Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky

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* The Cyclic Law of Race-Evolution is most unwelcome to scientists. It is sufficient to mention the fact of "primeval
civilization" to excite the frenzy of Darwinians; it being obvious that the further culture and science is pushed back, the
more precarious becomes the basis of the ape-ancestor theory. But as Jacolliot says:-- "Whatever there may be in these
traditions (submerged continents, etc.), 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 it is highly
important for Science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they be." (Histoire des Vierges; les peuples et les
continents disparus, p. 15.) Donnelly has proved the fact from the clearest premises, but the Evolutionists will not listen. A
Miocene civilization upsets the "universal stone-age" theory, and that of a continuous ascent of man from animalism! And
yet Egypt, at least, runs counter to current hypotheses. There is no stone-age visible there, but a more glorious culture is
apparent, the further back we are enabled to carry our retrospect. (Verb. Sap.)
** "Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 21.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 787 INGENIOUS EXPLANATIONS.
prehensive and satisfying alike to the physical and spiritual wants of man, than even the terminology and system
respectively elaborated by Mr. Fiske's Master -- Herbert Spencer. What, however, is Sir Charles Lyell's "explanation" of
the "myth"? Certainly, he in no way countenances the idea of its "astronomical" origin, as asserted by some writers.
The two interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyell's solution is as follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal
changes, from the absence (?) of any reliable historical data on the point, as well as from a strong bias to the
Uniformitarian conceptions of geologic changes,* he attempts to trace the Atlantis "tradition" to the following sources:--
(1) Barbarous tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God, who is assumed in this way to punish immoral races.
(2) Hence the commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.
(3) The primary source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia -- a continent subject to violent earthquakes.
Exaggerated accounts would thus be handed down the ages.
(4) Egypt, being herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not inconsiderable geologic knowledge on these
cataclysmal traditions.
An ingenious "explanation," as all such are. But proving a negative is proverbially a difficult task. Students of esoteric
science, who know what the resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such laboured hypothesis.
Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always able to furnish a reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch
of science, seem to necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic changes on the surface of our planet, the
impartial critic, who is not a
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* Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations -- if not of all. Elevation
and subsidence of continents is always in progress. The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet
and settled down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British islands have been four times depressed beneath
the ocean and subsequently raised again and peopled. The Alps, Himalayas and Cordilleras were all the result of
depositions drifted on to sea-bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces to their present elevation. The Sahara was the
basin of a Miocene sea. Within the last five or six thousand years the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway have risen
from 200 to 600 feet; in Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries surmounting the shore now
eroded by the hungry wave. The North of Europe is still rising from the sea and South America presents the phenomenon
of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a height varying from 100 to 1,300 feet above the sea-level. On
the other hand, the coast of Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All
these phenomena are certain. Why may not a gradual change have given place to a violent cataclysm in remote epochs?
-- such cataclysms occurring on a minor scale even now (e.g., the case of Sunda island with 80,000 Malays).
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 788 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
specialist, will recognise the immense difficulty of explaining away the cumulative evidences, -- namely, the
archaeological, ethnological, geological, traditional, botanical, and even biological -- in favour of former continents now
submerged. When each science is fighting for its own hand, the cumulative force of the evidence in its collectivity is
almost invariably lost sight of.
In the "Theosophist" (August, 1880), we wrote: "We have as evidences the most ancient traditions of various and wideseparated
peoples -- legends in India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal isles of
Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages; and in the traditions of the richest literature in the
world -- the Sanskrit literature of India -- there is an agreement in saying, that, ages ago, there existed in the Pacific
Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological cataclysm was engulfed by the sea,* (Lemuria). And it is our firm belief . .
. that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan archipelago to Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense
submerged Continent. Both Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since the
memory of man never had, and never could have any intercourse with, or even a knowledge of each other, have yet a
tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea: that there were
in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by
command of the gods, and to punish them for their incessant quarrelling, swallowed them up. Notwithstanding the
geographical proof that New Zealand, the Sandwich and Easter Islands, are at a distance from each other of between