Many a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to our commentators. The power of names is great, and was known since the first men were instructed by the divine masters. And as Solon had studied it, he translated the “Atlantean” names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the Great Continent and others to the last small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of “Atlantis.”

Thus, in the Timæus and Critias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself surrounded by mountain chains. . . . . And the plain was smooth and level, and of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand stadia in one direction and two thousand in the other. . . . . They surrounded the plain by an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.

Now in other places the entire size of the island of Poseidonis is given as about the same as that assigned here to the “plain around the city” alone. Obviously, one set of statements refers to the great continent, and the other to its last remnant — Plato’s island.

And, again, the standing army of Atlantis is given as upwards of a million men; its navy as 1,200 ships and 240,000 men. Such statements are quite inapplicable to a small island state, of about the size of Ireland!

The Greek allegories give to Atlas, or Atlantis, seven daughters (seven sub-races), whose respective names are Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope, Merope, Alcyone, and Celæno. This ethnologically, as they are credited with having married gods and with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides have become the seven Pleiades (?). In occult science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to Karmic law.

Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria (confused already several thousands of years before our era with Atlantis): and these were the Egyptians, the Phœnicians (Vide Sanchoniathon), and the old Greeks (Vide Diodorus, after Plato). But the oldest civilized country of Asia — India — can be shown to claim the same descent likewise. Sub-races guided by Karmic law or destiny repeat unconsciously the first steps of their respective mother-races. As the comparatively fair Brahmins have come — when invading India with its dark-coloured Dravidians — from the North, so the Aryan Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The occult sciences show that the founders (the respective groups of the seven Prajâpatis) of the Root Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary we find:

“He who understands the age of Dhruva ¹ who measures 9090 mortal years, will understand the times of the pralayas, the final destiny of nations, O Lanoo.”

Moreover there must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should locate its great progenitors and saints in the Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is 70,000 YEARS, HOWEVER, SINCE THE POLE OF THE EARTH POINTED TO THE FURTHER END OF URSA MINOR’S TAIL; and many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could have been identified with the constellation of Ursa Major.

The Aryan race was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further south into Asia. Hence Prometheus is son of Asia, and Deukalion, his son, the Greek Noah — he who created men out of the stones of mother earth — is called a northern Scythe, by Lucian, and Prometheus is made the brother of Atlas and is tied down to Mount Caucasus amid the Snows. ²

Greece had her Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the gods of Egypt, Greece, and Phœnicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed. ³ All the “fables” of Greece were built on historical facts, if that history had only passed unadulterated by myths to posterity. The “one-eyed” Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Cœus and Terra —three in number, according to Hesiod — were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the “one-eye” referring to the Wisdom eye ⁴; for the two front eyes were fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. The allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of Ithaca was saved by putting out with a fire-brand the eye of Polyphemus, is based upon the psycho-physiological atrophy of the “third” eye. Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a “sage” in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes. ⁵ His adventure with the latter — a savage gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey — is an allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of the Third Race to lose their all-penetrating spiritual eye. That other allegory, which makes Apollo kill the Cyclops to avenge the death of his son Asclepios, does not refer to the three races represented by the three sons of Heaven and Earth, but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last of the race endowed with the “Wisdom-eye.” The former have left relics of their buildings everywhere, in the south as much as in the north; the latter, were confined to the north solely. Thus Apollo — pre-eminently the god of the Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration — killed them — his shafts representing human passions, fiery and lethal — and hid his shaft behind a mountain in the Hyperborean regions. (Hygin. “Astron. Poétique,” Book ii. c. 15). Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean god is the Sun personified, which during the course of the sidereal year (25,868 years) changes the climates on the earth’s surface, making of tropical, frigid regions, and vice versa. Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr. Gladstone pertinently remarks in his “Greater Gods of Olympos,” “the qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athene) are impossible to be accounted for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology” (Nineteenth Century,July, 1887.)

The history of Latona (Leto), Apollo’s mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically, Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo, Phœbus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries wherein all the inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle (Diod. Sic. II. 307). Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its race — geologically. ⁶

¹ The equivalent of this name is given in the original.
² Deukalion is said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phœnicia. Now the worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical significance. It is only at the Pole where the Sun dies out for such a length of time as six months, for in latitude 68º it remains dead only for forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the north of Lemuria, or on that continent of which Asia was a kind of broken prolongation, and which stretched up to the Polar regions. This is well shown by de Gebelin’s “Allegories d‘Orient,” p. 246, and by Bailly, though neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven aspects.
³ The Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, were described (Herod, IV., 33-35; Pausanias, 1, 31, 2; V., 7, 8;ad X., 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the gods, and of Apollo chiefly.
⁴ The Cyclopes are not the only “one-eyed” representatives in tradition. The Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye. (Geographie ancienne, Vol. II, p. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with his shafts. (See supra.)
⁵ Ulysses was wrecked on the isle of Ææa, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs for their voluptuousness;and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit connection (Odyssey and elsewhere). Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas(Odys. Book XII.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of the ocean: thus identifying it with Atlantis.
⁶ To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the southern. Thus Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book II.): “The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis.” The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the mythologists have tried to make of Eridan the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridan and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridan, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridan by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where “the magnolia blossomed” became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ices. This allegory covers then the events of two pralayas; and if well understood ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 767–770
H. P. Blavatsky