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THE SECRET DOCTRINE -- THE SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY |
BOOK II. — PART I.ANTHROPOGENESIS.STANZAS TRANSLATED WITH COMMENTARIES FROM THE SECRET BOOK OF DZYAN.In primeval times, a maiden, . . . . . . . . . . . Seven hundred years she wandered, . . . . . . . . . . . Ere a beauteous duck descending, . . . . . . . . . . . Lightly on the knee she settles, (Kalevala, Rune I.) ANTHROPOGENESIS IN THE SECRET VOLUME. (verbatim extracts. [1]) I.1. The Lha which turns the fourth is subservient to the Lha of the Seven, they who revolve driving their chariots around their Lord, the One Eye. His breath gave life to the Seven; it gave life to the first. 2. Said the Earth: — “Lord of the Shining Face; my house is empty . . . . send thy sons to people this wheel. Thou hast sent thy seven sons to the Lord of Wisdom. Seven times doth he see thee nearer to himself, seven times more doth he feel thee. Thou hast forbidden thy servants, the small rings, to catch thy light and heat, thy great bounty to intercept on its passage. Send now to thy servant the same.” 3. Said the “Lord of the Shining Face”: — “I shall send thee a fire when thy work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other Lokas; apply to thy father, the Lord of the Lotus, for his sons . . . . thy people shall be under the rule of the Fathers. Thy men shall be mortals. The men of the Lord of Wisdom, not the Lunar Sons, are immortal. Cease thy complaints. Thy seven skins are yet on thee . . . . thou art not ready. Thy men are not ready.” 4. After great throes she cast off her old three and put on her new seven skins, and stood in her first one. II.5. The wheel whirled for thirty crores more. It constructed rupas: soft stones that hardened; hard plants that softened. Visible from invisible, insects and small lives. She shook them off her back whenever they overran the mother. . . . After thirty crores she turned round. She lay on her back; on her side . . . She would call no sons of Heaven, she would ask no sons of Wisdom. She created from her own bosom. She evolved water-men, terrible and bad. 6. The water-men terrible and bad she herself created from the remains of others, from the dross and slime of her first, second, and third, she formed them. The Dhyani came and looked — The Dhyani from the bright Father-mother, from the white regions they came, from the abodes of the immortal mortals. 7. Displeased they were. Our flesh is not there. No fit rupas for our brothers of the fifth. No dwellings for the lives. Pure waters, not turbid, they must drink. Let us dry them. 8. The flames came. The fires with the sparks; the night fires and the day fires. They dried out the turbid dark waters. With their heat they quenched them. The Lhas of the High, the Lhamayin of below, came. They slew the forms which were two- and four-faced. They fought the goat-men, and the dog-headed men, and the men with fishes’ bodies. 9. Mother-water, the great sea, wept. She arose, she disappeared in the moon which had lifted her, which had given her birth. 10. When they were destroyed, Mother-earth remained bare. She asked to be dried. III.11. The Lord of the Lords came. From her body he separated the waters, and that was Heaven above, the first Heaven. 12. The great Chohans called the Lords of the Moon, of the airy bodies. “Bring forth men, men of your nature. Give them their forms within. She will build coverings without. Males-females will they be. Lords of the Flame also . . . . “ 13. They went each on his allotted land: seven of them each on his lot. The Lords of the Flame remain behind. They would not go, they would not create. IV.14. The Seven Hosts, the “Will-born Lords,” propelled by the Spirit of Life-giving, separate men from themselves, each on his own zone. 15. Seven times seven Shadows of future men were born, each of his own colour and kind. Each inferior to his father. The fathers, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny were Bhuta, with neither form nor mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya. 16. How are the Manushya born? The Manus with minds, how are they made? The fathers called to their help their own fire; which is the fire that burns in Earth. The Spirit of the Earth called to his help the Solar Fire. These three produced in their joint efforts a good Rupa. It could stand, walk, run, recline, or fly. Yet it was still but a Chhaya, a shadow with no sense . . . . 17. The breath needed a form; The Fathers gave it. The breath needed a gross body; the Earth moulded it. The breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it into its form. The breath needed a Mirror of its Body; “We gave it our own,” said the Dhyanis. The Breath needed a Vehicle of Desires; “It has it,” said the Drainer of Waters. But Breath needs a mind to embrace the Universe; “We cannot give that,” said the Fathers. “I never had it,” said the Spirit of the Earth. “The form would be consumed were i to give it mine,” said the Great Fire . . . . Man remained an empty senseless Bhuta . . . . Thus have the boneless given life to those who became men with bones in the third. V.18. The first were the sons of Yoga. Their sons the children of the Yellow Father and the White Mother. 19. The Second Race was the product by budding and expansion, the A-Sexual from the Sexless. [2] Thus was, O Lanoo, the Second Race produced. 20. Their fathers were the self-born. The self-born, the Chhaya from the brilliant bodies of the Lords, the Fathers, the Sons of Twilight. 21. When the Race became old, the old waters mixed with the fresher waters. When its drops became turbid, they vanished and disappeared in the new stream, in the hot stream of life. The outer of the first became the inner of the second. The old Wing became the new Shadow, and the Shadow of the Wing. VI.22. Then the second evolved the Egg-born, the third. The sweat grew, its drops grew, and the drops became hard and round. The Sun warmed it; the Moon cooled and shaped it; the wind fed it until its ripeness. The white swan from the starry vault overshadowed the big drop. The egg of the future race, the Man-swan of the later third. First male-female, then man and woman. 23. The self-born were the Chhayas: the Shadows from the bodies of the Sons of Twilight. VII.24. The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down, they saw the vile forms of the First Third, “We can choose,” said the Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some entered the Chhaya. Some projected the Spark. Some deferred till the Fourth. From their own Rupa they filled the Kama. Those who entered became Arhats. Those who received but a spark, remained destitute of knowledge; the spark burned low. The third remained mind-less. Their Jivas were not ready. These were set apart among the Seven. They became narrow-headed. The Third were ready. “In these shall we dwell,” said the Lords of the Flame. 25. How did the Manasa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They rejected the Self-born. They are not ready. They spurned the Sweat-born. They are not quite ready. They would not enter the first Egg-born. 26. When the Sweat-born produced the Egg-born, the twofold and the mighty, the powerful with bones, the Lords of Wisdom said: “Now shall we create.” 27. The Third Race became the Vahan of the Lords of Wisdom. It created “Sons of Will and Yoga,” by Kriyasakti it created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. VIII.28. From the drops of sweat; from the residue of the substance; matter from dead bodies of men and animals of the wheel before; and from cast-off dust, the first animals were produced. 29. Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying Sarpas were added to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the air. 30. During the third Race the boneless animals grew and changed: they became animals with bones, their Chhayas became solid. 31. The animals separated the first. They began to breed. The two-fold man separated also. He said: “Let us as they; let us unite and make creatures.” They did. 32. And those which had no spark took huge she-animals unto them. They begat upon them dumb Races. Dumb they were themselves. But their tongues untied. The tongues of their progeny remained still. Monsters they bred. A race of crooked red-hair-covered monsters going on all fours. A dumb race to keep the shame untold. IX.33. Seeing which, the Lhas who had not built men, wept, saying: — 34. “The Amanasa have defiled our future abodes. This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen. They did . . . . 35. Then all men became endowed with Manas. They saw the sin of the mindless. 36. The Fourth Race developed speech. 