W. Scott-Elliot

“ The circumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible if we know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make an effort for its recovery is somehow improved without our having an improved knowledge of the method employed. And from this thought we may arrive by an easy transition at the idea, that in truth the records of Nature are not separate collections of individual property, but constitute the all-embracing memory of Nature herself, on which different people are in a position to make drafts according to their several capacities. ”

“ But a brighter sun now shines on the Aryan race than that which lit the path of their Atlantean forefathers. Less dominated by the passions of the senses, more open to the influence of mind, the men of our race have obtained, and are obtaining, a firmer grasp of knowledge, a wider range of intellect. ”

“ Without going into the question of the different rotations which this earth performs, or the varying degrees of eccentricity of its orbit, a combination of which is sometimes held to be the cause of the glacial epochs, it is a fact—and one already recognized by some astronomers—that a minor glacial epoch occurs about every 30,000 years. But in addition to these there were two occasions in the history of Atlantis when the ice-belt desolated not merely the northern regions, but, invading the bulk of the continent, forced all life to migrate to equatorial lands. ”

“ The memory of Nature is infallibly accurate and inexhaustibly minute. A time will come as certainly as the precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method of historical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case of all original work. People among us who are capable of exercising astral clairvoyance in full perfection—but have not yet been called away to higher functions in connexion with the promotion of human progress, of which ordinary humanity at present knows even less than an Indian ryot knows of cabinet councils—are still very few. ”

“ The hand of every man fought for himself alone, and his knowledge was used for purely selfish ends, till it became an established belief that there was nothing in the universe greater or higher than themselves. Each man was his own "Law, and Lord and God," and the very worship of the temples ceased to be the worship of any ideal, but became the mere adoration of man as he was known and seen to be. ”

“ Indeed, Lemurian man, during at least the first half of the race, must be regarded rather as an animal destined to reach [20] humanity than as human according to our understanding of the term; for though the second and third groups of Pitris, who constituted the inhabitants of Lemuria during its first four sub-races, had achieved sufficient self-consciousness in the Lunar Manvantara to differentiate them from the animal kingdom, they had not yet received the Divine Spark which should endow them with mind and individuality—in other words, make them truly human. ”

“ Many times forced to move south by the rigours of a glacial epoch, many times driven north by the greed of their more powerful neighbours, the scattered and degraded remnants of this race may be found to-day in the modern Lapps, though even here there was some infusion of other blood. And so it comes to pass that these faded and stunted specimens of humanity are the lineal descendants of the black race of giants who arose on the equatorial lands of Lemuria well nigh five million years ago. ”

“ There is no limit really to the resources of astral clairvoyance in investigations concerning the past history of the earth, whether we are concerned with the events that have befallen the human race in prehistoric epochs, or with the growth of the planet itself through geological periods which antedated the advent of man, or with more recent events, current narrations of which have been distorted by careless or perverse historians. ”

“ Arts and Sciences.—It must primarily be recognized that our [42] own Aryan race has naturally achieved far greater results in almost every direction than did the Atlanteans, but even where they failed to reach our level, the records of what they accomplished are of interest as representing the high water mark which their tide of civilization reached. On the other hand, the character of the scientific achievements in which they did outstrip us are of so dazzling a nature, that bewilderment at such unequal development is apt to be the feeling left. ”

“ Between the spiritual aspiration of a rude but simple race and the degraded ritual of an intellectually cultured but spiritually dead people, lies a gulf which only the term religion, used in its widest acceptation, can span. Nevertheless it is this consecutive process of generation and degeneration which has to be traced in the history of the Atlantean people. ”

“ Our metaphor of the bridge may carry us a little further if we consider it as now in process of construction, but as destined to remain incomplete for mankind in general for untold millenniums—in fact, until Humanity has completed another circle of the seven planets and the great Fifth Round is half way through its course. ”

“ It must be remembered that every true religious idea that has ever entered into the mind of man, has been consciously suggested to him by the divine Instructors or the Initiates of the Occult Lodges, who throughout all the ages have been the guardians of the divine mysteries, and of the facts of the supersensual states of consciousness.
Mankind generally has but slowly become capable of assimilating a few of these divine ideas, while the monstrous growths and hideous distortions to which every religion on earth stands [66] as witness, must be traced to man's own lower nature. ”

“ This was the golden age of the Toltec race. The government was just and beneficent; the arts and sciences were cultivated—indeed the workers in these fields, guided as they were by occult knowledge, achieved tremendous results; religious belief and ritual was still comparatively pure—in fact the civilization of Atlantis had by this time reached its height.
After about 100,000 years of this golden age the degeneracy and decay of the race set in. ”

“ Suffice it now to point out that the founding of a Lodge of Initiation for the sake of Beings who came from another scheme of evolution is an indication of the unity of object and of aim in the government and the guidance of all the schemes of evolution brought into existence by our Solar Logos. Apart from the normal course in our own scheme, there is, we know, a Path by which He may be directly reached, which every son of man in his progress through the ages is privileged to hear of, and to tread, if he so chooses. ”

“ We are the kings it was said; we are the Gods.... They built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built, and out of the fires vomited, out of the white stone of the mountains and of the black stone, they cut their own images in their size and likeness, and worshipped them. ”

