Book: Five Years Of Theosophy

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The "Adept" therefore has little, if anything, to do with difficulties
presented by Western history. To his knowledge--based on documentary
records from which, as said, hypothesis is excluded, and as regards
which even psychology is called to play a very secondary part--the
history of his and other nations extends immeasurably beyond that hardly
discernible point that stands on the far-away horizon of the Western
world as a landmark of the commencement of its history. Records made
throughout a series of ages, based on astronomical chronology and
zodiacal calculations, cannot err. (This new "difficulty"--
palaeographical, t his time--that may be possibly suggested by the
mention of the Zodiac in India and Central Asia before the Christian
era, is disposed of in a subsequent article.)

Hence, the main question at issue is to decide which--the Orientalist or
the "Oriental"--is most likely to err. The "English F.T.S." has choice
of two sources of information, two groups of teachers. One group is
composed of Western historians with their suite of learned Ethnologists,
Philologists, Anthropologists, Archeologists and Orientalists in
general. The other consists of unknown Asiatics belonging to a race
which, notwithstanding Mr. Max Muller's assertion that the same "blood
is running in the veins (of the English soldier) and in the veins of the
dark Bengalese," is generally regarded by many a cultured Western as
"inferior." A handful of men can hardly hope to be listened to,
specially when their history, religion, language, origin and sciences,
having been seized upon by the conqueror, are now disfigured and
mutilated beyond recognition, and who have lived to see the Western
scholar claim a monopoly beyond appeal or protest of deciding the
correct meaning, chronological date, and historical value of the
monumental and palaeographic relics of his motherland. It has little,
if ever, entered the mind of the Western public that their scholars
have, until very lately, worked in a narrow pathway obstructed with the
ruins of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic Past; that they have been cramped
on all sides by limitations of "revealed" events coming from God, "with
whom a thousand years are but as one day," and who have thus felt bound
to cram millenniums into centuries and hundreds into units, giving at
the utmost an age of 1,000 to what is 10,000 years old. All this to
save the threatened authority of their religion and their own
respectability and good name in cultured society. And even that, when
free themselves from preconceptions, they have had to protect the honour
of the Jewish divine chronology assailed by stubborn facts; and thus
have become (often unconsciously) the slaves of an artificial history
made to fit into the narrow frame of a dogmatic religion. No proper
thought has been given to this purely psychological but very significant
trifle. Yet we all know how, rather than admit any relation between
Sanskrit and the Gothic, Keltic, Greek, Latin and old Persian, facts
have been tampered with, old texts purloined from libraries, and
philological discoveries vehemently denied. And we have also heard from
our retreats, how Dugald Stewart and his colleagues, upon seeing that
the discovery would also involve ethnological affinities, and damage the
prestige of those sires of the world races--Shem, Ham and Japhet--denied
in the face of fact that "Sanskrit had ever been a living, spoken
language," supporting the theory that "it was an invention of the
Brahmins, who had constructed their Sanskrit on the model of the Greek
and Latin." And again we know, holding the proof of the same, how the
majority of Orientalists are prone to go out of their way to prevent any
Indian antiquity (whether MSS. or inscribed monument, whether art or
science) from being declared pre-Christian. As the origin and history
of the Gentile world is made to move in the narrow circuit of a few
centuries "B.C.," within that fecund epoch when mother earth,
recuperated from her arduous labours of the Stone age, begat, it seems
without transition, so many highly civilized nations and false
pretenses, so the enchanted circle of Indian archeology lies between the
(to them unknown) year of the Samvat era, and the tenth century of the
Western chronology.

Having to dispose of an "historical difficulty" of such a serious
character, the defendants charged with it can but repeat what they have
already stated; all depends upon the past history and antiquity allowed
to the Indo-Aryan nation. The first step to take is to ascertain how
much History herself knows of that almost prehistoric period when the
soil of Europe had not been trodden yet by the primitive Aryan tribes.
From the latest Encyclopedia down to Professor Max Muller and other
Orientalists, we gather what follows; they acknowledge that at some
immensely remote period, before the Aryan nations got divided from the
parent stock (with the germs of Indo-Germanic languages in them); and
before they rushed asunder to scatter over Europe and Asia in search of
new homes, there stood a "single barbaric (?) people as physical and
political representative of the nascent Aryan race." This people spoke
"a now extinct Aryan language," from which by a series of modifications
(surely requiring more thousands of years than our difficulty-makers are
willing to concede) there arose gradually all the subsequent languages
now spoken by the Caucasian races.

