The foregoing--a long, yet necessary digression--will show that the
Asiatic scholar is justified in generally withholding what he may know.
That it is not merely on historical facts that hangs the "historical
difficulty" at issue; but rather on its degree of interference with
time-honoured, long-established conjectures, often raised to the
eminence of an unapproachable historical axiom. That no statement
coming from our quarters can ever hope to be given consideration so long
as it has to be supported on the ruins of reigning hobbies, whether of
an alleged historical or religious character. Yet pleasant it is, after
the brainless assaults to which occult sciences have hitherto been
subjected--assaults in which abuse has been substituted for argument,
and flat denial for calm inquiry--to find that there remain in the West
some men who will come into the field like philosophers, and soberly and
fairly discuss the claims of our hoary doctrines to the respect due to a
truth and the dignity demanded for a science. Those alone whose sole
desire is to ascertain the truth, not to maintain foregone conclusions,
have a right to expect undisguised facts. Reverting to our subject, so
far as allowable, we will now, for the sake of that minority, give them.
The records of the Occultists make no difference between the "Atlantean"
ancestors of the old Greeks and Romans. Partially corroborated and in
turn contradicted by licensed or recognized history, their records teach
that of the ancient Latini of classic legend called Itali; of that
people, in short, which, crossing the Apennines (as their Judo-Aryan
brothers--let this be known--had crossed before them the Hindoo-Koosh)
entered from the north the peninsula--there survived at a period long
before the days of Romulus but the name, and a nascent language.
Profane history informs us that the Latins of the "mythical era" got so
Hellenized amidst the rich colonies of Magna Grecia that there remained
nothing in them of their primitive Latin nationality. It is the Latins
proper, it says, those pre-Roman Italians who by settling in Latium had
from the first kept themselves free from the Greek influence, who were
the ancestors of the Romans. Contradicting exoteric history, the Occult
records affirm that if, owing to circumstances too long and complicated
to be related here, the settlers of Latium preserved their primitive
nationality a little longer than their brothers who had first entered
the peninsula with them after leaving the East (which was not their
original home), they lost it very soon, for other reasons. Free from
the Samnites during the first period, they did not remain free from
other invaders. While the Western historian puts together the
mutilated, incomplete records of various nations and people, and makes
them into a clever mosaic according to the best and most probable plan
and rejects entirely traditional fables, the Occultist pays not the
slightest attention to the vain self-glorification of alleged conquerors
or their lithic inscriptions. Nor does he follow the stray bits of
so-called historical information, often concocted by interested parties
and found scattered hither and thither in the fragments of classical
writers, whose original texts themselves have not seldom been tampered
with. The Occultist follows the ethnological affinities and their
divergences in the various nationalities, races and sub-races, in a more
easy way; and he is guided in this as surely as the student who
examines a geographical map. As the latter can easily trace by their
differently coloured outlines the boundaries of the many countries and
their possessions; their geographical superficies and their separations
by seas, rivers and mountains; so the Occultist can by following the
(to him) well distinguishable and defined auric shades and gradations of
colour in the inner-man unerringly pronounce to which of the several
distinct human families, as also to what special group, and even small
sub-group of the latter, belongs any particular people, tribe, or man.
This will appear hazy and incomprehensible to the many who know nothing
of ethnic varieties of nerve-aura, and disbelieve in any "inner-man"
theory, scientific but to the few. The whole question hangs upon the
reality or unreality of the existence of this inner-man whom
clairvoyance has discovered, and whose odyle or nerve-emanations Von
Reichenbach proves. If one admits such a presence and realizes
intuitionally that being closer related to the one invisible Reality,
the inner type must be still more pronounced than the outer physical
type, then it will be a matter of little, if any, difficulty to conceive
our meaning. For, indeed, if even the respective physical
idiosyncrasies and special characteristics of any given person make his
nationality usually distinguishable by the physical eye of the ordinary
observer--let alone the experienced ethnologist: the Englishman being
commonly recognizable at a glance from the Frenchman, the German from
the Italian, not to speak of the typical differences between human
root-families* in their anthropological division--there seems little
difficulty in conceiving that the same, though far more pronounced,
difference of type and characteristics should exist between the inner
races that inhabit these "fleshly tabernacles." Besides this easily
discernible psychological and astral differences, there are the
documentary records in their unbroken series of chronological tables and
the history of the gradual branching off of races and sub-races from the
three geological primeval Races, the work of the Initiates of all the
archaic and ancient temples up to date, collected in our "Book of
Numbers," and other volumes.
