India Is the Mother of Greece

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edward Pococke · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 25 pages

A twenty-five page compilation drawing on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Edward Pococke, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. It is among the most recently revised files in this section, dated June 2024. Pococke's own book, India in Greece, is held complete elsewhere in this section.

The opening epigraph states the principle the argument works from — that myths are proved to be fables just in proportion as we misunderstand them, and truths in proportion as they were once understood — with the charge attached that western ignorance is a Hellenic inheritance and much of it the result of Hellenic vanity. The body is Blavatsky's response to a question from F.W.H. Myers arising out of A.P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, and it proceeds by a series of specific complaints. The European Orientalist is described as having raised himself to the eminence of a philological oracle; Anglo-Indian and European archaeologists are charged with ridiculous anachronisms in ascribing dates to Indian antiquities; and Greek chronology is called too defective and too diametrically opposed to fact to inspire confidence in anyone less prejudiced. The positive claim follows: that comparative mythology bears witness that the religious ideas of the Greeks and most of their gods derive from the religions of the north-west of India, which she calls the cradle of the main Hellenic stock. Two points of detail are then argued — that Yavanacharya was the Indian title of a single Greek, Pythagoras, as Shankaracharya was of a single Hindu philosopher, and that Yavanani does not mean Greek writing but any foreign writing — leading to the conclusion that the Mahabharata and the Homeric Trojan war belong to the same cycle of events, both mythical in their personal biographies yet historical in the main.

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