The Fourth Continent was Atlantis. ‘It would be the first historical land, were the traditions of the ancients to receive more attention than they have hitherto. The famous island of Plato of that name was but a fragment of this great Continent.’ (14)
In her description of the Fifth Continent, Blavatsky evokes images of cataclysmic seismic shifts in the land mass of the Earth:
The Fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Antipodes, it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval with it, which are generally referred to by the Indo-Aryan Occultists as the fifth. If their teaching followed the appearance of the Continents in their geological and geographical order, then this classification would have to be altered. But as the sequence of the Continents is made to follow the order of evolution of the Races, from the first to the fifth, our Aryan Root-race, Europe must be called the fifth great Continent. The Secret Doctrine takes no account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern geographical distribution of land and sea. Since the day of its earliest teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the earth has changed more than once. There was a time when the delta of Egypt and Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of Gibraltar, and a further upheaval of the continent, changed entirely the face of the map of Europe. The last serious change occurred some 12,000 years ago, and was followed by the submersion of Plato’s little Atlantic island, which he calls Atlantis after its parent continent. (15)
Blavatsky claimed to have read in the Stanzas of Dzyan that the Earth contained seven great continents, ‘four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future’ In The Secret Doctrine, she calls them Jambu, Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka and Pushkara. She continues:
We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara, refers to the geographical names given (i) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole earth during the period of a Root-Race, in general; and (ii) to what remained of these after a geological [cataclysm]: and (iii) to those localities which will enter, after the future cataclysms, into the formation of new universal ‘continents,’ [or] peninsulas … each continent being, in one sense, a greater or smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. [Original emphasis.] (16)
Aside from the Stanzas of Dzyan, Blavatsky drew on a huge number of religious texts, including the Hindu Puranas, which speak of a land called Svita-Dvipa (Hyperborea), or the White Island, at the centre of which is Mount Meru, the spiritual centre of the world. (We will have more to say of Mount Meru in Chapter Four.) If we accept the attributes given to Mount Meru in the sacred texts of the Hindus — including its height of 672,000 miles — then it must be conceded that the mountain does not exist anywhere on the physical Earth. This has led Orientalists to speculate that the White Island and Mount Meru are situated in what might best be described as another dimension occupying that same space as Earth and which is visible (and reachable) to beings possessing a sufficiently advanced spirituality. (17)
The legendary realm of Hyperborea also formed a centrepiece in the writings of the French occultist Rene Guenon (1886–1951) who, like Blavatsky (whom he nevertheless considered a charlatan), claimed to have received his information from hidden Oriental sources. Guenon’s Hyperborea is very similar to Blavatsky’s, although its origin is placed much more recently. According to Guenon, the present cycle of humanity began a mere 64,800 years ago in the Hyperborean land of Tula (Thule). Along with the later Atlantean civilisation, which lasted for 12,960 years (or half of one precessional cycle), Hyperborea was the origin of all religious and spiritual tradition in our own modern world. Guenon also wrote of Mount Meru, although in symbolic terms: ‘It seems from his essays on symbology that Guenon did not regard Meru as an actual mountain situated at the North Pole, but rather as a symbol of the earth’s axis that passes through the pole and points to the Arktoi, the constellations of the Great and Little Bears. (Guenon also claimed that the inclination of the Earth’s axis at 23 1/2° was a result of the Fall of humanity.)’ (18)
At this point, we should pause to consider a question that may have occurred to the reader: assuming the existence of the prehistoric Root Races of humanity, why have none of their remains ever been discovered and excavated by archaeologists and palaeontologists? Apart from the obvious but not particularly satisfactory answer that the vast majority of the Earth’s fossil record has yet to be discovered, it should be remembered that, according to Guenon, Blavatsky and the other Theosophists, the early Earth and its fabulous primordial inhabitants were not solid, corporeal entities, but were composed of a rarefied spiritual substance that only later descended into the material state. It is for this reason that their remains have never been discovered. (19)
For a basic chronology of the Earth according to this system, we can look to Godwin, who summarises the development of Guenon’s work by Jean Phaure. Between 62,000 and 36,880 BC was the Golden Age (Krita Yuga), which lasted for one full precessional cycle (25,920 years) beginning with the Age of Leo. This was the period before the descent into matter, when Paradise existed. Then came the period from 36,880 to 17,440 BC, the Silver Age (Treta Yuga), lasting 19,440 years. This age lasted from Leo to Sagittarius, and included the descent into matter. It also saw the rise of Hyperborea and the other continents of Lemuria and Mu. This was followed by the period from 17,440 to 4,480 BC, the Bronze Age (Dvapara Yuga), which lasted for half of one precessional cycle, and from Scorpio to Gemini. This age saw the fall of Atlantis around 10,800 BC, the colonisation of other parts of the world by Atlantean refugees, the biblical Flood and the invention of writing. The period between 4,480 BC and AD 2000 is the Iron Age (Kali Yuga), which lasts for 6,480 years, from Taurus, through Aries to Pisces. This period includes our own history. The cycle ends with the Millennium and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. Phaure has no problem with an incarnated humanity living in the Arctic, and suggests that they were able to do so with the aid of a spiritual energy source unknown to our own narrow, materialistic science. In support of this, he cites the case of certain Tibetan adepts who are able to live quite happily in the frigid Himalayan regions with little clothing. (20)
It is easy to see how the central tenets of Theosophy — the ancient and fantastic civilisations, the origins of the Aryan race and that race’s position of high nobility — were attractive to the German occultists and nationalists who so hated the modern world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the researcher Peter Levenda observes: ‘Modernism in general was seen as being largely an urban, sophisticated, intellectual (hence “Jewish”) phenomenon, and this included science, technology, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism.’ (21) The doctrines of the Theosophists successfully fused science and mysticism, taking Darwin’s theories regarding natural selection and the survival of the fittest and applying them to the concept of a spiritual struggle between the races of Earth (resulting in the Aryan race), which was a necessary component in the evolution of the spirit. (22)
Levenda continues:
It should be remembered that Blavatsky’s works … appear to be the result of prodigious scholarship and were extremely convincing in their day. The rationale behind many later Nazi projects can be traced back — through the writings of von List, von Sebottendorff, and von Liebenfels — to ideas first popularized by Blavatsky. A caste system of races, the importance of ancient alphabets (notably the runes), the superiority of the Aryans (a white race with its origins in the Himalayas), an ‘initiated’ version of astrology and astronomy, the cosmic truths coded within pagan myths … all of these and more can be found both in Blavatsky and in the Nazi Party itself, specifically in the ideology of its Dark Creature, the SS. It was, after all, Blavatsky who pointed out the supreme occult significance of the swastika. And it was a follower of Blavatsky who was instrumental in introducing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to a Western European community eager for a scapegoat. (23)
It will be remembered that the notorious document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic forgery created by the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) and occultists in St Petersburg and Paris to discredit the enemies of Rachkhovsky, the head of the Okhrana in Paris. (24) Produced in St Petersburg in 1902 and translated into German in 1919, the document purported to be the minutes of a meeting of the putative secret Jewish world conspiracy, (25) a conspiracy that, it appeared, was approaching the fulfilment of its goals. The Protocols indicated that Democracy, Communism and international commerce had been successfully infiltrated and taken over by the Jews, who ‘had “infected” all governments, all commerce, all of the arts and media’. (26) Information regarding the Protocols was initially provided to the press by a Madame Yuliana Glinka, a believer in Spiritualism who would do much to promote the anti-Semitic falsehoods contained within the document.