---------
* Properly speaking, these ought to be called "Geological Races," so as
to be easily distinguished from their subsequent evolutions--the
root-races. The Occult doctrine has nothing to do with the Biblical
division of Shem, Ham and Japhet, and admires, without accepting it, the
latest Huxleyan physiological division of the human races into their
quintuple groups of Australioids, Negroids, Mongoloids, Xanthechroics,
and the fifth variety of Melanochroics. Yet it says that the triple
division of the blundering Jews is closer to the truth, it knows but of
three entirely distinct primeval races whose evolution, formation and
development went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution,
formation, and development of three geological strata; namely, the
BLACK, the RED-YELLOW, and the BROWN-WHITE RACES.
---------
Hence, and on this double testimony (which the Westerns are quite
welcome to reject if so pleased) it is affirmed that, owing to the great
amalgamation of various sub-races, such as the Iapygian, Etruscan,
Pelasgic, and later--the strong admixture of the Hellenic and
Kelto-Gaulic element in the veins of the primitive Itali of
Latium--there remained in the tribes gathered by Romulus on the banks of
the Tiber about as much Latinism as there is now in the Romanic people
of Wallachia. Of course if the historical foundation of the fable of
the twins of the Vestal Silvia is entirely rejected, together with that
of the foundation of Alba Longa by the son of Aeneas, then it stands to
reason that the whole of the statements made must be likewise a modern
invention built upon the utterly worthless fables of the "legendary
mythical age." For those who now give these statements, however, there
is more of actual truth in such fables than there is in the alleged
historical Regal period of the earliest Romans. It is to be deplored
that the present statement should clash with the authoritative
conclusion of Mommsen and others. Yet, stating but that which to the
"Adepts" is fact, it must be understood at once that all (but the
fanciful chronological date for the foundation of Rome-April, 753
"B.C.") that is given in old traditions in relation to the Paemerium,
and the triple alliance of the Ramnians, Luceres and Tities, of the
so-called Romuleian legend, is indeed far nearer truth than what
external history accepts as facts during the Punic and Macedonian wars
up to, through, and down the Roman Empire to its fall. The founders of
Rome were decidedly a mongrel people, made up of various scraps and
remnants of the many primitive tribes; only a few really Latin
families, the descendants of the distinct sub-race that came along with
the Umbro-Sabellians from the East remaining. And, while the latter
preserved their distinct colour down to the Middle Ages through the
Sabine element, left unmixed in its mountainous regions, the blood of
the true Roman was Hellenic blood from its beginning. The famous Latin
league is no fable, but history. The succession of kings descended from
the Trojan Aeneas is a fact; and the idea that Romulus is to be
regarded as simply the symbolical representative of a people, as Aeolus,
Dorius, and Ion were once, instead of a living man, is as unwarranted as
it is arbitrary. It could only have been entertained by a class of
historiographers bent upon condoning their sin in supporting the dogma
that Shem, Ham and Japhet were the historical once living ancestors of
mankind, by making a burnt-offering of every really historical but
non-Jewish tradition, legend, or record which might presume to a place
on the same level with these three privileged archaic mariners, instead
of humbly groveling at their feet as "absurd myths" and old wives' tales
and superstitions.