37. The One became Two; also all the living and creeping things that were still one, giant fish-birds and serpents with shell-heads. X.38. Thus two by two on the seven zones, the Third Race gave birth to the Fourth-Race men; the gods became no-gods; the sura became a-sura. 39. The first, on every zone, was moon-coloured; the second yellow like gold; the third red; the fourth brown, which became black with sin. The first seven human shoots were all of one complexion. The next seven began mixing. 40. Then the Fourth became tall with pride. We are the kings, it was said; we are the gods. 41. They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the narrow-headed. They bred monsters. Wicked demons, male and female, also Khado (dakini), with little minds. 42. they built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped. Then the Third Eye acted no longer. XI.43. They built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built, and out of the fires vomited, out of the white stone of the mountains and of the black stone, they cut their own images in their size and likeness, and worshipped them. 44. They built great images nine yatis high, the size of their bodies. Inner fires had destroyed the land of their fathers. The water threatened the fourth. 45. The first great waters came. They swallowed the seven great islands. 46. All Holy saved, the Unholy destroyed. With them most of the huge animals, produced from the sweat of the earth. XII.47. Few men remained: some yellow, some brown and black, and some red remained. The moon-coloured were gone forever. 48. The fifth produced from the Holy stock remained; it was ruled over by the first divine Kings. 49. . . . . Who re-descended, who made peace with the fifth, who taught and instructed it. . . . . . STANZA I. [3] BEGINNINGS OF SENTIENT LIFE.§§ (1) The Lha,
or Spirit of the Earth. (2) Invocation of the Earth to the Sun. 1. The Lha (a) which turns the fourth (Globe, or our Earth) is servant to the Lha(s) of the seven (the planetary Spirits) (b), they who revolve, driving their chariots around their Lord, the one eye (Loka-Chakshub) of our world. His breath gives life to the seven (gives light to the planets). It gave life to the first (c). “They are all dragons of Wisdom,” adds the commentary (d). (a) Lha is the ancient word in trans-Himalayan regions for “Spirit,” any celestial or superhuman Being, and it covers the whole series of heavenly hierarchies, from Archangel, or Dhyani, down to an angel of darkness, or terrestrial Spirit. (b) This expression shows in plain language that the Spirit-Guardian of our globe, which is the fourth in the chain, is subordinate to the chief Spirit (or God) of the Seven Planetary Genii or Spirits. As already explained, the ancients had, in their Kyriel of gods, seven chief Mystery-gods, whose chief was, exoterically, the visible Sun, or the eighth, and, esoterically, the second Logos, the Demiurge. The seven (who have now become the “Seven Eyes of the Lord” in the Christian religion) were the regents of the seven chief planets; but these were not reckoned according to the enumeration devised later by people who had forgotten, or who had an inadequate notion of, the real Mysteries, and included neither the sun, the moon, nor the earth. The sun was the chief, exoterically, of the twelve great gods, or zodiacal constellations; and, esoterically, the Messiah, the Christos (the subject anointed by the Great Breath, or the One) surrounded by his twelve subordinate powers, also subordinate, in turn, to each of the seven “Mystery-gods” of the planets. “The seven higher make the Seven Lhas create the world,” states a Commentary; which means that our Earth, leaving aside the rest, was created or fashioned by terrestrial spirits, the “Regents” being simply the supervisors. This is the first germ, the seed of that which grew later into the Tree of Astrology and Astrolatry. The Higher ones were the Kosmocratores, the fabricators of our solar system. This is borne out by all the ancient Cosmogonies: that of Hermes, of the Chaldees, of the Aryans, of the Egyptians, and even of the Jews. Heaven’s belt, the signs of the Zodiac (the Sacred animals), are as much the Bne’ Alhim (Sons of the Gods or the Elohim) as the Spirits of the Earth; but they are prior to them. Soma and Sin, Isis and Diana, are all lunar gods or goddesses, called the fathers and mothers of our Earth, which is subordinate to them. But these, in their turn, are subordinate to their “Fathers” and “Mothers” — the latter interchangeable and varying with each nation — the gods and their planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Bel, Brihaspati, etc. (c) “His breath gave life to the seven,” refers as much to the sun, who gives life to the Planets, as to the “High One,” the Spiritual Sun, who gives life to the whole Kosmos. The astronomical and astrological keys opening the gate leading to the mysteries of Theogony can be found only in the later glossaries, which accompany the Stanzas. In the apocalyptic Slokas of the Archaic Records, the language is as symbolical, if less mythical, than in the Puranas. Without the help of the later commentaries, compiled by generations of adepts, it would be impossible to understand the meaning correctly. In the ancient Cosmogonies, the visible and the invisible worlds are the double links of one and the same chain. As the invisible Logos, with its seven hierarchies (represented or personified each by its chief angel or rector), form one power, the inner and the invisible; so, in the world of Forms, the Sun and the seven chief Planets constitute the visible and active potency; the latter “Hierarchy” being, so to speak, the visible and objective Logos of the invisible and (except in the lowest grades) ever-subjective angels. Thus — to anticipate a little by way of illustration — every Race in its evolution is said to be born under the direct influence of one of the Planets: Race the first receiving its breath of life from the Sun, as will be seen later on; while the third humanity — those who fell into generation, or from androgynes became separate entities, one male and the other female — are said to be under the direct influence of Venus, “the little sun in which the solar orb stores his light.” The summation of the Stanzas in Book I. showed the genesis [4] of Gods and men taking rise in, and from, one and the same Point, which is the One Universal, Immutable, Eternal, and absolute Unity. In its primary manifested aspect we have seen it become: (1) in the sphere of objectivity and Physics, Primordial Substance and Force (centripetal and centrifugal, positive and negative, male and female, etc., etc.); (2) in the world of Metaphysics, the Spirit of the Universe, or Cosmic Ideation, called by some the Logos. This Logos is the apex of the Pythagorean triangle. When the triangle is complete it becomes the Tetraktis, or the Triangle in the Square, and is the dual symbol of the four-lettered Tetragrammaton in the manifested Kosmos, and of its radical triple ray in the unmanifested, or its noumenon. Put more metaphysically, the classification given here of Cosmic Ultimates, is more one of convenience than of absolute philosophical accuracy. At the commencement of a great Manvantara, Parabrahm manifests as Mulaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equivalent to the “Unconscious Universal Mind,” etc., of Western Pantheists. It constitutes the Basis of the subject-side of manifested Being, and is the source of all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mulaprakriti or Primordial Cosmic Substance, is the foundation of the object-side of things — the basis of all objective evolution and Cosmogenesis. Force, then, does not emerge with Primordial Substance from Parabrahmic Latency. It is the transformation into energy of the supra-conscious thought of the Logos, infused, so to speak, into the objectivation of the latter out of potential latency in the One Reality. Hence spring the wondrous laws of matter: hence the “primal impress” so vainly discussed by Bishop Temple. Force thus is not synchronous with the first objectivation of Mulaprakriti. But as, apart from it, the latter is absolutely and necessarily inert — a mere abstraction — it is unnecessary to weave too fine a cobweb of subtleties as to the order of succession of the Cosmic Ultimates. Force succeeds Mulaprakriti; but, minus Force, Mulaprakriti is for all practical intents and purposes non-existent. [5] The “Heavenly Man” (Tetragrammaton) who is the Protogonos, Tikkoun, the firstborn from the passive deity and the first manifestation of that deity’s shadow, is the universal form and idea, which engenders the manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four-lettered symbol, in the Kabala, of the Universe itself, also called the second Logos. The second springs from the first and