THEOSOPHY, Vol. 49, No. 5, March, 1961
(Pages 225-229; Size: 15K)ON CLASSIC WESTERN ANCESTRY(1)
THE Asiatic scholar is justified in generally withholding what he may know. It is not merely on historical facts that hangs the issue of "historical difficulties," it is rather on their interference with time-honored, long-established conjectures, often raised to the eminence of an unapproachable historical axiom. Therefore pleasant it is, after the brainless assaults to which occult sciences have been subjected -- assaults in which abuse is substituted for argument, and flat denial for calm inquiry -- to find that there remain in the West men who will come into the field like philosophers, and soberly and fairly discuss the claims of the hoary doctrines of Theosophy with 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. In the matter of the long disputed area concerning the origins of the old Greeks and Romans, 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 Indo-Aryan brothers had crossed before them the Hindu Kush) entered from the north the peninsula, and there survived at a period long before the days of Romulus. Profane history informs us that the Latins of the "mythical era" got so Hellenized amidst the rich colonies of Magna Graecia that there remained nothing in them of their primitive Latin nationality. It is the Latins proper, it says, these 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 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 peoples, 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 colored 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 disbelievers 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, 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 "fleshy tabernacles."
Besides this easily discernible psychological and astral difference, there are the documentary records of the Occultists 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 Black, the Red-yellow, and the Brown-white) -- the work of the Initiates of all the archaic and ancient temples up to date, collected in our "Book of Numbers" and other volumes.
Hence, and on this double testimony 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-Gaullic 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 Æneas, then it stands to reason that the whole of the statement 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. 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 color 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 Æneas is a fact; and the idea that Romulus is to be regarded as simply the symbolical representative of a people, as Æolus, Dorius, and Ion once were, 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 mariners.
It is taught that "the Greeks and Romans were a small sub-race of our own Caucasian stock," and they were "the remnants of the Atlanteans (the modern belong to the Fifth Aryan race)." By the old Greeks, "remnants of the Atlanteans" the eponymous ancestors (as they are called by Europeans) of the Æolians, Dorians, and Ionians are meant. By the connection together, without distinction of the old Greeks and Romans, 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 Fourth 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.
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 first, second and third Races), we may cite the instance of Poseidonis, its last surviving remnant of 12,000 years ago. As the chief element in the languages of the fifth 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 Chinese, 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. A strong percentage of the Mongoloid or Fourth Root-Race was, of course, to be found in the Aryans of the Fifth. 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. Tradition says that one of the small tribes (the Æolians) who had become islanders after emigrating from far northern countries, had to leave their home again for fear of a deluge.
Belonging virtually, through their original connection with the Aryan, Central Asian stock, to the fifth Race, the old Æolians 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. But the Æolians of Atlantis were Aryans on the whole as much as the Basques are now southern Europeans. 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 Ægean Sea in the land of Pyrrha (now Thessaly), to which they gave the name Æolia. 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 the 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 Æolians 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 archaeologists 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 only after they had been settled in old Greece thousands of years -- 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 Olympus, allowing their tribe to settle only at the foot of the mountain, in the valleys, and by the shores of the Ægean Sea. Such is the oldest fable of the ancient Thessalonians.
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