“If Nagkon-Wat is essentially a Buddhist temple, how comes it to have on its walls basso-relievos of completely an Assyrian character; and Kabeirian gods which, though universally worshipped as the most ancient of the Asiatic mystery-gods, had already been abandoned 200 years B.C., and the Samothracian mysteries themselves completely altered?
Whence the popular tradition concerning the Prince of Roma among the Cambodians, a personage mentioned by all the native historians, who attribute to him the foundation of the temple? Is it not barely possible that even the Ramayana, itself, the famous epic poem, is but the original of Homer’s Iliad, as it was suggested some years ago? The beautiful Paris, carrying off Helen, looks very much like Ravana, king of the giants, eloping with Sita, Rama’s wife?
The Trojan war is a counterpart of the Ramayana war; moreover, Herodotus assures us that the Trojan heroes and gods date in Greece only from the days of the Iliad. In such a case even Hanouma, the monkey-god, would be but Vulcan in disguise; the more so that the Cambodian tradition makes the founder of Angkor come from Roma, which they place at the western end of the world, and that the Hindu Roma also apportions the west to the descendants of Hanouma. Hypothetical as the suggestion may now seem, it is worthy of consideration, if even for the sake of being refuted.
The Abbe Jaquenet, a Catholic missionary in Cochin China, ever ready to connect the least glimmer of historical light with that of Christian revelation, writes, “Whether we consider the commercial relations of the Jews…when, in the height of their power, the combined fleets of Hiram and Solomon went to seek the treasures of Ophir, or whether we come lower down, to the dispersion of the ten tribes who, instead of returning from captivity, set out from the banks of the Euphrates, and reached the shores of the ocean…the shining of the light of revelation in the far East is not the less incontestable.”
It looks certainly “incontestable” enough if we reverse the position and admit that all the light that ever shone on the Israelites came to them from this “far East”, passing first through the Chaldeans and Egyptians.”
H. P. Blavatsky