It will thus appear that the objectionable statements on pp. 56 and 62
of "Esoteric Buddhism," which are alleged to create an "historical
difficulty," were not made by Mr. Sinnett's correspondent to bolster a
western theory, but in loyalty to historical facts. Whether they can or
cannot be accepted in those particular localities where criticism seems
based upon mere conjecture (though honoured with the name of scientific
hypothesis), is something which concerns the present writers as little
as any casual traveler's unfavourable comments upon the time-scarred
visage of the Sphinx can affect the designer of that sublime symbol.
The sentences, "the Greeks and Romans were small sub-races of our own
Caucasian stock" (p. 6), and they were "the remnants of the Atlanteans
(the modern belong to the fifth race)" (p. 62), show the real meaning on
their face. By the old Greeks, "remnants of the Atlanteans" the
eponymous ancestors (as they are called by Europeans) of the Aeolians,
Dorians and Ionians, are meant. By the connection together of the old
Greeks and Romans without distinction, was meant that the primitive
Latins were swallowed by Magna Graecia. And by "the modern" belonging
"to the fifth race"--both these small branchlets from whose veins had
been strained out the last drop of the Atlantean blood--it was implied
that the Mongoloid 4th race blood had already been eliminated.
Occultists make a distinction between the races intermediate between any
two root-races: the Westerns do not. The "old Romans" were Hellenes in
a new ethnological disguise; and the still older Greeks the real blood
ancestors of the future Romans. In direct relation to this, attention
is drawn to the following fact--one of the many in close historical
bearing upon the "mythical" age to which Atlantis belongs. It is a
fable and may be charged to the account of historical difficulties. It
is well calculated, however, to throw all the old ethnological and
genealogical divisions into confusion.
Asking the reader to bear in mind that Atlantis, like modern Europe,
comprised many nations and many dialects (issues from the three primeval
root-languages of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Races), we may return to
Poseidonis, its last surviving remnant of 12,000 years ago. As the
chief element in the languages of the 5th race is the Aryan-Sanskrit of
the "Brown-white" geological stock or race, so the predominating element
in Atlantis was a language which has now survived but in the dialects of
some American Red-Indian tribes, and in the Chinese speech of the
inland Chinamen, the mountainous tribes of Kivang-ze--a language which
was an admixture of the agglutinate and the monosyllabic, as it would be
called by modern philologists. It was, in short, the language of the
"Red-yellow" second or middle geological stock (we maintain the term
"geological"). A strong percentage of the Mongoloid or 4th Root-race
was, of course, to be found in the Aryans of the 5th. But this did not
prevent in the least the presence at the same time of unalloyed, pure
Aryan races in it. A number of small islands scattered around
Poseidonis had been vacated, in consequence of earthquakes, long before
the final catastrophe, which has alone remained in the memory of men--
thanks to some written records. Tradition says that one of the small
tribes (the Aeolians) who had become islanders after emigrating from far
northern countries, had to leave their home again for fear of a deluge.
If, in spite of the Orientalists and the conjecture of M.F. Lenormant--
who invented a name for a people whose shadowy outline he dimly
perceived in the faraway Past as preceding the Babylonians--we say that
this Aryan race that came from Central Asia, the cradle of the 5th race
Humanity, belonged to the "Akkadian" tribes, there will be a new
historico-ethnological difficulty created. Yet it is maintained that
these "Akkads" were no more a "Turanian" race than any of the modern
British people are the mythical ten tribes of Israel, so conspicuously
present in the Bible, and absent from history. With such remarkable
pacta conventa between modern exact (?) and ancient Occult sciences, we
may proceed with the fable. Belonging virtually, through their original
connection with the Aryan, Central Asian stock, to the 5th race, the old
Aeolians yet were Atlanteans, not only in virtue of their long residence
in the now submerged continent, covering some thousands of years, but by
the free intermingling of blood, by intermarriage with them. Perhaps in
this connection Mr. Huxley's disposition to account for his Melanochroi
