We have previously thrown some light on the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, which Bunsen, the best modern authority, places at 21,000 years BC, a date he assigns to the erection of the first pyramid. It will be impossible, within the limited scope of this series, to trace in any detail the evidences of the last Golden, Silver and Bronze Age civilizations of India, to study which, as Louis Jacolliet remarks, "is to trace humanity to its sources."

"In the same way," writes this great French scholar, "as modern society jostles antiquity at each step; as our poets have copied Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence; as our philosophers have drawn inspiration from Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle; as our historians take Titus Livius, Sallust or Tacitus as models; our orators, Demosthenes or Cicero; our physicians study Hippocrates, and our codes transcribe Justinian—so had antiquity's self also an antiquity to study, to imitate and to copy. What more simple and more logical? Do not peoples precede and succeed one another? Does the knowledge, painfully acquired by one nation, confine itself to its own territory, and die with the generation that produced it? Can there be an absurdity in the suggestion that the India of 6000 years ago, brilliant, civilized, overflowing with population, impressed upon Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece and Rome, a stamp as ineffaceable, impressions as profound, as these last have impressed upon us?"

In another place, Jacolliot says: "The Greek is but the Sanskrit. Phidias and Praxiteles have studied in Asia the chefs d'oeuvre of Daouthia, "Ramana and Aryavosta. Plato disappears before Jaimini and Veda-V yasa, whom he literally copies. Aristotle is thrown into the shade by the Purva-Mimansa and the Uttara-Mimansa, in which one finds all the systems of philosophy which we are now occupied in re-editing, from the Spiritualism of Socrates and his school, the skepticism of Pyrroho, Montaigne and Kant, down to the positivism of Littre."

Jacolliot proves by parallel textual reference (see La Bible das l'Inde, pages 33-47) that the famous Code of Justinian, Roman basis of modern jurisprudence, was copied from the Laws of Manu, great Hindu legislator whose origin, Jacolliot points out, "is lost in the night of the ante-historical period of India; and no scholar has dared to refuse him the title of the most ancient law-giver in the world."

There is an interesting point which can be made here, in reference to the period of Manu, and the validity of the Equinoctial-World Age plan as presented in these articles. Manu is universally considered in India as having lived during the Golden Age of the world. This assignment is accepted by Sir William Jones, the great Sanskrit scholar, who observes that "many of the laws of Manu are restricted to the first three ages," i.e., a Golden, Silver and Bronze Age. But if the mistaken chronology which has been current in India since about 700 B.C. is taken as a basis, we shall see that the last Golden Age of the world ended almost four million years ago. It is manifestly absurd to assign the Laws of Manu to any such remote period. On the other hand, by linking Manu to a Golden Age as determined by the Equinoctial Cycle, we may consider him as belonging to either the last Golden Age of the Ascending Arc, which started in 16,302 B.C., or to the last Golden Age of the Descending Arc, which started in 11,502 B.C.

Another case which verifies the Equinoctial Age-Chart is that of Vyasa, the great expounder of Vedanta, whose date is given in Brahmanical records as 10,400 B.C., and whose works assign him to a Golden Age of the world. We have no difficulty, then, in placing him in the last Equinoctial Golden Age of the Descending Arc.

Although the scholar Jablonski admits that the Egyptians were familiar for centuries before the historical period with the heliocentric system of the universe, he adds: "This theory Pythagoras took from the Egyptians, who had it from the Brahmans of India." Pythagoras, whose great learning was described by Aristotle, was an Initiate of Egyptian schools, and learned there the truths of the earth's spherical form, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the reflected light of the Moon, the presence of fixed stars in the Milky Way, and other astronomical facts, knowledge of which was subsequently lost to the Western World for the two thousand years of the last two Kali Yugas. All this knowledge is contained in the ancient Hindu Brahmagupta, which points out the fixity of the starry firmament as compared with the dual movement of the earth upon its axis and its yearly circuit around the Sun.

With, then, these few remarks on the enlightenment of India as she passed through the last Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of her civilization, we shall leave the subject, recommending to the attention of students the scholarly works of Max Muller, Colebrooke, St. Hilaire, Sir William Jones, Weber, Strange, Lassen, Hardy, Burnouf and Louis Jacolliot, all of whom have attempted, with at least some success, to do justice to ancient India. Isis Unveiled, especially Vol. I, Section II, by Mme. Blavatsky, is full of well-documented references to the glories of the ancients, and a number of quotations in this article have been culled from its pages.

