THE LOST LEMURIA

BY W. SCOTT-ELLIOT

THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE, LTD.; LONDON

[1904]

The Arts.

To trace the development of the Arts among the Lemurians, we must start with the history of the fifth sub-race. The separation of the sexes was now fully accomplished, and man inhabited a completely physical body, though it was still of gigantic stature. The offensive and defensive war with the monstrous beasts of prey had already begun, and men had taken to living in huts. To build their huts they tore down trees, and piled them up in a rude fashion. At first each separate family lived in its own clearing in the jungle, but they soon found it safer, as a defence against the wild beasts, to draw together and live in small communities. Their huts, too, which had been formed of rude trunks of trees, they now learnt to build with boulders of stone, while the weapons with which they attacked, or defended themselves against the Dinosauria and other wild beasts, were spears of sharpened wood, similar to the staff held by the man whose appearance is described above.

Up to this time agriculture was unknown, and the uses of fire had not been discovered. 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 LOST LEMURIA

BY W. SCOTT-ELLIOT

THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE, LTD.; LONDON

[1904]

The First Taking of Life.

The first instance of sin, the first taking of life--quoted above from an old commentary on the stanzas of Dzyan, may be taken as indicative of the attitude which was then inaugurated between the human and the animal kingdom, and which has since attained such awful proportions, not only between men and animals, but between the different races of men themselves. And this opens up a most interesting avenue of thought.

The fact that Kings and Emperors consider it necessary or appropriate, on all state occasions, to appear in the garb of one of the fighting branches of their service, is a significant indication of the apotheosis reached by the combative qualities in man! The custom doubtless comes down from a time when the King was the warrior-chief, and when his kingship was acknowledged solely in virtue of his being the chief warrior. But now that the Fifth Root Race is in ascendency, whose chief characteristic and function is the development of intellect, it might have been expected that the dominant attribute of the Fourth Root Race would have been a little less conspicuously paraded. But the era of one race overlaps another, and though, as we know, the leading races of the world all belong to the Fifth Root Race, the vast majority of its inhabitants still belong to the Fourth, and it would appear that the Fifth Root Race has not yet outstripped Fourth Race characteristics, for it is by infinitely slow degrees that man's evolution is accomplished.

It will be interesting here to summarise the history of this strife and bloodshed from its genesis during these far-off ages on Lemuria.

From the information placed before the writer it would seem that the antagonism between men and animals was developed first. With the evolution of man's physical body, suitable food for that body naturally became an urgent need, so that in addition to the antagonism brought about by the necessity of self-defence against the now ferocious animals, the desire of food also urged men to their slaughter, and as we have seen above, one of the first uses they made of their budding mentality was to train animals to act as hunters in the chase.

The element of strife having once been kindled, men soon began to use weapons of offence against each other. 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.

It was reserved for the Atlanteans to develop the principle of strife on organised lines--to collect and to drill armies and to build navies. This principle of strife was indeed the fundamental characteristic of the Fourth Root Race. All through the Atlantean period, as we know, warfare was the order of the day, and battles were constantly fought on land and sea. And so deeply rooted in man's nature during the Atlantean period did this principle of strife become, that even now the most intellectually developed of the Aryan races are ready to war upon each other.

Footnotes

31:1 It must, however, be noted that the Chinese peopleare mainly descended from the fourth or Turanian sub-race of the Fourth Root Race.
31:2 "Secret Doctrine," Vol. ii., p. 198.

THE LOST LEMURIA

BY W. SCOTT-ELLIOT

THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE, LTD.; LONDON

[1904]

Origin of Language.

As stated in the stanzas of Dzyan above quoted, the men of that epoch, even though they had become completely physical, still remained speechless. Naturally the astral and etherial ancestors of this Third Root Race had no need to produce a series of sounds in order to convey their thoughts, living as they did in astral and etherial conditions, but when man became physical he could not for long remain dumb. We are told that the sounds which these primitive men made to express their thoughts were at first composed entirely of vowels. In the slow course of evolution the consonant sounds gradually came into use, but the development of language from first to last on the continent of Lemuria never reached beyond the mono-syllabic phase. The Chinese language of to-day is the sole great lineal descendant of ancient Lemurian speech 1 for "the whole human race was at that time of one language and of one lip." 2

In Humboldt's classification of language, the Chinese, as we know, is called the isolatingas distinguished from the more highly evolved agglutinative, and the still more highly evolved inflectional. Readers of the Story of Atlantismay remember that many different languages were developed on that continent, but all belonged to the agglutinative, or, as Max Müller prefers to call it, the combinatorytype, while the still higher development of inflectional speech, in the Aryan and Semitic tongues, was reserved for our own era of the Fifth Root Race.

THE LOST LEMURIA

BY W. SCOTT-ELLIOT

THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE, LTD.; LONDON

[1904]

Origin of the Pithecoid and the Anthropoid Apes.

The anatomical resemblance between Man and the higher Ape, so frequently cited by Darwinists as pointing to some ancestor common to both, presents an interesting problem, the proper solution of which is to be sought for in the esoteric explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid stocks.

Now, we gather from the Secret Doctrine 1 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.

We are given to understand that in the coming Sixth Root Race, these anthropoids will obtain human incarnation, in the bodies doubtless of the lowest races then existing upon earth.

That part of the Lemurian continent where the separation of the sexes took place, and where both the fourth and the fifth sub-races flourished, is to be found in the earlier of the two maps. It lay to the east of the mountainous region of which the present Island of Madagascar formed a part, and thus occupied a central position around the smaller of the two great lakes.

Footnotes

30:1 Vol. ii., pp. 683 and 689.