CHAPTER III. INDIAN. "Searching ancient records lately Iron clasped and parchment bound. "The five hundred million Brahminic and Buddhist believers hold all the gods, men, demons, and various grades of animated life occupying this innumerable array of worlds compose one cosmic family." India! author of races-birth-place of art, science, sculpture, fragrant with the lotus-dreamy with emotions and aspirations kindled by the warmth of tropic suns! Mother of religions, India abounded with the poetic, the visionary, the spiritual. Multiform are the evidences of a conscious communion between mortals and the inhabitants of the spirit world, blossoming along the borders of Time's earlier mornings. All things, from atoms to astral worlds, move in spiralscycles being the subjects of law. "A spiral winds from the worlds to the suns, And every star that shines In the path of degrees forever runs, And the spiral octave climbs." Nations, as men, are born, grow, mature, and die; or they ascend and descend, as sea waves rise and fall. There were golden ages with heroes, poets and scholars, thousands upon thousands of years before the reputed Adam ate the "forbidden fruit" that mellowed along the banks af the Euphrates. Plato, in the Timmæus, speaks of a vast island, larger than Lybia and Asia combined, that, nine thousand years before his time, had its kings, priests, soldiers, arts, guardian gods and goddesses. This thickly-peopled isle, or, more properly, continent, owing to a fearful earthquake or some other violent concussion of nature, sank in a single night into the ocean and disappeared forever. Le Can, an eminent Mongolian scholar, personally assured us that the Chinese measure time by dynasties; that their sacred historical works, extending back in a line forty-four thousand years, contain many accounts of commerce ceasing, because of the sinking of large islands and the rising of immense continents from the ocean's depths. Among the most prominent of the great nations of old whose footprints were encircled in the light of spiritual phenomena and inspirational truths, uttered by seers, seeresses and oracles, we mention Egypt, China, India, Syria and Persia. These either carved their gospels in symbols and hieroglyphics, or penned them on scrolls-Vedas and Avestas. That profound linguist, Müller, of All Souls' College, Oxford, says, "Every learned man knows that the Hebrew was not, as Jerome and other Church Fathers taught, the oldest or primitive language of mankind.” The Sanscrit of the old Hindoos was a much more ancient and a far more perfect language. This was in its full flush of glory more than five thousand years ago. Even Sir William Jones awards to some books, now extant in Sanscrit, an antiquity of four and five thousand years. Rev. Mr. Maurice, as quoted by Higgins, thinks the Bhagavat Gita, so marvellously rich in thought relating to the immortality of the soul and pre-existence, was written over four thousand years since. That fine Scotch scholar, Lord Monboddo, wrote in 1792, that the "language of the ancient Brahmins of India was a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer." Another European scholar of great renown says the Sanscrit was a written and spoken language hundreds of years before Abraham appeared on the plains of Shinar, and long before the Hebrew language had an existence. M. Ernest Renan, in his history of the "Shemitic languages," says: "The birth-place of philosophy is India, amidst an inquisitive race, deeply pre-occupied by the search after the secret of all things; but the psalm and the prophecy, the wisdom concealed in riddles and symbols, the pure hymn, the revealed book, are the inheritance of the theocratic race of the Shemites-Assyrians, Chaldees, Arabians, Hebrews and cognate tribes." He further adds: "The Shemite race has neither the elevation of Spiritualism, known only to India, nor the feeling for measure and perfect beauty bequeathed by Greece to the Neo-Latin nations." It is generally conceded by all learned Orientals that a large portion of the writings of the Brahmins is anterior to any part of our Bible. In style and spirit they are eminently superior, abounding in the grandest conceptions of Deity, and in communications from the gods, demi-gods, manes and spirits. The Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, Rig-Veda Sanhita, Bhagavat-Gita, Ramayanna, etc., are full of myths inlaid with spiritual thoughts and sublime spiritual ideas, such as "Spirit moving upon chaos and fashioning forms"-the "girdles and spheres" encircling the earth-the "power of the gods to clothe themselves in a luminous ether" and appear to mortals-"the celestial state of eighty-eight thousand saints," the holiest of the Brahmins, and their descent to guard cities and guide the young. The Puranas also describe the oblations offered and the methods devised to dispossess "malignant spirits and enemies of the deities." (Vishnu Purana, p. 329). Long before the patriarchs pitched their tents under Syrian skies, long before Moses saw the tables of stone on the Mount, long before the oldest Hebrew prophets were inspired to sound the alarm in Judean mountains, there were millions of Spiritualists, prophets, yogees, sages, seers and mediums, in India. What is more, Abraham himself was, without the least doubt, a Brahmin. The scholarly Higgins proves this beyond a cavil in his very labored work, the "Anacalypsis." Terah, the father of Abraham, came from an Eastern country called Ur. Higgins clearly proves that this Ur of the Chaldees was in India, that portion of the country lying on the river Jumna and now called Uri, or Ur. Abbe Dubois states that the Hindoos in their earliest times had no images. They worshipped the one God as Divinity in duality, positive and negative-father and mother. Abraham refused to worship the female principle in the Godhead. He became a Protestant Hindoo, a wandering pilgrim, and accordingly emigrated from Ur in India to Haran in Assyria; from thence to Phoenicia, and finally into Egypt, nearly 2,000 B. C., in consequence of a terrible famine; and in all his jour neyings he took with him the belief in and practice of the mysteries and spirit communion he had been taught in India. Therefore we read in the Old Testament that "the Lord (a spiritual being) appeared to him on the plains of Mamre." Also when he sat in the door of his tent, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood before him; and when he saw them—that is, these three spirits-"he bowed himself towards the ground." The history of the Phoenicians and the Assyrians (Assurians or Assoors from India) has reached us only in fragments, and these through that voluminous author Sanchoniathan, that lived long prior to Moses; and Berosus, the Babylonian historian. Porphyry says, Sanchoniathan received much of his information from Hierombalus, a priest of Iao, that is, Jehovah; accordingly, with deep insight, the sect of learned Gnostics taught, that this Iao, or Jehovah of the Jews, was the "name of an angel." This shows that Sanchoniathan was a mystic and medium, as well as historian. It is clear from both Sanchoniathan and Berosus, that the Phoenicians, full five thousand years since, engaged in an extensive commerce. Modern exhumations and discoveries in Peru, Mexico and |