Though many of the ancient books have been lost, the majestic ruins of pyramids, labyrinths, caves, palaces and temples, many of them dating from the last Golden Age, still exist, exciting the awe and admiration of all those in the modern world who can read their majestic story aright. "Near Benares," Mme Blavatsky writes, "there are still the relics of cycle-records and of astronomical instruments cut out of solid rock, the everlasting records of Archaic Initiation, called by Sir William Jones old "back records" or reckonings. In Stonehenge (England) they exist to this day. Higgins says that Waltire found the barrows of tumuli surrounding this giant-temple represented accurately the situation and magnitude of the fixed stars, forming a complete orrery or planisphere. . . . In recognizing in the gods of Stonehenge the divinities of Delphos and Babylon, one need feel little surprise." In another place, the same writer says:

"The religious monuments of old, in whatever land or under whatever climate, are the expression of the same identical thoughts, the key to which is in the esoteric doctrine. It would be vain, without studying the latter, to seek to unriddle the mysteries enshrouded for centuries in the temples and ruins of Egypt and Assyria, or those of Central America, British Columbia, and the Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia. If each of these was built by a different nation of whom none had had intercourse with the others for ages, it is also certain that all these structures were planned and built under the direct supervision of the priests. And the clergy of every nation, though practising rites and ceremonies which may have differed externally, had evidently been initiated into the same traditional mysteries which were taught all over the world. In order to institute a better comparison between the specimens of prehistoric architecture to be found at the most opposite points of the globe, we have but to point to the grandiose Hindu ruins of Ellora in the Dekkan, the Mexican Chichen-Itza in Yucatan, and the still grander ruins of Copan in Honduras. They present such features of resemblance that it seems impossible to escape the conviction that they were built by peoples moved by the same religious ideas, and who had reached an equal level of high civilization in arts and sciences. There is not, perhaps, on the face of the whole globe, a more imposing mass of ruins than Nagkon-Wat, the wonder and puzzle of European archaeologists who venture into Siam." Of these ruins, the French traveler Mouhot says they are "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome" and credits their construction to "some ancient Michael Angelos." Frank Vincent confesses the inability of archaeologists to trace their origin. "Nagkon-Wat," he says, "must be ascribed to other than ancient Cambodians. But to whom?"

Look where one will, the ruins of ancient structures give mute but eloquent testimony that their builders were no primitive Neolithic men, but intellectual and artistic giants. The great Labyrinth of Egypt, already a mass of ruins even in the day of Herodotus, is well described by that historian. He considered it superior to even the pyramids, and as "excelling all other human productions," with its 3000 chambers, half of them subterranean.

Karnak at Thebes is fully as ancient, Champollion, the great French Egyptologist, gives his impressions: "One is astounded and overcome by the grandeur of the sublime remnants, the prodigality and magnificence of workmanship to be seen everywhere. . . . the imagination . . . falls powerless at the foot of the 140 columns of the hypostyle of Karnac!"

The walls of Tiryns, the Cyclopean fortresses of ancient Greece, and the Cyclopean remains of Easter Island, cannot be denied an antiquity less remote than the first pyramids.

The origin of the ruins of ancient Mexico and Peru, the palaces and temples of Palenque, Uxmal, Santa Cruz del Quiche, Copan and Arica is so far lost in the mist of time as to give rise to such diverse theories as that

Whatever the verdict, it will not be likely to uphold the theory of modern historians who claim, like Wells, that the first civilization started about 6000 B.C. with a mysterious Sumerian people in Mesopotamia.

"Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa (Sumerian cities)," writes the historian Winckler, "have already an immemorial past when first they appear in history." The "immemorial past" and civilizations of Egypt, India, China and other countries with less glamour of "mystery" about their origin and achievements than the Sumerians have little interest for the representative modern historian, since he cannot reconcile these facts with his prejudiced misconception that only a primitive Norlithic culture reigned throughout the ante-historical periods.

The sincere student, then, goes not to the dull and materialistic pages of present-day historians for an understanding of the spiritual wisdom which inspired the ancients and instructed their arts and sciences, but seeks to find the universal message and revelations contained, under diverse allegories, in the sacred scriptures of all the peoples of pre-Kali Yuga antiquity—the Vedas of the Hindus, the Books of Thoth or Hermes of the Egyptians, the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster, the Kabbalistic Zohar of the Hebrews the Woluspa of the ancient Scandinavians, the Popol Vuh of the ancient Mexicans, the Tanjur of the Tibetans, the mystical Hymns of Orpheus, and the Chaldean Book of Numbers.

The pre-Kali Yuga scriptures, as well as many of the Iron Age, cannot be understood without a key to their symbolism, and to this face may be ascribed the endless colossal blunders which modern scholars have made in translation and interpretation. A literal rendition is often absurd and meaningless, but this fact is the clue that the proper key and insight will yield the most profound knowledge.

