The main explanation that Blavatsky gave on this subject, she put it in her
work Isis Unveiled, and below I transcribe what she wrote
about it:
The celebrated Atlantis
is attributed by the latest modern commentator and translator of Plato's works,
Benjamin Jowett, to one of Plato's "noble lies." Even the frank
admission of the philosopher, in the Timaeus,
that "they say,
that in their time the inhabitants of this island (Poseidon) preserved a tradition handed down by
their ancestors concerning the existence of the Atlantic island of a prodigious
magnitude."
Professor Jowett discredits the story of the Atlantis, in the Timaeus; and the records
of 8,000 and 9,000 years appear to him an ancient swindle. But Bunsen remarks:
-
"There is
nothing improbable in itself in reminiscences and records of great events in
Egypt 9,000 years B.C., for . . . the Origines of Egypt go back to the ninth
millennium before Christ." (1)
Then how about the primitive Cyclopean fortresses of ancient Greece?
Can the walls of Tiryns, about which, according to archaeological
accounts, "even among the ancients it was reported to have been the work
of the Cyclops,"(2) be deemed posterior to the pyramids?
Masses of rock, some equal to a cube of six feet, and the smallest of
which, Pausanias says, could never be moved by a yoke of oxen, laid up in walls
of solid masonry twenty-five feet thick and over forty feet high, still
believed to be the work of men of the races known to our history!
Besides, the perfect identity of the rites, ceremonies, traditions, and
even the names of the deities, among the Mexicans and ancient Babylonians and
Egyptians, are a sufficient proof of South America being peopled by a colony
which mysteriously found its way across the Atlantic.
When? At what period?
History is silent on that point; but those who consider that there is no
tradition, sanctified by ages, without a certain sediment of truth at the
bottom of it, believe in the Atlantis-legend.
There are, scattered throughout the world, a handful of thoughtful and
solitary students, who pass their lives in obscurity, far from the rumors of
the world, studying the great problems of the physical and spiritual universes.
They have their secret records in which are preserved the fruits of the
scholastic labors of the long line of recluses whose successors they are. The
knowledge of their early ancestors, the sages of India, Babylonia, Nineveh, and
the imperial Thebes; the legends and traditions commented upon by the masters
of Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, in the marble halls of Heliopolis and Sais;
traditions which, in their days, already seemed to hardly glimmer from behind the
foggy curtain of the past.
All this, and much more, is recorded on indestructible parchment, and
passed with jealous care from one adept to another. These men believe the story
of the Atlantis to be no fable, but maintain that at different epochs of the
past huge islands, and even continents, existed where now there is but a wild
waste of waters. In those submerged temples and libraries the archaeologist
would find, could he but explore them, the materials for filling all the gaps
that now exist in what we imagine is history.
These sages say that at a remote epoch a traveller could traverse what
is now the Atlantic Ocean, almost the entire distance by land, crossing in
boats from one island to another, where narrow straits then existed.
(Observation: The Theosophical
instructors point out that Atlantis was not a massive continent as most of our
continents are today, but was an immense archipelago with huge islands like
Australia, and many smaller ones, something similar to what is the Oceanic
continent, but with much less ocean and more islands.
And progressively this immense
archipelago was sinking, leaving only the island of Poseidon mentioned by
Plato, near the Strait of Gibraltar, and on this island Blavatsky added.)
There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean
passages known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions.
Tradition points to many of the majestic ruins of India, Ellora, Elephanta, and
the caverns of Ajunta (Chandor range), which belonged once to those colleges,
and with which were connected such subterranean ways. (3)
The ruins which cover both Americas, and are found on many West Indian
islands, are all attributed to the submerged Atlantians. As well as the
hierophants of the old world, which in the days of Atlantis was almost
connected with the new one by land, the magicians of the now submerged country
had a net-work of subterranean passages running in all directions.
Who can tell but the lost Atlantis — which is also mentioned in the Secret Book, but, again,
under another name, pronounced in the sacred language — did not exist yet in
those days? The great lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south
of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania? (4)
If the hypothesis now so much doubted, and positively denied by some
learned authors who regard it as a joke of Plato's, is ever verified, then,
perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of the god-inhabited
continent was not altogether fable. And they may then perceive that Plato's
guarded hints and the fact of his attributing the narrative to Solon and the
Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world and
by cleverly combining truth and fiction, to disconnect himself from a story
which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to divulge.