develops the third triangle (see the Sephirothal Tree); from the last of which (the lower host of Angels) men are generated. It is with this third aspect that we shall deal at present. The reader must bear in mind that there is a great difference between the Logos and the Demiurgos, for one is Spirit and the other is Soul; or as Dr. Wilder has it: “Dianoia and Logos are synonymous, Nous being superior and closely in affinity with [[To agathon]], one being the superior apprehending, the other the comprehending — one noetic and the other phrenic.” Moreover, Man was regarded in several systems as the third Logos. The esoteric meaning of the word Logos (speech or word, Verbum) is the rendering in objective expression, as in a photograph, of the concealed thought. The Logos is the mirror reflecting divine mind, and the Universe is the mirror of the Logos, though the latter is the esse of that Universe. As the Logos reflects all in the Universe of Pleroma, so man reflects in himself all that he sees and finds in his Universe, the Earth. It is the three Heads of the Kabala: “Unum intra alterum, et alterum super alterum” (Zohar, Idra Suta, sec. VII). “Every Universe (world or planet) has its own Logos,” says the doctrine. The Sun was always called by the Egyptians “the eye of Osiris,” and was himself the Logos, the first-begotten, or light made manifest to the world, “which is the Mind and divine intellect of the Concealed.” It is only by the sevenfold Ray of this light that we can become cognizant of the Logos through the Demi-urge, regarding the latter as the creator of our planet and everything pertaining to it, and the former as the guiding Force of that “Creator” — good and bad at the same time, the origin of good and the origin of evil. This “Creator” is neither good nor bad per se, but its differentiated aspects in nature make it assume one or the other character. With the invisible and the unknown Universes disseminated through space, none of the sun-gods had anything to do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the “Books of Hermes,” and in every ancient folk lore. It is symbolised generally by the Dragon and the Serpent — the Dragon of Good and the Serpent of Evil, represented on Earth by the right and the left-hand Magic. In the epic poem of Finland, the Kalewala, [6] the origin of the Serpent of Evil is given: it is born from the “spittle of Suoyatar . . . . and endowed with a living Soul by the Principle of Evil,” Hisi. A strife is described between the two, the “thing of Evil” (the Serpent or Sorcerer), and Ahti, the Dragon; “Magic Lemminkainen.” The latter is one of the seven sons of Ilmatar, the virgin “daughter of the air,” she “who fell from heaven into the sea,” before Creation, i.e., Spirit transformed into the matter of sensuous life. There is a world of meaning and Occult thought in these few lines, admirably rendered by Dr. J. M. Crawford, of Cincinnati. The hero Lemminkainen, the good magician,
(d) In China the men of Fohi (or the “Heavenly Man”) are called the twelve Tien-Hoang, the twelve hierarchies of Dhyanis or Angels, with human Faces, and Dragon bodies; the dragon standing for divine Wisdom or Spirit [7]; and they create men by incarnating themselves in seven figures of clay — earth and water — made in the shape of those Tien-hoang, a third allegory; (compare the “Symbols of the Bonzes”). The twelve AEsers of the Scandinavian Eddas do the same. In the Secret Catechism of the Druses of Syria — a legend which is repeated word for word by the oldest tribes about and around the Euphrates — men were created by the “Sons of God” descending on Earth, where, after culling seven Mandragoras, they animated these roots, which became forthwith men. [8] All these allegories point to one and the same origin — to the dual and the triple nature of man; dual, as male and female; triple — as being of spiritual and psychic essence within, and of a material fabric without. 2. Said the Earth, “Lord of the Shining Face (the Sun) my house is empty. . . . Send thy sons to people this wheel (Earth). Thou hast sent thy seven sons to the Lord of Wisdom (a). Seven times doth He see thee nearer to Himself; seven times more doth He feel thee. Thou hast forbidden Thy servants, the small rings, to catch Thy light and heat, Thy great Bounty to intercept on its passage (b). Send now to Thy servant the same!” (c). (a) The “Lord of Wisdom” is Mercury, or Budha. (b) The modern Commentary explains the words as a reference to a well-known astronomical fact, “that Mercury receives seven times more light and heat from the Sun than Earth, or even the beautiful Venus, which receives but twice that amount more than our insignificant Globe.” Whether the fact was known in antiquity may be inferred from the prayer of the “Earth Spirit” to the Sun as given in the text. [9] The Sun however, refuses to people the globe, as it is not ready to receive life as yet. Mercury is, as an astrological planet, still more occult and mysterious than Venus. It is identical with the Mazdean Mithra, the genius, or god, “established between the Sun and the Moon, the perpetual companion of ‘Sun’ of Wisdom.” Pausanias shows him as having an altar in common with Jupiter (Book V). He had wings to express his attendance upon the Sun in its course; and he was called the Nuntis, or Sun-wolf, “solaris luminis particeps.” He was the leader of and the evocator of Souls, the “great Magician” and the Hierophant. Virgil depicts him as taking “his wand to evoke from Orcus the souls plunged therein” — tum virgam capit, hac animas ille evocat Orco. (See also the 21st Fargard of the Vendidad on the celestial militia.) He is the golden-coloured Mercury, the [[chrusophaes Hermes]] whom the Hierophants forbade to name. He is symbolised in Grecian mythology by one of the dogs (vigilance), which watch over the celestial flock (occult wisdom), or Hermes Anubis, or again Agathodaemon. He is the Argus watching over the Earth, and which the latter mistakes for the Sun itself. It is through the intercession of Mercury that the Emperor Julian prayed to the Occult Sun every night; for, as says Vossius: “All the theologians agree to say that Mercury and the Sun are one. . . . He was the most eloquent and the most wise of all the gods, which is not to be wondered at, since Mercury is in such close proximity to the Wisdom and the Word of God (the Sun) that he was confused with both.” (Idolatry, Vol. II., p. 373.) Vossius utters here a greater occult truth than he suspected. The Hermes-Sarameyas of the Greeks is closely related to the Hindu Saram and Sarameya, the divine watchman, “who watches over the golden flock of stars and solar rays.” In the clearer words of the Commentary: — “The Globe, propelled onward by the Spirit of the Earth and his six assistants, gets all its vital forces, life, and powers through the medium of the seven planetary Dhyanis from the Spirit of the Sun. They are his messengers of Light and Life.” “Like each of the seven regions of the Earth, each of the seven [10] First-born (the primordial human groups) receives its light and life from its own especial Dhyani — spiritually, and from the palace (house, the planet) of that Dhyani physically; so with the seven great Races to be born on it. The first is born under the Sun; the second under Brihaspati (Jupiter); the third under Lohitanga (the “fiery-bodied,” Venus, or Sukra); the fourth, under Soma (the Moon, our Globe also, the Fourth Sphere being born under and from the Moon) and Sani, Saturn [11] the Krura-lochana (evil-eyed) and the Asita (the dark); the fifth, under Budha (Mercury).” “So also with man and every
‘man’ in man (every principle). Each gets its
specific quality from its primary (the planetary spirit),
therefore every man is a septenate (or a combination of
principles, each having its origin in a quality of that special
Dhyani). Every active power or force of the earth comes to her
from one of the seven Lords. Light comes through Sukra (Venus),
who receives a triple supply, and gives one-third of it
to the Earth. Therefore the two are called ‘Twin-sisters,’
but the Spirit of the Earth is subservient to the ‘Lord’
of Sukra. Our wise men represent the two Globes, one
over, the other under the double Sign (the primeval
Svastica bereft of its four arms, or the cross
The “double sign” is, as every
student of Occultism knows, the symbol of the male and the female
principles in Nature, of the positive and the negative, for the
Svastica or
“It is through Sukra that the
‘double ones’ (the Hermaphrodites) of the
Third (Root-Race) descended from the first ‘Sweat-born,’
” says the Commentary. Therefore it is represented under the
symbol of This needs explanation. The
diameter, when found isolated in a circle, stands for female
nature, for the first ideal World, self-generated and