(the Greeks being included under this classification or type)--as
themselves "the result of crossing between the Xanthochroi and the
Australioids," among whom he places the Southern India lower classes and
the Egyptians to some extent--is not far off from fact. Anyhow the
Aeolians of Atlantis were Aryans on the whole, as much as the Basques--
Dr. Pritchard's Allophylians--are now southern Europeans, although
originally belonging to the South Indian Dravidian stock (their
progenitors having never been the aborigines of Europe prior to the
first Aryan emigration, as supposed). Frightened by the frequent
earthquakes and the visible approach of the cataclysm, this tribe is
said to have filled a flotilla of arks, to have sailed from beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, and, sailing along the coasts, after several years
of travel to have landed on the shores of the Aegean Sea in the land of
Pyrrha (now Thessaly), to which they gave the name of Aeolia. Thence
they proceeded on business with the gods to Mount Olympus. It may be
stated here, at the risk of creating a "geographical difficulty," that
in that mythical age Greece, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, and many other
islands of the Mediterranean, were simply the far-away possessions, or
colonies, of Atlantis. Hence, the "fable" proceeds to state that all
along the coasts of Spain, France, and Italy the Aeolians often halted,
and the memory of their "magical feats" still survives among the
descendants of the old Massilians, of the tribes of the later
Carthago-Nova, and the seaports of Etruria and Syracuse. And here
again it would not be a bad idea, perchance, even at this late hour, for
the archeologists to trace, with the permission of the anthropological
societies, the origin of the various autochthones through their
folk-lore and fables, as they may prove both more suggestive and
reliable than their "undecipherable" monuments. History catches a misty
glimpse of these particular autochthones thousands of years only after
they had been settled in old Greece--namely, at the moment when the
Epireans cross the Pindus bent on expelling the black magicians from
their home to Boeotia. But history never listened to the popular
legends which speak of the "accursed sorcerers" who departed, leaving as
an inheritance behind them more than one secret of their infernal arts,
the fame of which crossing the ages has now passed into history--or,
classical Greek and Roman fable, if so preferred. To this day a popular
tradition narrates how the ancient forefathers of the Thessalonians, so
renowned for their magicians, had come from behind the Pillars, asking
for help and refuge from the great Zeus, and imploring the father of the
gods to save them from the deluge. But the "Father" expelled them from
the Olympus, allowing their tribe to settle only at the foot of the
mountain, in the valleys, and by the shores of the Aegean Sea.
Such is the oldest fable of the ancient Thessalonians. And now, what
was the language spoken by the Atlantean Aeolians? History cannot
answer us. Nevertheless, the reader has only to be reminded of some of
the accepted and a few of the as yet unknown facts, to cause the light
to enter any intuitional brain. It is now proved that man was
universally conceived in antiquity as born of the earth. Such is now
the profane explanation of the term autochthones. In nearly every
vulgarized popular fable, from the Sanskrit Arya "born of the earth," or
Lord of the Soil in one sense; the Erechtheus of the archaic Greeks,
worshiped in the earliest days of the Akropolis and shown by Homer as
"he whom the earth bore" ( Il. ii. 548); down to Adam fashioned of "red
earth," the genetical story has a deep occult meaning, and an indirect
connection with the origin of man and of the subsequent races. Thus,
the fables of Helen, the son of Pyrrha the red--the oldest name of
Thessaly; and of Mannus, the reputed ancestor of the Germans, himself
the son of Tuisco, "the red son of the earth," have not only a direct
bearing upon our Atlantis fable, but they explain moreover the division
of mankind into geological groups as made by the Occultists. It is only
this, their division, that is able to explain to Western teachers the
apparently strange, if not absurd, coincidence of the Semitic Adam--a
divinely revealed personage--being connected with red earth, in company
with the Aryan Pyrrha, Tuisco, &c.--the mythical heroes of "foolish"
fables. Nor will that division made by the Eastern Occultists, who call
the 5th race people "the Brown-white," and the 4th race the