And how could the name of Atlanta itself originate with Plato at all?
Atlante is not
a Greek name, and its construction has nothing of the Grecian element in it.
Brasseur de Bourbourg tried to demonstrate it years ago, and Baldwin, in his Prehistoric Nations and Ancient
America, cites the former, who declares that:
« The words Atlas and Atlantic have no
satisfactory etymology in any language known in Europe. They are not Greek, and
cannot be referred to any known language of the Old World. But in the Nahuatl
(or Toltec) language we find immediately the radical a, atl, which signifies
water, war, and the top of the head.
From this comes a series of
words, such as atlan,
or the border of or amid the water; from which we have the adjective Atlantic. We have also atlaca, to combat. . . . A
city named Atlan
existed when the continent was discovered by Columbus, at the entrance of the
Gulf of Uraha, in Darien, with a good harbor. It is now reduced to an
unimportant pueblo
(village) named Aclo. »
(p.179)
Is it not, to say the least, very extraordinary to find in America a
city called by a name which contains a purely local element, foreign moreover
to every other country, in the alleged fiction
of a philosopher of 400 years B.C.?
But let’s go back to our story about the Atlanteans. To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of hierophants
was divided into two distinct categories: those who were instructed by the
"Sons of God," of the island, and who were initiated in the divine
doctrine of pure revelation, and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis — if
such must be its name — and who, being of another race, were born with a sight
which embraced all hidden things, and was independent of both distance and
material obstacle. In short, they were the fourth
race of men mentioned in the Popol-Vuh,
whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once.
They were, perhaps, what we would now term "natural-born
mediums," who neither struggled nor suffered to obtain their knowledge,
nor did they acquire it at the price of any sacrifice. Therefore, while the
former walked in the path of their divine instructors, and acquiring their
knowledge by degrees, learned at the same time to discern the evil from the
good, the born adepts
of the Atlantis blindly followed the insinuations of the great and invisible
"Dragon," the King Thevetat
(the Serpent of Genesis?).
Thevetat had neither learned nor acquired knowledge, but, to borrow an
expression of Dr. Wilder in relation to the tempting Serpent, he was "a
sort of Socrates who knew
without being initiated." Thus, under the evil insinuations of their
demon, Thevetat, the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians. In consequence
of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to narrate; its
substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the
giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family.
The conflict came to an end by the submersion of the Atlantis; which
finds its imitation in the stories of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood: The
giants and magicians " . . . and all flesh died . . . and every man."
All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are substantially identical with the great
Father of the Thlinkithians in the Popol-Vuh,
or the sacred book of the Guatemaleans, which also tells of his escaping in a
large boat, like the Hindu Noah — Vaiswasvata.
If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story
that from the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and
the descendants of the Atlantian Noah, sprang up a mixed race of righteous and
wicked.
On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, Gautama-Buddhas, its
numerous "Saviours," and great hierophants; on the other hand, its
"natural
magicians" who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual
enlightenment, and because of weakness of physical and mental organizations,
unintentionally perverted their gifts to evil purposes.
Moses had no word of rebuke for those adepts in prophecy and other
powers who had been instructed in the colleges of esoteric wisdom mentioned in
the Bible.(5) His denunciations were reserved
for such as either wittingly or otherwise debased the powers inherited from
their Atlantian ancestors to the service of evil spirits, to the injury of
humanity. His wrath was kindled against the spirit of Ob, not that of Od.
Annexed
As we are going to press with this
chapter, we have received from Paris, through the kindness of the Honorable
John L. O'Sullivan, the complete works of Louis Jacolliot in twenty-one
volumes. They are chiefly upon India and its old traditions, philosophy, and
religion. This indefatigable writer has collected a world of information from
various sources, mostly authentic. While we do not accept his personal views on
many points, still we freely acknowledge the extreme value of his copious
translations from the Indian sacred books. The more so, since we find them
corroborating in every respect the assertions we have made. Among other
instances is this matter of the submergence of continents in prehistoric days.
