Chaldeans, Hierophants of the Aryan Root-Race

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 53 pages

Fifty-three pages on a single question — who the Chaldeans actually were — and one of the more substantial studies in the series. Blavatsky begins with the terminology, treating Akkadians, Asideans, Chaldeans, Chaldees, Kaldis, Kasdeans and Kasdim as names for one people, before characterising them as a pastoral nation and, within it, a priestly caste initiated in and wholly devoted to the sciences of astrology and magic. The framing question she poses is whether they are better understood as Chaldean Vedas or as Vedic Chaldees.

The bulk of the argument concerns their origin and their inheritance. She identifies them with the Asiatic Ethiopians, citing Eusebius on the Ethiopians having come from India and placing ancient Ethiopia in Arabia, with the Arabi at the mouth of the Indus; and she places them before the Turano-Akkadians, who in turn preceded the Hamitic nation of Nimrod. The closing sections trace what she regards as the fate of their knowledge — the dead letter of Chaldean magic, stripped of understanding and surviving as incantation, ceremonial prayer and talisman, passing into later religion under the guise of exorcism and holy water.

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