Like the Phoenix of Lore, Arts and Sciences Die Only to Revive

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 10 pages

The title carries the thesis: what the far-distant forefathers heard in the secrecy of the temples was not lost, but has reached posterity and is now improving upon the details. The paper belongs to the same exchange with F.W.H. Myers that produced the study on the Atlanto-Aryan tribes, and shares its combative tone.

Two arguments run through it. The first is chronological, and is put as a question rather than an assertion: whether the West had any right to impose on universal history the chronology of one small and obscure tribe while rejecting every datum and tradition furnished by the classical writers of non-Jewish and non-Christian nations. The second is a debt. Had it not been for the efforts of a few Alexandrian and other mystics, Platonists and heathen philosophers, Blavatsky argues, Europe would never have laid hands even on the few Greek and Roman classics she now possesses — and the European critics and historians who dismiss the ancient record are, on her account, people with no past of their own to draw on.

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