self-impregnated by the universally diffused Spirit of Life —
referring thus to the primitive Root-Race also. It becomes
androgynous as the Races and all on Earth develop into their
physical forms, and the symbol is transformed into a circle with a
diameter from which runs a vertical line: expressive of male and
female, not separated as yet — the first and earliest Egyptian
Tau In one of the most ancient Catechisms of Southern India, Madras Presidency, the hermaphrodite goddess Adanari (see also “Indian Pantheon”) has the ansated cross, the Svastica, the “male and female sign,” right in the central part, to denote the pre-sexual state of the Third Race. Vishnu, who is now represented with a lotus growing out of his navel — or the Universe of Brahma evolving out of the central point Nara — is shown in one of the oldest carvings as double-sexed (Vishnu and Lakshmi) standing on a lotus-leaf floating on the water; which water rises in a semicircle and pours through the Svastica, “the source of generation” or of the descent of man. Pythagoras calls Sukra-Venus the Sol alter, “the other Sun.” Of the “seven palaces of the Sun,” that of Lucifer Venus is the third one in Christian and Jewish Kabala, the Zohar making of it the abode of Samael. According to the Occult Doctrine, this planet is our Earth’s primary, and its spiritual prototype. Hence, Sukra’s car (Venus-Lucifer’s) is said to be drawn by an ogdoad of “earth-born horses,” while the steeds of the chariots of the other planets are different. “Every sin committed on Earth is felt by Usanas-Sukra. The Guru of the Daityas is the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Men. Every change on Sukra is felt on, and reflected by, the Earth.” Sukra, or Venus, is thus represented as the preceptor of the Daityas, the giants of the Fourth Race, who, in the Hindu allegory, obtained at one time the sovereignty of all the Earth, and defeated the minor gods. The Titans of the Western allegory are as closely connected with Venus-Lucifer, identified by later Christians with Satan. Therefore, as Venus, equally with Isis, was represented with Cow’s horns on her head, the symbol of mystic Nature, and one that is convertible with, and significant of, the moon, since all these were lunar goddesses, the configuration of this planet is now placed by theologians between the horns of the mystic Lucifer. [16] It is owing to the fanciful interpretation of the archaic tradition, which states that Venus changes simultaneously (geologically) with the Earth; that whatever takes place on the one takes place on the other; and that many and great were their common changes — it is for these reasons that St. Augustine repeats it, applying the several changes of configuration, colour, and even of the orbital paths, to that theologically-woven character of Venus-Lucifer. He even goes so far in his pious fancy as to connect the last changes of the planet with the Noachian and mythical Deluge alleged to have taken place 1796 years B.C. (See “City of God” lxxi., ch. viii.). As Venus has no satellites, it is stated allegorically, that “Asphujit” (this “planet”) adopted the Earth, the progeny of the Moon, “who overgrew its parent and gave much trouble,” a reference to the occult connection between the two. The Regent (of the planet) Sukra [17] loved his adopted child so well that he incarnated as Usanas and gave it perfect laws, which were disregarded and rejected in later ages. Another allegory, in Harivansa, is that Sukra went to Siva asking him to protect his pupils, the Daityas and Asuras, from the fighting gods; and that to further his object he performed a Yoga rite “imbibing the smoke of chaff with his head downwards for 1,000 years.” This refers to the great inclination of the axis of Venus (amounting to 50 degrees), and to its being enveloped in eternal clouds. But it relates only to the physical constitution of the planet. It is with its Regent, the informing Dhyan Chohan, that Occult mysticism has to deal. The allegory which states that for killing Sukra’s mother, Vishnu was cursed by him to be reborn seven times on the Earth, is full of occult philosophical meaning. It does not refer to Vishnu’s Avatars, since these number nine, the tenth being still to come, but to the Races on Earth. Venus, or Lucifer (also Sukra and Usanas) the planet, is the light-bearer of our Earth, in both its physical and mystic sense. The Christians knew it well in early times, since one of the earliest popes of Rome is known by his Pontiff name as Lucifer. “Every world has its parent star and sister planet. Thus Earth is the adopted child and younger brother of Venus, but its inhabitants are of their own kind. . . . All sentient complete beings (full septenary men or higher beings) are furnished, in their beginnings, with forms and organisms in full harmony with the nature and state of the sphere they inhabit.” [18] “The Spheres of Being, or centres of life, which are isolated nuclei breeding their men and their animals, are numberless; not one has any resemblance to its sister-companion or to any other in its own special progeny.” [19] “All have a double physical and spiritual nature.” “The nucleoles are eternal and everlasting; the nuclei periodical and finite. The nucleoles form part of the absolute. They are the embrasures of that black impenetrable fortress, which is for ever concealed from human or even Dhyanic sight. The nuclei are the light of eternity escaping therefrom.” “It is that Light which condenses into the forms of the ‘Lords of Being’ — the first and the highest of which are, collectively, Jivatma, or Pratyagatma (said figuratively to issue from Paramatma. It is the Logos of the Greek philosophers — appearing at the beginning of every new Manvantara). From these downwards — formed from the ever-consolidating waves of that light, which becomes on the objective plane gross matter — proceed the numerous hierarchies of the Creative Forces, some formless, others having their own distinctive form, others, again, the lowest (Elementals), having no form of their own, but assuming every form according to the surrounding conditions.” “Thus there is but one Absolute Upadhi (basis) in the spiritual sense, from, on, and in which, are built for Manvantaric purposes the countless basic centres on which proceed the Universal, cyclic, and individual Evolutions during the active period.” “The informing Intelligences, which animate these various centres of Being, are referred to indiscriminately by men beyond the Great Range [20] as the Manus, the Rishis, the Pitris [21], the Prajapati, and so on; and as Dhyani Buddhas, the Chohans, Melhas (fire-gods), Bodhisattvas, [22] and others, on this side. The truly ignorant call them gods; the learned profane, the one God; and the wise, the Initiates, honour in them only the Manvantaric manifestations of that which neither our Creators (the Dhyan Chohans) nor their creatures can ever discuss or know anything about. The absolute is not to be defined, and no mortal or immortal has ever seen or comprehended it during the periods of Existence. The mutable cannot know the Immutable, nor can that which lives perceive Absolute Life.” Therefore, man cannot know higher beings than his own “progenitors.” “Nor shall he worship them, “but he ought to learn how he came into the world. (c) Number Seven, the fundamental figure among all other figures in every national religious system, from Cosmogony down to man, must have its raison d’etre. It is found among the ancient Americans, as prominently as among the archaic Aryans and Egyptians. The question will be fully dealt with in the second part of this Book; meanwhile a few facts may be given here. Says the author of the “Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches, 11,500 years ago” [23]: — “Seven seems to have been the sacred number par excellence among all civilised nations of antiquity. Why? Each separate people has given a different explanation, according to the peculiar tenets of their (exoteric) religion. That it was the number of numbers for those initiated into the sacred mysteries, there can be no doubt. Pythagoras . . . calls it the ‘Vehicle of Life’ containing body and soul, since it is formed of a Quaternary, that is Wisdom and intellect, and of a Trinity or action and matter. The Emperor Julian, ‘In matrem, etc.,’ expresses himself thus: ‘Were I to touch upon the initiation into our Sacred Mysteries, which the Chaldees Bacchized, respecting the seven-rayed god, lighting up the soul through him, I should say things unknown to the rabble, very unknown, but well known to the blessed Theurgists.’ ” (p. 141). And who, acquainted with the Puranas, the Book of the Dead, the Zendavesta, the Assyrian tiles, and finally the Bible, and who has observed the constant occurrence of the number seven, in these records of people living from the remotest times unconnected and so far apart, can regard as a coincidence the following fact, given by the same explorer of ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of seven as a mystic number, among the inhabitants of the “Western continent” (of America), he adds that it is not less remarkable. For: — “It frequently occurs in the Popul-vuh . . . we find it besides in the seven families said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical personage named Votan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. In the seven caves [24] from which the ancestors of the Nahuatl are reported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described by Coronado and Niza. . . . In the seven Antilles; in the seven heroes who, we are told, escaped the Deluge . . . .” “Heroes,” moreover, whose number is found the same in every “Deluge” story — from the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to Noah’s ark, into which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by “Sevens.” Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called “celestial numbers” in the canonical “Book of Changes.” (Yi King, or transformation, as in “Evolution”). The explanation of it becomes evident