"Red-yellow," Root-races--connecting them with geological strata--appear
at all fantastic to those who understood verse iii. 34-9 of the Veda and
its occult meaning, and another verse in which the Dasyus are called
"Yellow." Hatvi Dasyun pra aryam varanam avat is said of Indra who, by
killing the Dasyus, protected the colour of the Aryans; and again, Indra
"unveiled the light for the Aryas and the Dasyus was left on the left
hand" (ii. III 18). Let the student of Occultism bear in mind that the
Greek Noah, Deukalion, the husband of Pyrrha, was the reputed son of
Prometheus who robbed Heaven of its fire (i.e., of secret Wisdom "of the
right hand," or occult knowledge); that Prometheus is the brother of
Atlas; that he is also the son of Asia and of the Titan Iapetus--the
antetype from which the Jews borrowed their Japhet for the exigencies of
their own popular legend to mask its kabalistic, Chaldean meaning; and
that he is also the antetype of Deukalion. Prometheus is the creator of
man out of earth and water,* who after stealing fire from Olympus--a
mountain in Greece--is chained on a mount in the far-off Caucasus. From
Olympus to Mount Kazbek there is a considerable distance. The
Occultists say that while the 4th race was generated and developed on
the Atlantean continent--our Antipodes in a certain sense--the 5th was
generated and developed in Asia. (The ancient Greek geographer Strabo,
for one, calls by the name of Ariana, the land of the Aryas, the whole
country between the Indian Ocean in the south, the Hindu Kush and
Parapamisis in the north, the Indus on the east, and the Caspian Gates,
Karamania and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, on the west.) The fable of
Prometheus relates to the extinction of the civilized portions of the
4th race, whom Zeus, in order to create a new race, would destroy
entirely, and Prometheus (who had the sacred fire of knowledge) saved
partially "for future seed." But the origin of the fable antecedes the
destruction of Poseidonis by more than seventy thousand years, however
incredible it may seem. The seven great continents of the world, spoken
of in the Vishnu Purana (B. II., cap. 2) include Atlantis, though, of
course, under another name. Ila and Ira are synonymous Sanskrit terms
(see Amarakosha), and both mean earth or native soil; and Ilavrita is a
portion of Ila, the central point of India (Jambudvipa), the latter
being itself the centre of the seven great continents before the
submersion of the great continent of Atlantis, of which Poseidonis was
but an insignificant remnant. And now, while every Brahmin will
understand the meaning, we may help the Europeans with a few more
explanations.
--------
* Behold Moses saying that it requires earth and water to make a living
man.
--------
If, in that generally tabooed work, "Isis Unveiled," the "English
F.T.S." turns to page 589, vol. I., he may find therein narrated another
old Eastern legend. An island .... (where now the Gobi desert lies) was
inhabited by the last remnants of the race that preceded ours: a
handful of "Adepts"--the "Sons of God," now referred to as the Brahman
Pitris; called by another yet synonymous name in the Chaldean Kabala.
"Isis Unveiled" may appear very puzzling and contradictory to those who
know nothing of Occult Sciences. To the Occultist it is correct, and
while perhaps left purposely sinning (for it was the first cautious
attempt to let into the West a faint streak of Eastern esoteric light),
it reveals more facts than were ever given before its appearance. Let
any one read these pages and he may comprehend. The "six such races" in
Manu refer to the sub-races of the fourth race (p. 590). In addition to
this the reader must turn to the paper on "The Septenary Principle in
Esotericism" (p. 187 ante), study the list of the "Manus" of our fourth
Round (p. 254), and between this and "Isis" light may, perchance, be
focused. On pages 590-6 of the work mentioned above, he will find that
Atlantis is mentioned in the "Secret Books of the East" (as yet virgin
of Western spoliating hand) under another name in the sacred hieratic or
sacerdotal language. And then it will be shown to him that Atlantis was
not merely the name of one island but that of a whole continent, of
whose isles and islets many have to this day survived. The remotest
ancestors of some of the inhabitants of the now miserable fisherman's
hovel "Aclo" (once Atlan), near the gulf of Uraha, were allied at one
time as closely with the old Greeks and Romans as they were with the
"true inland China-man," mentioned on p. 57 Of "Esoteric Buddhism."