Religion intolerance and vandalism were so rampant through the period of the last two Kali Yugas (702 B.C. to 1698 A.D.) that ancient writings, tell-tale evidence easier to destroy than granite walls and pyramids, were consigned by millions to the flames of fanatical prejudice or artful design.

A third reason for the limited knowledge of the modern world in regard to the depth and extent of bygone civilizations is the strict vow of silence imposed on all Initiates of the Ancient Wisdom, and the necessary caution and ambiguity with which they imparted their great knowledge. The teachings of the Kali Yuga Initiates, such as Pythagoras, a student of the Mysteries or sacred wisdom of Egypt, Babylon, India, Byblos, Syria and Tyre, and those of Thales, Plato, Lao-Tze of China, Simeon Ben Jochai, the great hebrew kabbalist, many of the Old Testament prophets, St. Paul, Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, the Essenes' Brotherhood, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Plotinus, Proclus, and Paracelsus, all concealed more than they revealed, so that sacred truths might not be profaned nor knowledge of godly powers abused. The two greatest teachers of the last Kali Yuga of the Descending Arc, Buddha and Jesus the Christ, also "spoke in parables."

Thus we have seen, in the facts pointed out in this article, some of the grandeur of the ancient nations of pre-Kali Yuga civilizations, as testified to by the imposing ruins of their stupendous structures, which still embody their knowledge of great arts and sciences, and we have also seen some of the difficulties that face us in our effort to accord a just appreciation to their wisdom and their achievements. With these facts before us, we avoid the delusions of our modern materialistic historians and see the ancients, not as primitive "New Stone Age" men, but as sages and builders enjoying the superior light of intelligence and spiritual perception conferred by the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of the Equinoctial Cycle in which they lived.

Previously we have mentioned some of the evidence which Egypt, India and other centers of ancient culture have preserved from their last Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages. The year 702 B.C. (see Diagram 1) marked the start of the equinoctial Kali Yuga or Iron Age of the Descending Arc. This year roughly corresponds to that of the founding of Rome and the start of a history of mankind that can today be recounted with fair chronological accuracy. With these more exact, or more generally accepted and authenticated, records at our disposal, do we find that the fate of empires and the story of mankind have followed a course which can serve as a verification of the Equinoctial Time-Chart we are considering? The answer must be in the affirmative, and the historical record of this 1200 year Iron Age is one of the destruction of proud and mighty empires, of the almost total extinction of the light of human knowledge, and of the prevalence of wars, famines and pestilence. The civilizations and learning of the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages, gradually diminishing with the passage of the Autumnal Equinox down the Descending Arc of its cycle from 11,502 to 702 B.C., had completely perished by the time the Iron Age came to an end in 498 A.D., and the splendours of the ancient world, overrun by its hordes of barbarian conquerors, were no more.

Egypt, her Golden and Silver Ages and even the spacious times of her great Bronze Age monarchs, such as Cheops, Amenophis IV and Queen Hatasu, now but a dim memory, fell under Ethiopian rule in 790 B.C., and surrendered the last vestige of her freedom to Alexander in 332 B.C. "Thus," writes J. M. Ragon, "perished that ancient theocracy which showed its crowned priests for so many centuries to Egypt and the whole world." W. J. Colville points out facts which confirm the validity of the Equinoctial Age-Chart, since he says, "One very remarkable fact has impressed all Egyptologists greatly, namely, the vast superiority of the older over the more recent monuments. Egypt apparently has had no infancy or childhood, but appears as though it started on its strange career fully equipped with all the possessions of maturity, and then began at first slowly, then more quickly, to decline."

Egypt was not alone in feeling the weight of Kali Yuga. "Chinese history," H. G. Wells tells us, "is still very little known to European students, and our accounts of the early records are particularly unsatisfactory. About 2700 to 2400 B.C., reigned five emperors, who seem to have been almost incredibly exemplary beings. There follows upon these first five emperors a series of dynasties, of which the accounts become more and more exact and convincing as they become more recent." The Chinese records which are so "unsatisfactory" to Wells, are merely those historical accounts of the high Golden, Silver and Bronze Age civilizations in China, to accept which he would have to discard his elaborate misconceptions about the ancient world. The five "incredibly exemplary" Emperors and the state of the country during their reigns are therefore dismissed without enlargement by Wells, and he does not breathe freely until the chinese records touch the Iron Age period, when the accounts become, he says, "more exact and convincing"—that is, more bloodthirsty and ignoble, and thus more in keeping with his own ideas on the nature of the ancients.