“ The Semites and Akkadians were also to a certain extent colonizing races.
Then, as time went on and population tended more and more to outrun the limits of subsistence, necessity operated with the least well-to-do in every race alike, and drove them to seek for a livelihood in less thickly populated countries. For it should be realized that when the Atlanteans reached their zenith in the Toltec era, the proportion of population to the square mile [34] on the continent of Atlantis probably equalled, even if it did not exceed, our modern experience in England and Belgium. ”

“ Historical research has depended for western civilisation hitherto, on written records of one kind or another. When literary memoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes been available, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, though inarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but modern culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilities connected with the investigation of past events, which are independent of fallible evidence transmitted to us by ancient writers. ”

“ For ordinary humanity, however, at the early stage of its evolution represented at present by the majority, the interior spiritual capacities ranging beyond those which the brain is an instrument for expressing, are as yet too imperfectly developed to enable them to get touch with any other records in the vast archives of Nature's memory, except those with which they have individually been in contact at their creation. ”

“ So shall the ranks of the Adept instructors—the Masters of Wisdom—be ever strengthened and recruited, and even amongst us to-day there must certainly be some, indistinguishable save by the deathless enthusiasm with which they are animated, who will, before the next Root Race is established on this planet, stand themselves as Masters of Wisdom to help the race in its upward progress. ”

“ It was not, however, until the time of the seventh sub-race on Lemuria that humanity was sufficiently developed physiologically to warrant the choice of individuals fit to become the parents of a new Root Race. So it was from the seventh sub-race that the segregation was effected. The colony was first settled on land which occupied the site of the present Ashantee and Western Nigeria. A reference to the second map will show this as a promontory lying to the north-west of the island-continent which embraced the Cape of Good Hope and parts of western Africa. ”

“ With so primitive a race of men, at the best, there was but little in the shape of religion that they could be taught. Simple rules of conduct and the most elementary precepts of morality were all that they were fitted to understand or to practise. During the evolution of the seventh sub-race, it is true that their divine instructors taught them some primitive form of worship and imparted the knowledge of a Supreme Being whose symbol was represented as the Sun. ”

“ The tribes resulting from the segregation effected by the Manu for the formation of the new Root Race eventually found their way to the southern shores of the central Asian sea, and there the first great Aryan kingdom was established. When the Transaction dealing with the origin of a Root Race comes to be written, it will be seen that many of the peoples we are accustomed to call Semitic are really Aryan in blood. The world will also be enlightened as to what constitutes the claim of the Hebrews to be considered a "chosen people." ”

“ The food of their boneless ancestors who crawled on the earth were such things as they could find on the surface of the ground or just below it. Now that they walked erect many of the wild forest trees provided them with nuts and berries, but their chief article of food was the flesh of the beasts and reptiles which they slew, tore in pieces, and devoured. ”

“ The causes of aggression were naturally the same as those which exist to-day among savage communities. The possession of any desirable object by one of his fellows was sufficient inducement for a man to attempt to take it by force. Nor was strife limited to single acts of aggression. As among savages to-day, bands of marauders would attack and pillage the communities who dwelt at a distance from their own village. But to this extent only, we are told, was warfare organised on Lemuria, even down to the end of its seventh sub-race. ”

“ The Third Race mankind is the most [28] mysterious of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the 'How' of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs, and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. ”

“ The memory of Nature is in reality a stupendous unity, just as in another way all mankind is found to constitute a spiritual unity if we ascend to a sufficiently elevated plane of Nature in search of the wonderful convergence where unity is reached without the loss of individuality. ”

“ Though, as we know, the goal of normal evolution is greater and more glorious than can, from our present standpoint, be well imagined, it is by no means synonymous with that expansion of consciousness which, combined with and alone made possible by, the purification and ennoblement of character, constitute the heights to which the Pathway of Initiation leads. ”

“ Architecture and sculpture, painting and music were all practised in Atlantis. The music even at the best of times was crude, and the instruments of the most primitive type. All the Atlantean races were fond of colour, and brilliant hues decorated both the insides and the outsides of their houses, but painting as a fine art was never well established, though in the later days some kind of drawing and painting was taught in the schools. ”

“ England even during the more recent history of the earth, when man already existed, has repeatedly been connected with the European continent and been repeatedly separated from it. Nay, even Europe and North America have been directly connected. The South Sea at one time formed a large Pacific Continent, and the numerous little islands which now lie scattered in it were simply the highest peaks of the mountains covering that continent. The Indian Ocean formed a continent which extended from the Sunda Islands along the southern coast of Asia to the east coast of Africa. ”

“ Now, we gather from the Secret Doctrine [19] that the descendants of these semi-human monsters described above as originating in the sin of the "mindless," having through long centuries dwindled in size and become more densely physical, culminated in a race of Apes at the time of the Miocene period, from which in their turn are descended the pithecoids of to-day. With these Apes of the Miocene period, however, the Atlanteans of that age renewed the sin of the "mindless"—this time with full responsibility, and the resultants of their crime are the species of Apes now known as Anthropoid. ”