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; and strange to him who does not follow the mysterious
working of the human mind and its unconscious approximations to hidden
truths--even the aborigines of the new continent, the Red-skinned
tribes, the "Mongoloids" of Mr. Huxley, were named Indians. Names now
attributed to chance: elastic word that! Strange coincidence, indeed,
to him who does not know--science refusing yet to sanction the wild
hypothesis--that there was a time when the Indian peninsula was at one
end of the line, and South America at the other, connected by a belt of
islands and continents. The India of the prehistoric ages was not only
within the region at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, but there was
even in the days of history, and within its memory, an upper, a lower,
and a western India: and still earlier it 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 traveler, 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. On pp. 592-3 of "Isis," vol. I., the Thevetatas--the evil,
mischievous gods that have survived in the Etruscan Pantheon--are
mentioned, along with the "sons of God" or Brahman Pitris. The
Involute, the hidden or shrouded gods, the Consentes, Complices, and
Novensiles, are all disguised relics of the Atlanteans; while the
Etruscan arts of soothsaying their Disciplina revealed by Tages comes
direct and in undisguised form from the Atlantean king Thevetat, the
"invisible" Dragon, whose name survives to this day among the Siamese
and Burmese, as also, in the Jataka allegorical stories of the Buddhists
as the opposing power under the name of Devadat. And Tages was the son
of Thevetat, before he became the grandson of the Etruscan
Jupiter-Tinia. Have the Western Orientalists tried to find out the
connection between all these Dragons and Serpents; between the "powers
of Evil" in the cycles of epic legends, the Persian and the Indian, the
Greek and the Jewish; between the contests of Indra and the giant; the
Aryan Nagas and the Iranian Aji Dahaka; the Guatemalian Dragon and the
Serpent of Genesis--&c. &c. &c.? Professor Max Muller discredits the
connection. So be it. But the fourth race of men, "men" whose sight
was unlimited and who knew all things at once, the hidden as the
unrevealed, is mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, the sacred books of the
Guatemalians; and the Babylonian Xisuthrus, the far later Jewish Noah,
the Hindu Vaivaswata, and the Greek Deukalion, are all identical with
the great Father of the Thlinkithians, of Popol-Vuh who, like the rest
of these allegorical (not mythical) Patriarchs, escaped in his turn and
in his days, in a large boat at the time of the last great Deluge--the
submersion of Atlantis.
To have been an Indo-Aryan, Vaivaswata had not, of necessity, to meet
with his Saviour (Vishnu, under the form of a fish) within the precincts
of the present India, or even anywhere on the Asian continent; nor is
it necessary to concede that he was the seventh great Manu himself (see
catalogue of the Manus, in the paper on "The Septenary Principle in
Esotericism" cited above), but simply that the Hindu Noah belonged to
the clan of Vaivaswata and typifies the fifth race. Now the last of the
Atlantean islands perished some 11,000 years ago; and the fifth race
headed by the Aryans began its evolution, to the certain knowledge of
the "Adepts" nearer one million than 900,000 years ago. But the
historian and the anthropologist with their utmost stretch of liberality
are unable to give more than from twenty to one hundred thousand years
for all our human evolution. Hence we put it to them as a fair
question: at what point during their own conjectural lakh of years do
they fix the root-germ of the ancestral line of the "old Greeks and
Romans?" Who were they? What is known or even "conjectured" about their
territorial habitat after the division of the Aryan nations? And where
were the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races? It is not enough
for purposes of refutation of other peoples' statements to say that the
latter lived separate from the former, and then come to a full stop--a
fresh hiatus in the ethnological history of mankind. Since Asia is
sometimes called the Cradle of Humanity, and it is an ascertained fact
that Central Asia was likewise the cradle of the Semitic and Turanian
races (for thus it is taught in Genesis), and we find the Turans
agreeably to the theory evolved by the Assyriologists preceding the
Babylonian Semitists, where, at what spot of the globe, did these
Semito-Turanian nations break away from the parent stock, and what has
become of the latter? It cannot be the small Jewish tribe of
Patriarchs; and unless it can be shown that the garden of Eden was also
on the Oxus or the Euphrates, fenced off from the soil inhabited by the
children of Cain, philologists who undertake to fill in the gaps in
Universal History with their made-up conjectures, may be regarded as
ignorant of this detail as those they would enlighten.