That is about all Western history knows of its genesis. Like Ravana's
brother, Kumbhakarna,--the Hindu Rip van Winkle--it slept for a long
series of ages a dreamless, heavy sleep. And when at last it awoke to
consciousness, it was but to find the "nascent Aryan race" grown into
scores of nations, peoples and races, most of them effete and crippled
with age, many irretrievably extinct, while the true origin of the
younger ones it was utterly unable to account for. So much for the
"youngest brother." As for "the eldest brother, the Hindu," who,
Professor Max Muller tells us, "was the last to leave the central home
of the Aryan family," and whose history this eminent philologist has now
kindly undertaken to impart to him,--he, the Hindu, claims that while
his Indo-European relative was soundly sleeping under the protecting
shadow of Noah's ark, he kept watch and did not miss seeing one event
from his high Himalayan fastnesses; and that he has recorded the
history thereof, in a language which, though as incomprehensible as the
Iapygian inscriptions to the Indo-European immigrant, is quite clear to
the writers. For this crime he now stands condemned as a falsifier of
the records of his forefathers. A place has been hitherto purposely
left open for India "to be filled up when the pure metal of history
should have been extracted from the ore of Brahmanic exaggeration and
superstition." Unable, however, to meet this programme, the Orientalist
has since persuaded himself that there was nothing in that "ore" but
dross. He did more. He applied himself to contrast Brahmanic
"superstition" and "exaggeration" with Mosaic revelation and its
chronology. The Veda was confronted with Genesis. Its absurd claims to
antiquity were forthwith dwarfed to their proper dimensions by the 4,004
years B.C. measure of the world's age; and the Brahmanic "superstition
and fables" about the longevity of the Aryan Rishis, were belittled and
exposed by the sober historical evidence furnished in "The genealogy and
age of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah," whose respective days were 930
and 950 years; without mentioning Methuselah, who died at the premature
age of nine hundred and sixty-nine.

