Insights to Universal History

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 9 pages

A short study on a narrow and unexpectedly precise subject: names, and what survives in them. It opens on the proposition that the power of names is great and was known from the time the first men were instructed by the divine masters — a claim that then does real work, because the argument that follows is largely philological.

The peoples the classical world called barbarian are presented here as the physical and political representatives of the nascent Aryan race, speaking a now-extinct Aryan language that predates the division of nations, and possessing as a root-race a higher civilisation than the geological strata have yet yielded. The Pelasgians are identified as a remnant of an Atlantean sub-race, their origin placed far beyond what Blavatsky calls the biblical ditch of historic chronology; the "most barbarous language" Herodotus mentions is taken to be that primitive pure Aryan tongue preceding Vedic Sanskrit. The most striking specific claim is that the Aeolic was neither the language of Aeschylus nor Attic nor even the older speech of Homer, but Vedic Sanskrit itself. A closing section observes that in old Greece barbarous names were sacred and unlawful to alter — and that the Greeks nonetheless fell into the habit of twisting primeval names.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.7 MB, 9 pages)