when one examines the ancient Symbols: all these are based upon and
start from the figures given from the Archaic Manuscript in the
proem of Book I. “The universe,” says every Philosophy and Cosmogony, “hath a Ruler (Rulers collectively) set over it, which is called the Word (Logos); the fabricating Spirit is its Queen: which two are the First Power after the One.” These are the Spirit and Nature, which two form our illusory universe. The two inseparables remain in the Universe of Ideas so long as it lasts, and then merge back into Parabrahm, the One ever changeless. “The Spirit, whose essence is eternal, one and self-existent,” emanates a pure ethereal light — a dual light not perceptible to the elementary senses — in the Puranas, in the Bible, in the Sepher Jezirah, the Greek and Latin hymns, in the Book of Hermes, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, in the esotericism of Lao-tse, everywhere. In the Kabala, which explains the secret meaning of Genesis, this light is the dual-man, or the Androgyne (rather the sexless) angels, whose generic name is Adam Kadmon. It is they who complete man, whose ethereal form is emanated by other divine, but far lower beings, who solidify the body with clay, or the “dust of the ground” — an allegory indeed, but as scientific as any Darwinian evolution and more true. The author of the “Source of Measures” says that the foundation of the Kabala and all its mystic books is made to rest upon the ten Sephiroth; which is a fundamental truth. [27] He shows these ten Sephiroth or the ten numbers in the following diagram: —
wherein the circle is the naught, its vertical diameter line is the first or primal one (the Word or Logos), from which springs the series of the other numbers up to 9, the limit of the digits. The 10 is the first Divine Manifestation [28] containing “every possible power of exact expression of proportion.” By this Kabalistic speculation we are taught that the Sephiroth “were the numbers or emanations of the Heavenly Light (figures 20612 to 6561), they were the 10 ‘Words,’ dbrim, 41224, the light, of which they were the flux, was the Heavenly Man, the Adam kdm (the 144-144); and the Light, by the New Testament or Covenant (or 41224) created God; just as, by the Old Testament God (Alhim, 31415) creates light (20612 to 6561).” Now there are three kinds of light in Occultism, as in the Kabala. (1) The Abstract and Absolute Light, which is Darkness; (2) The Light of the Manifested-Unmanifested, called by some the Logos; and (3) The latter light reflected in the Dhyan Chohans, the minor logoi (the Elohim, collectively), who, in their turn, shed it on the objective Universe. But in the Kabala — re-edited and carefully adjusted to fit the Christian tenets by the Kabalists of the XIII. century — the three lights are described as: — (1) The clear and penetrating, that of Jehovah; (2) reflected light; and (3) light in the abstract. “This light abstractly taken (in a metaphysical or symbolical sense) is Alhim (Elohim God), while the clear penetrating light is Jehovah. The light of Alhim belongs to the world in general, in its allness and general fulness, but the light of Jehovah is that pertaining to the chiefest production, man, whom this light penetrated and made.” The author of the “Source of Measures” pertinently refers the reader to Inman’s “Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names,” vol. ii., p. 648. There, an engraving of “the vesica piscis, Mary and the female emblem, copied from a rosary of the blessed Virgin . . . . printed at Venice, 1542,” and therefore, as Inman remarks, “with a license from the Inquisition, consequently orthodox,” will show the reader what the Latin Church understood by this “penetrating power of light and its effects” How sadly disfigured — applied as they were to the grossest anthropomorphic conceptions — have become, under Christian interpretation, the noblest and grandest, as the most exalted, ideas of deity of the Eastern philosophy! The Occultists call this light Daiviprakriti in the East, and light of Christos in the West. It is the light of the logos, the direct reflection of the ever Unknowable on the plane of Universal manifestation. But here is the interpretation thereof given by the modern Christians from the Kabala. As declared by the author just cited: — “To the fulness of the world in general with its chiefest content, man, the term Elohim-Jehovah applies. In extracts from the Zohar, the Rev. Dr. Cassell (a Kabalist), to prove that the Cabbalah sets forth the doctrine of the Trinity, among other things says: ‘Jehovah is Elohim (Alhim) . . . by three steps God (Alhim), and Jehovah become the same, and though separated each and together, they are of the same one.’ ” Similarly, Vishnu becomes the Sun, the visible symbol of the impersonal deity. Vishnu is described as “striding through the seven regions of the Universe in three steps.” But with the Hindus this is an exoteric account, a surface tenet and an allegory, while the Kabalists give it out as the esoteric and final meaning. But to proceed: — “Now light,” explains the author, “as shown, is 20612 to 6561, as the proper enunciation of the integral and numerical relation of diameter to circumference of a circle. God (Alhim, i.e., 3.1415 to one, a modified form of the above) is the reduction of this, so as to obtain a standard unit one, as the basis, in general, of all calculation and all mensuration. But, for the production of animal life, and for especial time measure or the lunar year, that influence which causes conception and embryotic development, the numbers of the Jehovah measure (‘man even Jehovah’ measure), viz. 113 to 355, have to be specialised. [29] But this last ratio is but a modified form of light or 20612 to 6561, as a ‘[[pi]]’ value, being only a variation of the same (that is 20612 to 6561 is 31415 to one, or Alhim or God) — and in such a manner that one can be made to flow into and be derived from the other, and these are the three steps by which the Unity and sameness can be shown of the divine names. That is, the two are but variations of the same ratio, viz., that of ‘[[pi]].’ The object of this comment is to show the same measuring use for the Cabbalah as was employed in the three Covenants of the Bible, and in the symbols of Masonry, as just noticed.” “First then, the Sephiroth are
described as Light, that is, they themselves are a function
of, indeed, the same as, the manifestation of Ain-Soph; and they are
so from the fact that Light represents the ratio of 20612
to 6561, as part of the ‘Words,’ dbrim,
41224, or as to the Word, Debar, 206 (= 10 cubits). Light
is so much the burden of the Kabbalah, in explaining the Sephiroth,
that the most famous book on the Kabbalah is called Zohar
or Light. In this we find expressions of this kind: — ‘The
Infinite was entirely unknown and diffused no light before the
luminous point violently broke through into vision . . . .’ ‘When he
first assumed the form (of the Crown, or the first Sephira), he
caused 9 splendid lights to emanate from it, which, shining through
it, diffused a bright light in all directions’: that is, these 9
with his one (which was the origin, as above, of the nine), together
