The Arabian Nights Are Echoes from Lemuria and Atlantis

William Quan Judge · Black versus White Magic Series · 7 pages

A short piece from The Theosophist of October 1884, and one of the most approachable things in the section. Judge takes a collection of stories everybody has read as children and asks the question a scientist ought to ask of any persistent myth: how did such ideas arise? Where there is that much smoke, he suggests, there was once a fire — just as the Devil and the Serpent recur across too many peoples and too many centuries to be nobody's invention.

The argument then narrows geographically. The world of the tales is the world around the Red Sea, Arabia and Persia — waters that in the theosophical account cover part of what was once Lemuria. Judge notes that the strait at the sea's lower entrance is called Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Hell, and that the Red Sea is where the genii are always buried. Arabia had its own men of science, many of them magicians, who learned either from the Lemurian Adepts or from the black magicians of Atlantis; and Solomon, who appears throughout the tales with his interlaced triangles, was reckoned an adept wherever he actually lived. The conclusion is modest: not that the stories are true, but that they are echoes.

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