . . . . Thus the wise fathers say that man is born in the head of his mother (earth), and that her feet at the left end generated (begot) the evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon . . . . Between the first and second (races) the eternal central (land) was divided by the water of life. ||
“ It flows around and animates her (mother earth’s) body. Its one end issues from her head ; it becomes foul at her feet (the Southern Pole). It gets purified (on its return) to her heart — which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah, which then (in the beginnings) was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man’s dwelling (the earth) that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes. ¶ During the first and second (races) the belt was covered with the great waters. (But) the great mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-gear (the cap). She travailed harder for the third (race) and her waist and navel appeared above the
{Footnotes start}} * The two poles are called the right and left ends of our globe — the right being the North Pole — or the head and feet of the earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the North ; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with and influence “ right ” and “ left ” hand magic.
† The more one approaches the poles the less rotation is felt ; at the poles proper, the diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Thence the expression that the sphere is “ motionless.”
‡ It is averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the North Pole like a skull-cap, is the only one which prevails during the whole Manvantara of our “ Round.” All the central continents and lands will emerge from the sea bottom many times in turn, but this land will never change.
§ Bear in mind that the Vedic and Avestian name of Fohat is Apâm-Napât. In the Avesta he stands between the fire-yazatas and the water-yazatas. The literal meaning is “ Son of the Waters,” but these “ waters ” are not the liquid we know, but Ether — the fiery waters of space. Fohat is the “ Son of Ether ” in its highest aspect, Akâsa, the Mother-Father of the primitive Seven, and of Sound or Logos. Fohat is the light of the latter. See Book I.
|| This “ water ” is the blood or fluid of life which animates the earth, compared here to a living body.
¶ Occult teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the existence of a fountain of life in the bowels of the earth and in the North Pole. It is the blood of the earth, the electro-magnetic current, which circulates through all the arteries ; and which is said to be found stored in the “ navel ” of the earth.
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water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world. * She broke toward the setting sun from her neck † downward (to the south west), into many lands and islands, but the eternal land (the cap) broke not asunder. Dry lands covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the world. All these perished (in their turn). Then appeared the abode of the wicked (the Atlantis). The eternal land was now hid, for the waters became solid (frozen) under the breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon’s mouth,” etc., etc.
This shows that Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its root-continent, so to speak, already existed ; that part of the world now known as Asia being only cut off from it in a later age, and divided by the glacial waters.
If, then, the teaching is understood correctly, the first continent which came into existence capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust, and remains so to this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the few arctic travellers who perceived it.
During the Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a continuation of the “ head ” from the neck. Beginning on both hemispheres, on the line above the most northern part of Spitzbergen ‡ on
* Occultism points to the Himalayan chain as that “ belt,” and maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the globe. The navel is described as situated to the setting sun or to the west of the Himavat in which lie the roots of Meru, which mountain is north of the Himalaya. Meru is not “ the fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth,” but its roots and foundations are in that navel, though it is in the far north itself. This connects it with the “ central ” land “ that never perishes ” ; the land in which “ the day of the mortal lasts six months and his night another six months.” As the Vishnu Purâna has it : “ for the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day in other regions ; for Meru is north of all the dwipas and varshas ” (islands and countries). (Book II., chap. viii.) Meru is therefore neither on Atlas as Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show, “ absolutely in the centre of the globe,” only because “ relatively with the inhabitants of the several portions, to all of whom the East is that quarter where the sun first appears.”
† Even the Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The globe is likened to the body of a woman, “ mother earth.” From her neck downward, means from the inland sea now beyond the impassable barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parasâra says : “ is the mother and nurse, augmented with all creatures and their qualities, the comprehender of all the worlds.”
‡ For the Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the commentary as a place of no latitude (niraksha) the abode of the gods. As a scholiast says from the Sûrya, Sidhanta :
“ Above this (the Siddhâ) goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes ; they have neither equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (akshonnati, v. 42). In both directions from these are two pole-stars (dhruvatara), fixed in the midst of the sky ; to those who are situated in places of no latitude (niraksha) both these have their place in the horizon. Hence there is (on that land) no elevation of the poles, the two pole-stars being situated in their horizon ; but their degrees of colatitude (lumbaka) are 90 ; at Meru the degrees of latitude (aksha) are of the same number.” (43 and 44.)
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Mercator’s Projection, on our side, it may have included, on the American side, the localities that are now occupied by Baffin’s Bay and the neighbouring islands and promontories. There it hardly reached, southward, the 70th degree of latitude ; here — it formed the horse-shoe continent of which the commentary speaks ; of the two ends of which, one included Greenland with a prolongation which crossed the 50th degree a little south west, and the other Kamschatka, the two ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the early part of the Third Race — Lemuria was formed (Vide supra). When it was destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.