The Shang Dynasty, which began in 1750 B.C., and the Chow Dynasty, which rose to power about 1125 B.C., marked the heroic Bronze Age period in China, and even Wells is forced to concede, through the sheer weight of material evidence (which cannot be dismissed as "lies" like mere written records), that "Bronze vessels of these earlier dynasties, beautiful, splendid, and with a distinctive style of their own, still exist, and there can be no doubt of the existence of a high state of culture even (!) before the days of Shang."

With the coming of Kali Yuga, a chaotic state of internal wars and conflict with the invading Huns marked the several centuries which Chinese historians call "the Age of Confusion." A state of profound disorder was manifest under the last theocratic rulers of the Chow dynasty in the 3rd century B.C., and sometime later a part of China's ancient literature vanished under the Emperor Shi Hwang-Ti, who made an attempt to destroy the entire body of the Chinese classics.

A mighty Aegean civilization disappeared shortly before the start of the Iron Age, with the destruction of Cnossos, and Troy (Hissarlik) by the early Greeks. These ancient sites have recently been excavated. "The Cretan labyrinth was a building as stately, complex and luxurious as any in the ancient world. Among other details we find water-pipes, bathrooms, and the like conveniences, such as have hitherto been regarded as the latest refinements of modern life. The pottery, the textile manufactures, the sculpture and painting of these people, their gem and ivory work, their metal and inlaid work, is as admirable as any that mankind has produced . . . Greek legend has it that it was in Crete that Daedalus attempted to make the first flying machine." 2

The coming of the Dark Age saw the extinction of the Elamite civilization in Mesopotamia. Its chief city, Susa, boasting a culture dating back to the Golden Age, fell to the Persians in the 8th century, B.C. The great Assyrian Empire dwindled away with the fall of Nineveh before the conquering Medes and Persians in 606 B.C. The Chaldean civilization of ancient Babylon perished in the 6th century, B.C. through the devastations of Cyrus and Darius. The bloody career of Alexander "the great" saw the wanton destruction of many cities of great antiquity, including Tyre, Gaza and majestic Thebes, which were razed to the ground and their people sold into slavery. Naught remains today to remind us of Theban glory but the grand ruins of the Golden Age temple of Karnak, which all archaeologists concede could have been built only by men of extraordinary intelligence and artistic gifts.

The older civilization of the Etruscans was wiped out in the 5th century B.C. by the rising Romans and the Gauls from the north. The great days of Greece were over by the 2nd century B.C.; 3 then "gradually barbarism fell like a curtain between the Western civilization and India" (Wells). 4 The early promise of Rome was frustrated by the Punic Wars with ancient Carthage, the "most wasteful and disastrous series of wars that ever darkened the history of mankind" (Wells). The universally famous sea power, Carthage, thus perished by fire at the hands of Rome (146 B.C.) and her population of over half a million people was wiped out. the Greek city of Corinth was murdered by the Romans in the same year.

Julius Caesar, whose conquest of Gaul is popularly supposed to have "civilized" it, i.e., Romanized it, accomplished nothing more than the destruction of the ancient Kelto-Gaulic civilization. Its chief city, Alesia (now St. Reine), seat of the ancient Gaulic learning and the home of the Druids, 5 was plundered and burned by Caesar in 47 B.C. Bibractis (now Autun) in Gaul suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Romans in 21 A.D., and the whole body of her historical and religious literature perished, like that of Alesia, by fire. J. M. Ragon, Belgian authority on Masonic origins, has the following to say:

"Bibractis, the mother of sciences, the soul of the early (European) nations, a town equally famous for its sacred college of Druids, its civilization, its schools, in which 40,000 students were taught philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, occult sciences, architecture, etc., Rival of Thebes, of Memphis, of Athens and of Rome, it possessed an amphitheatre, surrounded with colossal statues, and accommodating 100,000 spectators . . . and in the midst of those sumptuous edifices, the Naumachy, with its vast basin, an incredible construction, a gigantic work wherein floated boats and galleys devoted to naval games; then a Champ de Mars, an aqueduct, fountains, public baths; finally fortifications and walls, the construction of which dated from the heroic ages. . . . a few monuments of glorious antiquity are still there, such as the temples of Janus and of Cybele. . . . Arles, founded 2000 years before Christ, was sacked in 270. This metropolis of Gaul, restored forty years later by Constantine, has preserved to this day a few remains of its ancient splendor; amphi-theatre, capitol, and obelisk, a block of marble seventeen metres high, a triumphal arch, catacombs, etc. . . . Thus ended Kelto-Gaulic civilization. Caesar, as a barbarian worthy of Rome, had already accomplished the destruction of the ancient Mysteries by the sack of the temples and their initiatory colleges, and by the massacre of the Initiates and the Druids. Remained Rome; but she never had but the lesser Mysteries, shadows of the Secret Sciences. The Great Initiation was extinct."