made the 10, that is In Sepher Jezirah, or Numbers of Creation, the whole process of evolution is given out in Numbers. In its “32 paths of Wisdom” the number 3 is repeated four times, and the number 4 five times. Therefore, the Wisdom of God is contained in numbers (Sephrim or Sephiroth), for Sepher (or S-ph-ra when unvowelled) means “to cipher.” And therefore, also, we find Plato stating that the deity geometrizes in fabricating the Universe. The Kabalistic book, the Sepher Jezirah, opens with a statement of the hidden wisdom of Alhim in Sephrim, i.e., the Elohim in the Sephiroth. “In thirty and two paths, hidden wisdom, established Jah, jhvh, Tzabaoth, Elohi of Israel, Alhim of Life, El of Grace and Mercy — exalted, uplifted Dweller on high, and King of Everlasting, and his name — Holy! in three Sephrim: viz: — B-S’ph-r, V-S’ph-r, V-Siph-o-r.” “This Comment sets forth ‘the Hidden Wisdom’ of the original text by hidden Wisdom, that is, by the use of words carrying a special set of Numbers and a special phraseology, which will set forth the very explanatory system which we find to fit so accurately in the Hebrew Bible. . . . . In setting forth his scheme, to enforce it, and to finish out his detailed exposition in a general postulate, viz., the one word Sephrim (Sephiroth) of the Number Jezirah, the author explains the separation of this word in the three subordinate ones, a play upon a common word s-ph-r, or number.” The prince Al-Chazari says to the Rabbi [30]: — “I wish now that thou wouldest impart to me some of the chiefest or leading principles of Natural Philosophy, which as thou sayest were in former times worked out by them (the Ancient Wise Ones)”; to which the Rabbi makes answer: — “To such principles appertains the Number of Creation of our Race-father Abraham” (that is Abram and Abraham, or numbers 41224 and 41252). He then says that this book of Number treats of teaching the Alhim-ness and One-ness through, “dbrim,” viz., the numbers of the Word “Words.” That is, it teaches the use of the ratio 31415 to one, through 41224, which last, in the description of the Ark of the Covenant, was divided into two parts by two tables of stone, on which these, dbrim or 41224, were written or engraved — or 20612 by 2. He then comments on these three subordinately used words, and takes care as to one of them to make the comment: — “And Alhim (31415 to 1) said: Let there be Light (20612 to 6561).” The three words as given in the text
are: The reader is asked to turn to Stanza IV. of Book I. and its fourth commentary to find that the 3, 4 — (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065, the number of Jehovah, is the number of the 21 Prajapati mentioned in the Mahabharata, or the three Sephrim (words in cipher or figures). And this comparison between the Creative Powers of Archaic philosophy and the anthropomorphic Creator of exoteric Judaism (since their esotericism shows its identity with the Secret Doctrine) will lead the student to perceive and discover that, in truth, Jehovah is but a lunar and “generation” god. (See Book 1, Part 2, “Deus Lunus.”) It is a fact well known to every conscientious student of the Kabala, that the deeper he dives into it, the more he feels convinced that unless the Kabala — or what is left of it — is read by the light of the Eastern esoteric philosophy, its study leads only to the discovery that, on the lines traced by exoteric Judaism and Christianity, the monotheism of both is nothing more exalted than ancient Astrolatry, now vindicated by modern Astronomy. The Kabalists never cease to repeat that primal intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and negative. Hence the Ain-Soph — the “unknowable” and the “unnameable” — which, as it could not be made manifest, was conceived to emanate manifesting Powers. It is then with its emanations alone that human intellect has to, and can deal. Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious creations of angels and the rest out of nothing, now finds itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or miracle, and materialism. An extra-cosmic god is fatal to philosophy, an intra-cosmic Deity — i.e. Spirit and matter inseparable from each other — is a philosophical necessity. Separate them and that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of emotionalism. But why “geometrize,” as Plato has it, why represent these emanations under the form of an immense arithmetical table? The question is well answered by the author just cited. His remarks are quoted in Part II., § “The Theogony of the Creative Gods.” “Mental perception,” he says, “to become physical perception, must have the Cosmic principle of light: and by this, our mental circle must become visible through light; or, for its complete manifestation, the Circle must be that of physical visibility, or Light itself. Such conceptions, thus formulated, became the groundwork of the philosophy of the divine manifesting in the Universe.” This is philosophy. It is otherwise when we find the Rabbi in Al-Chazari saying that “under s’ph-r is to be understood calculation and weighing of created bodies. For the calculation, by means of which a body must be constructed in harmony or symmetry, by which it must be in construction rightly arranged and made to correspond to the object in design, consists at last in number, extension, mass, weight; co-ordinate relation of movements, then harmony of music, must consist altogether by number, that is (S’ph-r). . . By Sippor (s’phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim whereunto joins or adapts itself the design of the frame or form of construction; for example, it was said ‘Let Light be.’ The work became as the words were spoken, that is, as the numbers of the work came forth. . . . .” This is materialising the Spiritual without scruple. But the Kabala was not always so well adapted to anthropo-monotheistic conceptions. Compare this with any of the six schools of India. For instance, in Kapila’s “Sankhya” Philosophy, unless, allegorically speaking, Purusha mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti, the latter remains irrational, while the former remains inactive without her. Therefore Nature (in man) must become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever changing forms. Evolution, not creation, by means of words is recognized in the philosophies of the East, even in their exoteric records. Ex oriente lux. Even the name of the first man in the Mosaic Bible had its origin in India, Professor Max Muller’s negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from Chaldea; and Adam-Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold symbol, and proves the occult dogmas. This is no place for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be reminded that the words Ad and Adi mean in Sanskrit “the first”; in Aramaean, “One” (Ad-ad, “the only one”); in Assyrian, “father” whence Ak-Ad or “father-creator. [31] And once the statement is found correct it becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic Bible alone, and to see therein simply a Jewish name. Vide Part II. of this Volume, § “Adam-Adami.” There is frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the gods in their theogonies, as given to the world by the half-initiated writers, Brahmanical and Biblical, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that symbolical science. Yet there could be no such confusion made by the earliest nations, the descendants and pupils of the divine instructors: for both the attributes and the genealogies were inseparably linked with cosmogonical symbols, the “gods” being the life and animating “soul-principle” of the various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no people was speculation allowed to range beyond those manifested gods. The boundless and infinite unity remained with every nation a virgin forbidden soil, untrodden by man’s thought, untouched by fruitless speculation. The only reference made to it was the brief conception of its diastolic and systolic property, of its periodical expansion or dilatation, and contraction. In the Universe with all its incalculable myriads of systems and worlds disappearing and re-appearing in eternity, the anthropomorphised powers, or gods, their Souls, had to disappear from view with their bodies: — “The breath returning to the eternal bosom which exhales and inhales them,” says our Catechism. “Ideal nature,” the abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony. Aditi is Sephira, and the Sophia-Achamoth of the Gnostics, and Isis, the virgin Mother of Horus. In every Cosmogony, behind and higher than the creative deity, there is a superior deity, a planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the unknowable and the unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations. . . . . It thus becomes easy to account for the reason why “Adam-Adami” is found in the Chaldean scripture, certainly earlier than the Mosaic Books. In Assyrian Ad is the father, and in Aramaean Ad is “One,” and Ad-ad the “only one,” while Ak is in Assyrian “creator.” Thus Ad-am-ak-ad-mon became Adam Kadmon in the Kabala (Zohar), meaning as it did, the “One (Son) of the divine Father, or the creator,” for the words “am” and “om” meant at one time in nearly every language the divine, or the deity. Thus Adam Kadmon and Adam-Adami came to mean: — “The first emanation of the Father-Mother or divine nature,” and literally “the first divine one.” And it is easy to see that Ad-Argat (or Aster’t, the Syrian goddess, the consort of Ad-on, the lord god of Syria or the Jewish Adonai), and Venus, Isis, Ister, Mylitta, Eve, etc., etc., are identical with the Aditi and Vach of the Hindus. They are all the “Mothers of all living” and “of the gods.” On the other hand — cosmically and astronomically — all the male gods became at first “Sun-gods,” then, theologically, the “Suns of Righteousness” and the Logoi, all symbolised by the Sun. [32] They are all Protogonoi (the first-born) and Mikroprosopoi. With the Jews Adam Kadmon was the same as Athamaz, Tamaz, or the Adonis of the Greeks — “the One with, and of his father” — the “Father” becoming during the later Races Helios, the Sun, as Apollo Karneios, [33] for instance, who was the “Sun born”; Osiris, Ormazd, and so on, were all followed by, and found themselves transformed later on into still more earthly types: such as Prometheus, the crucified of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many others, sun-gods and heroes, until all of them came to have no better significance than phallic symbols. In the Zohar it is said “Man was created by the Sephiroth (Elohim-Javeh, also) and they engendered by common power the earthly Adam.” Therefore in Genesis the Elohim say: — “Behold Man is become as one of us.” But in Hindu Cosmogony or “Creation,” Brahma-Prajapati creates Viraj and the Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly called “the Mind-born Sons of Brahma”; and this specified mode of engendering precluded every idea of Phallicism, at any rate in the earlier human nations. This instance well illustrates the respective spirituality of the two nations. 3. Said the “Lord of the shining Face.” “I shall send thee a fire when thy work is commenced. Raise thy voice to other Lokas, apply to thy Father the Lord of the Lotus (Kumuda-Pati) (a) for his Sons . . . . Thy people shall be under the rule of the Fathers (Pitri-pati). Thy men shall be mortals. The men of the Lord of Wisdom (Budha, Mercury) not the sons of Soma (the Moon) are immortal. Cease thy complaints (b). Thy seven skins are yet on thee. . . . Thou art not ready. Thy men are not ready (c). (a) Kumuda-Pati is the Moon, the Earth’s parent, in his region of Soma-loka. Though the Pitris (Pitar or “Fathers”) are sons of the Gods, elsewhere sons of Brahma and even Rishis, they are generally known as the “lunar” ancestors. (b) Pitri-pati is the lord or king of the Pitris, Yama, the god of Death and the Judge of mortals. The men of Budha (Mercury) are metaphorically immortal through their Wisdom. Such is the common belief of those who credit every star or planet with being inhabited. (And there are men of science — M. Flammarion among others — who believe in this fervently, on logical as well as on astronomical data). The Moon being an inferior body to the Earth even, to say nothing of other planets, the terrestrial men produced by her sons — the lunar men or “ancestors” — from her shell or body, cannot be immortal. They cannot hope to become real, self-conscious and intelligent men, unless they are finished, so to say, by other creators. Thus in the Puranic legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha (Mercury), “the intelligent” and the Wise, because he is the offspring of Soma, the “regent” of the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus Mercury is the elder brother of the Earth, metaphorically — his step-brother, so to say, the offspring of Spirit — while she (the Earth) is the progeny of the body. These allegories have a deeper and more scientific meaning (astronomically and geologically) then our modern physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle of the “first War in Heaven,” the Taraka-maya, is as full of philosophical as of Cosmogonical and astronomical truths. One can trace therein the biographies of all the planets by the history of their gods and rulers. Usanas (Sukra, or Venus), the bosom-friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter) the instructor of the gods, whose wife Tara (or Taraka) had been carried away by the Moon, Soma — “of whom he begat Budha” — took also an active part in this war against “the gods” and forthwith was degraded into a demon (Asura) deity, and so he remains to this day. [34] Here the word “men” refers to the celestial men, or what are called in India the pitar or pitris, the Fathers, the progenitors of men. This does not remove the seeming difficulty, in view of modern hypotheses, of the teaching, which shows these progenitors or ancestors creating the first human Adams out of their sides: as astral shadows. And though it is an improvement on Adam’s rib, still geological and climatic difficulties will be brought forward. Such, however, is the teaching of Occultism. (c) Man’s organism was adapted in every race to its surroundings. The first Root-Race was as ethereal as ours is material. The progeny of the seven Creators, who evolved the seven primordial Adams, [35] surely required no purified gases to breathe and live upon (see Part III. of this Volume). Therefore, however strongly the impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees of modern science, the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated aeons of years before even the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which itself took place 18,000,000 years ago. [36] Preliminary evolution is described in one of the Books of Dzyan and the Commentaries thereon in this wise: — Archaic Scripture teaches that at the commencement of every local Kalpa, or Round, the earth is reborn; “as the human Jiva (monad), when passing into a new womb, gets re-covered with a new body, so does the Jiva of the Earth; it gets a more perfect and solid covering with each Round after re-emerging once more from the matrix of space into objectivity” (Comment). This process is attended, of course, by the throes of the new birth or geological convulsions. Thus the only reference to it is contained in one verse of the volume of the Book of Dzyan before us, where it says: 4. And after great throes she (the Earth) cast off her old three and put on her new seven skins, and stood in her first one (a). (a) This refers to the growth of the Earth, whereas in the Stanza treating of the First Round it is said (given in the Commentary): — “After the changeless (avikara) immutable nature (Essence, sadaikarupa) had awakened and changed (differentiated) into (a state of) causality (avayakta), and from cause (Karana) had become its own discrete effect (vyakta), from invisible it became visible. The smallest of the small (the most atomic of atoms, or aniyamsam aniyasam) became one and the many (ekanekarupa); and producing the Universe produced also the Fourth Loka (our Earth) in the garland of the seven lotuses. The Achyuta then became the Chyuta. [37] The Earth is said to cast off her old three skins, because this refers to the three preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present being the fourth Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new Round, after a period of “obscuration,” the earth (as do also the other six “earths”) casts off, or is supposed to cast off, her old skins as the Serpent does: therefore she is called in the Aitareya-Brahmana the Sarpa Rajni, “the Queen of the Serpents,” and “the mother of all that moves.” The “Seven Skins,” in the first of which she now stands, refer to the seven geological changes which accompany and correspond to the evolution of the Seven Root-Races of Humanity. Stanza II., which speaks of this Round, begins with a few words of information concerning the age of our Earth. The chronology will be given in its place. In the Commentary appended to the Stanza, two personages are mentioned: Narada and Asura Maya, especially the latter. All the calculations are attributed to this archaic celebrity; and what follows will make the reader superficially acquainted with some of these figures. To the mind of the Eastern student of Occultism, two figures are indissolubly connected with mystic astronomy, chronology, and their cycles. Two grand and mysterious figures, towering like two giants in the Archaic Past, emerge before him, whenever he has to refer to Yugas and Kalpas. When, at what period of pre-history they lived, none save a few men in the world know, or ever can know with that certainty which is required by exact chronology. It may