Presentation 7 — Satyrs Were Apes: An Extinct Race of Animal-Men

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Atlantean Realities Series · 6 slides · White Lotus Day, Athens, 14 May 2006

The last of the seven presentations, and the shortest after the Easter Island set. Its claim is stated in the subtitle: that the satyrs of Greek myth are not invention but memory — the record of an extinct race of animal-men, which the Secret Doctrine treats as the issue of the Lemurian period and the origin of the anthropoid apes rather than their descendant.

The images are drawn entirely from European painting and printmaking of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where the satyr was a standard subject: a Poussin bacchanal, two crowded Flemish bacchanalian scenes in the manner of Rubens and Jordaens, Jordaens' domestic Satyr and the Peasant with its household gathered round the table, and a Netherlandish engraving of satyrs carrying their young. The argument being made is about how persistently the type is drawn — and how consistently, across artists who had no reason to agree, the satyr is rendered as something between the human and the animal rather than as either.

View the presentation (PDF, 1.0 MB, 6 slides)