The 5th century A.D. was Attila and his Huns laying waste to Europe. During the same century, cruel and degenerate Rome met her just fate at the hands of the conquering Goths and Vandals, and the year 493 A.D. (a date practically coincident with the passage of the Autumnal Equinox over the nadir of its cycle) saw Theororic the Ostrogoth on the throne of Rome. "So it was in utter social decay and collapse that the great slave-holding 'world-ascendancy' of the God-Caesars and the rich men of Rome came to an end. . . We have dwelt on the completeness of that collapse. To any intelligent and public-spirited mind . . . it must have seemed, indeed, as if the light of civilization was waning and near extinction . . . The social and economic structure of the Roman Empire was in ruins . . . It had presented a spectacle of outward splendour and luxurious refinement, but beneath that brave outward show were cruelty, stupidity and stagnation. It had to break down, it had to be removed, before anything better could replace it" (Wells).

The history of the Jews during this Kali Yuga is one far removed from the days of their glory under Saul and Solomon in the Bronze Age. Their Babylonian captivity occurred about 590 B.C. Jerusalem, their sacred city, passed from one alien hand to another, and in 70 A.D., the Roman Emperor Titus completely destroyed the temple and city after a horrible siege.

Palmyra, ancient trading center in the Syrian desert, fell to the Romans in 272 B.C. and remained a scene of desolate abandonment for centuries thereafter. The great cities of the Anatolian peninsula were all plundered and destroyed by the Persian hordes. By the 6th century, A.D., the ancient magnificent cities of Baalbek (Heliopolis), Amman (Philadelphia) and Gerash, who have left us eloquent evidence of their architectural and engineering skill in Syria, had declined to the state of miserable small towns. The regions of Cilicia and Cappadocia, in eastern Asia Minor, containing many thriving seaport towns thoroughly permeated with a gracious Greek culture, had sunk into barbaric impotency by the end of the 6th century.

India was invaded by barbaric Hunnish hordes during the Dark Age we are considering. The Indo-Scythians founded the Kushan dynasty over all northern India. The Ephthalites came in 470 A.D., and their most powerful leader, Mihiragula, the "Attila of India," inflicted atrocious cruelties upon the people.

So the story goes. There were parts of the world in this Age of Kali which were unaffected (through the action of "cycles within cycles" which provides, according to individual national destiny, for minor Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages within a major Iron Age) by the turmoil and retrogression that marked the affairs of mankind in general during this Dark Yuga. But history gives us the plain story of the correspondence that existed between events on the earth, and the passage in the heavens of the Autumnal Equinox over the lowest part of its cycle. This inauspicious time in the heavens was indeed an inauspicious time upon the earth.

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1This span would put the beginning of the line of theocratic rulers back well into the last Golden Age of the Ascending Arc, which endured for 4800 years and ended in 11,502 B.C. Herodotus has the following to say: "The Egyptians assert that from the reign of Hercules to that of Amasis (570 B.C.), 17,000 years elapsed."

2Wells admits this much, and also that the Cretan civilization "was already launched upon the sea as early as 4000 B.C.," but he advances some superficial sophistries for the cause of this high culture in such early "Neolithic" days.

3An interesting tie-up with our Equinoctial Age-Chart is found in the periods of the Greek Olympic Games. This institution, dating from the Descending Bronze Age (some authorities give 1453 and others 1222 B.C. as the date of their origin), was discontinued in the 4th century A.D. and not reestablished until 1896 (in Athens), shortly after the start of the Ascending Bronze Age.

4 Wells is worth quoting here, because his accounts of the well-known historical periods (which start only in the 8th century B.C.) are, generally speaking, as dependable as his accounts of the ante-historical ancients are hopelessly mistaken.

5 These Druids, custodians of a high civilization dating at least from the last Silver Age of the world, and builders of the great astronomical structures whose ruins still stand in England (Stonehenge) and in Brittany (Carnac—the ancient European correspondence of the Egyptian Karnak), are mentioned in Isis Unveiled as great "architects, for the immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was such that even now the ruined remains of them 'frighten the mathematical calculations of our modern engineers'," according to a statement in the report of the Archaeological Society of the Antiquaries of London. Further information on the Druids may be found in W. F. Skene's The Four Ancient books of Wales (1868). These Druids are represented by Wells, with his customary perversion of truth in all matters pertaining to the ante-historical ancients, as savages given to human sacrifice!