In view of such experience, the Hindu has a certain right to decline the
offers made to correct his annals by Western history and chronology. On
the contrary, he would respectfully advise the Western scholar, before
he denies point-blank any statement made by the Asiatics with reference
to what is prehistoric ages to Europeans, to show that the latter have
themselves anything like trustworthy data as regards their own racial
history. And that settled, he may have the leisure and capacity to help
his ethnic neighbours to prune their genealogical trees. Our Rajputs,
among others, have perfectly trustworthy family records of an unbroken
lineal descent through 2,000 years "B.C." and more, as proved by Colonel
Tod; records which are accepted by the British Government in its
official dealings with them. It is not enough to have studied stray
fragments of Sanskrit literature--even though their number should amount
to 10,000 texts, as boasted of--allowed to fall into foreign hands, to
speak so confidently of the "Aryan first settlers in India," and assert
that, "left to themselves, in a world of their own, without a past and
without a future (!) before them, they had nothing but themselves to
ponder upon," and therefore could know absolutely nothing of other
nations. To comprehend correctly and make out the inner meaning of most
of them, one has to read these texts with the help of the esoteric
light, and after having mastered the language of the Brahmanic Secret
Code--branded generally as "theological twaddle." Nor is it
sufficient--if one would judge correctly of what the archaic Aryans did
or did not know; whether or not they cultivated the social and
political virtues; cared or not for history--to claim proficiency in
both Vedic and classical Sanskrit, as well as in Prakrit and Arya
Bhasha. To comprehend the esoteric meaning of ancient Brahmanical
literature, one has, as just remarked, to be in possession of the key to
the Brahmanical Code. To master the conventional terms used in the
Puranas, the Aranyakas and Upanishads is a science in itself, and one
far more difficult than even the study of the 3,996 aphoristical rules
of Panini, or his algebraical symbols. Very true, most of the Brahmans
themselves have now forgotten the correct interpretations of their
sacred texts. Yet they know enough of the dual meaning in their
scriptures to be justified in feeling amused at the strenuous efforts of
the European Orientalist to protect the supremacy of his own national
records and the dignity of his science by interpreting the Hindu
hieratic text after a peremptory fashion quite unique. Disrespectful
though it may seem, we call on the philologist to prove in some more
convincing manner than usual, that he is better qualified than even the
average Hindu Sanskrit pundit to judge of the antiquity of the "language
of the gods;" that he has been really in a position to trace unerringly
along the lines of countless generations the course of the "now extinct
Aryan tongue" in its many and various transformations in the West, and
its primitive evolution into first the Vedic, and then the classical
Sanskrit in the East, and that from the moment when the mother-stream
began deviating into its new ethnographical beds, he has followed it up.
Finally that, while he, the Orientalist, can, owing to speculative
interpretations of what he thinks he has learnt from fragments of
Sanskrit literature, judge of the nature of all that he knows nothing
about--i.e., to speculate upon the past history of a great nation he has
lost sight of from its "nascent state," and caught up again but at the
period of its last degeneration--the native student never knew, nor can
ever know, anything of that history. Until the Orientalist has proved
all this, he can be accorded but small justification for assuming that
air of authority and supreme contempt which is found in almost every
work upon India and its Past. Having no knowledge himself whatever of
those incalculable ages that lie between the Aryan Brahman in Central
Asia, and the Brahman at the threshold of Buddhism, he has no right to
maintain that the initiated Indo-Aryan can never know as much of them
as the foreigner. Those periods being an utter blank to him, he is
little qualified to declare that the Aryan, having had no political
history "of his own...." his only sphere was "religion and
philosophy.... in solitude and contemplation." A happy thought
suggested, no doubt, by the active life, incessant wars, triumphs, and
defeats portrayed in the oldest songs of the Rik-Veda. Nor can he with
the smallest show of logic affirm that "India had no place in the
political history of the world," or that "there are no synchronisms
between the history of the Brahmans and that of other nations before the
date of the origin of Buddhism in India;" for he knows no more of the
prehistoric history of those "other nations" than of that of the
Brahman. All his inferences, conjectures and systematic arrangements of
hypotheses begin very little earlier than 200 "B.C.," if even so much,
on anything like really historical grounds. He has to prove all this
before he can command our attention. Otherwise, however "irrefragable
the evidence of language," the presence of Sanskrit roots in all the
European languages will be insufficient to prove, either that (a) before
the Aryan invaders descended toward the seven rivers they had never left
their northern regions; or (b) why the "eldest brother, the Hindu,"
should have been "the last to leave the central home of the Aryan
family." To the philologist such a supposition may seem "quite
natural." Yet the Brahman is no less justified in his ever-growing
suspicion that there may be at the bottom some occult reason for such a
programme. That in the interest of his theory the Orientalist was
forced to make "the eldest brother" tarry so suspiciously long on the
Oxus, or wherever "the youngest" may have placed him in his "nascent
state" after the latter "saw his brothers all depart towards the setting
sun." We find reasons to believe that the chief motive for alleging
such a procrastination is the necessity to bring the race closer to the
Christian era. To show the "brother" inactive and unconcerned, "with
nothing but himself to ponder on," lest his antiquity and "fables of
empty idolatry," and perhaps his traditions of other people's doings,
should interfere with the chronology by which it is determined to try
him. The suspicion is strengthened when one finds in the book from
which we have been so largely quoting--a work of a purely scientific and
philological character--such frequent remarks and even prophecies as:
"History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual
education before, in the fulness of time, it could be admitted to the
truths of Christianity." Or, again "The ancient religions of the world
were but the milk of Nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by
the bread of life;" and such broad sentiments expressed as that "there
is some truth in Buddhism, as there is in every one of the false
religions of the world, but...." *

-----------
* Max Muller's "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature."
-----------

The atmosphere of Cambridge and Oxford seems decidedly unpropitious to
the recognition of either Indian antiquity, or the merit of the
philosophies sprung from its soil!*

---------
* And how one-sided and biased most of the Western Orientalists are may
be seen by reading carefully "The History of Indian Literature," by
Albrecht Weber--a Sanskrit scholiast classed with the highest
authorities. The incessant harping upon the one special string of
Christianity, and the ill-concealed efforts to pass it off as the
keynote of all other religions, is painfully pre-eminent in his work.
Christian influences are shown to have affected not only the growth of
Buddhism and Krishna worship, but even that of the Siva-cult and its
legends; it is openly stated that "it is not at all a far-fetched
hypothesis that they have reference to scattered Christian
missionaries!" The eminent Orientalist evidently forgets that,
notwithstanding his efforts, none of the Vedic, Sutra or Buddhist
periods can be possibly crammed into this Christian period--their
universal tank of all ancient creeds, and of which some Orientalists
would fain make a poor-house for all decayed archaic religions and
philosophy. Even Tibet, in his opinion, has not escaped "Western
influence." Let us hope to the contrary. It can be proved that Buddhist
missionaries were as numerous in Palestine, Alexandria, Persia, and even
Greece, two centuries before the Christian era, as the Padris are now in
Asia. That the Gnostic doctrines (as he is obliged to confess) are
permeated with Buddhism. Basilides, Valentinian, Bardesanes, and
especially Manes were simply heretical Buddhists, "the formula of
abjuration of these doctrines in the case of the latter, specifying
expressly Buddha (Bodda) by name."
----------



Leaflets from Esoteric History


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.

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