Logically, if the ancestors of these various groups had been at that
remote period massed together, then the self-same roots of a parent
common stock would have been equally traceable in their perfected
languages as they are in those of the Judo-Europeans. And so, since
whichever way one turns, one is met with the same troubled sea of
speculation, margined by the treacherous quicksands of hypothesis, and
every horizon bounded by inferential landmarks inscribed with imaginary
dates. Again, the "Adepts" ask why should any one be awed into
accepting as final criterion that which passes for science of high
authority in Europe? For all this is known to the Asiatic scholar--in
every case save the purely mathematical and physical sciences--as little
better than a secret league for mutual support, and, perhaps,
admiration. He bows with profound respect before the Royal Societies of
Physicists, Chemists, and, to a degree, even of Naturalists. He refuses
to pay the slightest attention to the merely speculative and conjectural
so-called "sciences" of the modern Physiologist, Ethnologist,
Philologist, &c., and the mob of self-styling Oedipuses to whom it is
not given to unriddle the Sphynx of Nature, and who therefore throttle
her.
With an eye to the above, as also with a certain prevision of the
future, the defendants in the cases under examination believe that the
"historical difficulty" with reference to the non-historical statement,
necessitated more than a simple reaffirmation of the fact. They knew
that with no better claims to a hearing than may be accorded by the
confidence of a few, and in view of the decided antagonism of the many,
it would never do for them to say "we maintain" while Western professors
maintained to the contrary. For a body of, so to say, unlicensed
preachers and students of unauthorized and unrecognized sciences to
offer to fight an August body of universally recognized oracles, would
be an unprecedented piece of impertinence. Hence their respective
claims had to be examined on however small a scale to begin with (in
this as in all other cases) on other than psychological grounds. The
"Adepts" in Occult Arts had better keep silence when confronted with the
"A.C.S.'s"--Adepts in Conjectural Sciences--unless they could show,
partially at least, how weak is the authority of the latter and on what
foundations of shifting sands their scientific dicta are often built.
They may thus make it a thinkable conjecture that the former may be
right after all. Absolute silence, moreover, as at present advised,
would have been fatal. Besides risking to be construed into inability
to answer, it might have given rise to new complaints among the faithful
few, and lead to fresh charges of selfishness against the writers.
Therefore have the "Adepts" agreed to smooth in part at least a few of
the most glaring difficulties and showing a highway to avoid them in
future by studying the non-historical but actual, instead of the
historical but mythical, portions of Universal History. And this they
have achieved, they believe (at any rate with a few of their querists),
by simply showing, or rather reminding them, that since no historical
fact can stand as such against the "assumption" of the "Adepts"--
historians being confessedly ignorant of pre-Roman and Greek origins
beyond the ghostly shadows of the Etruscans and Pelasgians--no real
historical difficulty can be possibly involved in their statement. From
objectors outside the Society, the writers neither demand nor do they
expect mercy. The "Adept" has no favours to ask at the hands of
conjectural science, nor does he exact from any member of the "London
Lodge" blind faith: it being his cardinal maxim that faith should only
follow inquiry. The "Adept" is more than content to be allowed to
remain silent, keeping what he may know to himself, unless worthy
seekers wish to share it. He has so done for ages, and can do so for a
little longer. Moreover, he would rather not "arrest attention" or
"command respect" at present. Thus he leaves his audience to first
verify his statements in every case by the brilliant though rather
wavering light of modern science: after which his facts may be either
accepted or rejected, at the option of the willing student. In short,
the "Adept"--if one indeed--has to remain utterly unconcerned with, and
unmoved by, the issue. He imparts that which it is lawful for him to
give out, and deals but with facts.
The philological and archeological "difficulties" next demand attention.