In his
"Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus," he
says:
« One of the most ancient
legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition,
relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific
Ocean, an immense continent which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the
fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo,
and the principal isles of Polynesia.
The high plateaux of Hindustan and
Asia, according to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those
distant epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent. . . .
According to the Brahmans this country had attained a high civilization, and
the peninsula of Hindustan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the
time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive
traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas
to the peoples which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from
their speech was derived the Sanscrit." (We will have something to
say of this language in our second volume.)
The Indo-Hellenic tradition,
preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from the plains of
India, equally relates the existence of a continent and a people to which it
gives the name of Atlantis and Atlantides, and which it locates in the Atlantic
in the northern portion of the Tropics.
Apart from the fact that the
supposition of an ancient continent in those latitudes, the vestiges of which
may be found in the volcanic islands and mountainous surface of the Azores, the
Canaries and Cape Verd, is not devoid of geographical probability, the Greeks,
who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond the pillars of Hercules, on account
of their dread of the mysterious ocean, appeared too late in antiquity for the
stories preserved by Plato to be anything else than an echo of the Indian
legend.
Moreover, when we cast a look on a
planisphere, at the sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan
Archipelago to Polynesia, from the straits of Sund to Easter Island, it is
impossible, upon the hypothesis of continents preceding those which we inhabit,
not to place there the most important of all.
A religious belief, common to
Malacca and Polynesia, that is to say to the two opposite extremes of the
Oceanic world, affirms 'that all these islands once formed two immense
countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the
gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify them, the
latter swallowed up the two continents, and since, it had been impossible to
make him give up his captives. Alone, the mountain-peaks and high plateaux
escaped the flood, by the power of the gods, who perceived too late the mistake
they had committed.'
Whatever there may be in these
traditions, and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more
ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India was developed, it
is certain that this civilization did exist, and that it is highly important
for science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they may be. »
(p.13-15)
This last tradition, translated by
Louis Jacolliot from the Sanscrit manuscripts, corroborates the one we have
given from the "Records of the Secret Doctrine." The war mentioned
between the yellow and the black men, relates to a struggle between the
"sons of God" and the "sons of giants," or the inhabitants
and magicians of the Atlantis.
The final conclusion of M.
Jacolliot, who visited personally all the islands of Polynesia, and devoted
years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the
peoples, is as follows:
« As to the Polynesian continent
which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence
rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer.
The three summits of this continent,
Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from
fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands,
Viti, Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna, Ouvea, Marquesas, Tahiti, Pournouton, Gambiers,
are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to
one thousand leagues.
All navigators agree in saying that
the extreme and the central groups could never have communicated in view of
their actual geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at
hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a pirogue . . .
without a compass, and travel months without provisions.
On the other hand, the aborigines of
the Sandwich Islands, of Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa,
Tahiti, etc., had never known each other, had never heard of each other
before the arrival of the Europeans. And yet, each of these people
maintained that their island had at one time formed a part of an immense
stretch of land which extended toward the West, on the side of Asia. And
all, brought together, were found to speak the same language, to have the same
usages, the same customs, the same religious belief. And all to the question,
'Where is the cradle of your race?' for sole response, extended their hand
toward the setting sun. »
(Ibid., p.308)
(Isis Unveiled I, p.413, 529, 557-558, 590-595)
Notes
- "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. iv, p.462.
- "Archaeologia," vol. xv, p.320.
- There are archaeologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, deny the great antiquity of even one single monument in India. In his work, "Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India," the author ventures to express the very extraordinary opinion that "Egypt had ceased to be a nation before the earliest of the cave-temples of India was excavated." In short, he does not admit the existence of any cave anterior to the reign of Asoka, and seems willing to prove that most of these rock-cut temples were executed from the time of that pious Buddhist king, till the destruction of the Andhra dynasty of Maghada, in the beginning of the fifth century. We believe such a claim perfectly arbitrary. Further discoveries are sure to show how erroneous and unwarranted it was.
- It is a strange coincidence that when first discovered, America was found to bear among some native tribes the name of Atlanta.
- 2 Kings, xxii. 14; 2 Chronicles, xxxiv. 22.
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