have been 100,000 years ago, it may have been 1,000,000, for all that the outside world will ever know. The mystic West and Freemasonry talk loudly of Enoch and Hermes. The mystic East speaks of Narada, the old Vedic Rishi, and of Asuramaya, the Atlantean. It has already been hinted that of all the incomprehensible characters in the Mahabharata and the Puranas, Narada, the son of Brahma in Matsya Purana, the progeny of Kasyapa and the daughter of Daksha in the Vishnu Purana, is the most mysterious. He is referred to by the honourable title of Deva Rishi (divine Rishi, more than a demi-god) by Parasara, and yet he is cursed by Daksha and even by Brahma. He informs Kansa that Bhagavat (or Vishnu in exotericism) would incarnate in the eighth child of Devaki, and thus brings the wrath of the Indian Herod upon Krishna’s mother; and then, from the cloud on which he is seated — invisible as a true Manasaputra — he lauds Krishna, in delight at the Avatar’s feat of killing the monster Kesim. Narada is here, there, and everywhere; and yet, none of the Puranas gives the true characteristics of this great enemy of physical procreation. Whatever those characteristics may be in Hindu Esotericism, Narada — who is called in Cis-Himalayan Occultism Pesh-Hun, the “Messenger,” or the Greek Angelos — is the sole confidant and the executor of the universal decrees of Karma and Adi-Budh: a kind of active and ever incarnating logos, who leads and guides human affairs from the beginning to the end of the Kalpa. “Pesh-Hun” is a general not a special Hindu possession. He is the mysterious guiding intelligent power, which gives the impulse to, and regulates the impetus of cycles, Kalpas and universal events. [38] He is Karma’s visible adjuster on a general scale; the inspirer and the leader of the greatest heroes of this Manvantara. In the exoteric works he is referred to by some very uncomplimentary names; such as “Kali-Karaka,” strife-maker, “Kapi-vaktra,” monkey-faced, and even “Pisuna,” the spy, though elsewhere he is called Deva-Brahma. Even Sir W. Jones was strongly impressed with this mysterious character from what he gathered in his Sanskrit Studies. He compares him to Hermes and Mercury, and calls him “the eloquent messenger of the gods” (see Asiat. Res. I. p. 264). All this led the late Dr. Kenealy (“Book of God”), on the ground that the Hindus believe him to be a great Rishi, “who is for ever wandering about the earth, giving good counsel,” to see in him one of his twelve Messiahs. He was, perhaps, not so far off the real track as some imagine. What Narada really is, cannot be explained in print; nor would the modern generations of the profane gather much from the information. But it may be remarked, that if there is in the Hindu Pantheon a deity which resembles Jehovah, in, tempting by “suggestion” of thoughts and “hardening” of the hearts of those whom he would make his tools and victims, it is Narada. Only with the latter it is no desire to obtain a pretext for “plaguing,” and thus showing that “I am the Lord God.” Nor is it through any ambitious or selfish motive; but, verily, to serve and guide universal progress and evolution. Narada is one of the few prominent characters, save some gods, in the Puranas, who visits the so-called nether or infernal regions, Patala. Whether or not it was from his intercourse with the thousand-headed Sesha, the serpent who bears the seven Patalas and the entire world like a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great teacher of astronomy, [39] that Narada learned all that he knew, certain it is that he surpasses Garga’s Guru in his knowledge of cyclic intricacies. It is he who has charge of our progress and national weal or woe. It is he who brings on wars and puts an end to them. In the old Stanzas Pesh-Hun is credited with having calculated and recorded all the astronomical and cosmic cycles to come, and with having taught the Science to the first gazers at the starry vault. And it is Asuramaya, who is said to have based all his astronomical works upon those records, to have determined the duration of all the past geological and cosmical periods, and the length of the all the cycles to come, till the end of this life-cycle, or the end of the seventh Race. There is a work among the Secret Books, called the “Mirror of Futurity,” wherein all the Kalpas within Kalpas and cycles within the bosom of Sesha, or infinite Time, are recorded. This work is ascribed to Pesh-Hun Narada. There is another old work which is attributed to various Atlanteans. It is these two Records which furnish us with the figures of our cycles, and the possibility of calculating the date of cycles to come. The chronological calculations which will presently be given are, however, those of the Brahmins as explained further on; but most of them are also those of the Secret Doctrine. The chronology and computations of the Brahmin Initiates are based upon the Zodiacal records of India, and the works of the above-mentioned astronomer and magician — Asuramaya. The Atlantean zodiacal records cannot err, as they were compiled under the guidance of those who first taught astronomy, among other things, to mankind. But here again we are deliberately and recklessly facing a new difficulty. We shall be told that our statement is contradicted by science, in the person of a man regarded as a great authority (in the West) upon all subjects of Sanskrit literature — Professor Albrecht Weber, of Berlin. This, to our great regret, cannot be helped; and we are ready to maintain what is now stated. Asuramaya, to whom the epic tradition points as the earliest astronomer in Aryavarta, one to whom “the Sun-god imparted the knowledge of the stars,” in propria persona, as Dr. Weber himself states, is identified by him, in some very mysterious way, with the “Ptolemaios” of the Greeks. No more valid reason is given for this identification than that “this latter name (Ptolemaios), as we see from the inscription of Piyadasi, became the Indian ‘Turamaya,’ out of which the name ‘Asuramaya’ might very easily grow.” No doubt it “might,” but the vital question is — Are there any good proofs that it has thus grown? The only evidence that is given for it is, that it must be so: “since this Maya is distinctly assigned to Romaka-pura in the West.” [40] The Maya is evident, since no Sanskritist among Europeans can tell where that locality of “Romaka-pura” was, except, indeed, that it was somewhere “in the West.” Anyhow, as no member of the Asiatic Society, or Western Orientalist, will ever listen to a Brahmanical teaching, it is useless to take the objections of European Orientalists into consideration. “Romakapura” was in “the West,” certainly, since it was part and parcel of the last continent of Atlantis. And it is equally certain that it is Atlantis, which is assigned in the Hindu Puranas as the birth-place of Asuramaya, “as great a magician as he was an Astrologer and an Astronomer.” Moreover, Prof. Weber refuses to assign any great antiquity to the Indian Zodiac, and feels inclined to think that the Hindus never knew of a Zodiac at all till “they had borrowed one from the Greeks.” [41] This statement clashes with the most ancient traditions of India, and must therefore be ignored. (Vide “The Zodiac and its Antiquity”). We are the more justified in ignoring it, as the learned German Professor himself tells us in the introduction to his work (History of Sanskrit Literature) that “in addition to the natural obstacles which impede investigation (in India), there still prevails a dense mist of prejudices and preconceived opinions hovering over the land, and enfolding it as with a veil.” Caught in that veil, it is no wonder that Dr. Weber should himself have been led into involuntary errors. Let us hope that he knows better now. Now whether Asuramaya is to be considered a modern myth, a personage who flourished in the day of the Macedonian Greeks, or as that which he is claimed to be by the Occultists, in any case his calculations agree entirely with those of the Secret Records. From fragments of immensely old works attributed to the Atlantean astronomer, and found in Southern India, the calendar elsewhere mentioned was compiled by two very learned Brahmins [42] in 1884 and 1885. The work is proclaimed by the best Pundits as faultless — from the Brahmanical standpoint — and thus far relates to the chronology of the orthodox teachings. If we compare its statements with those made several years earlier in “Isis Unveiled,” with the fragmentary teachings published by some Theosophists, and with the present data derived from the Secret Books of Occultism, the whole will be found to agree perfectly, save in some details which may not be explained; for secrets of higher Initiation — as unknown to the writer as they are to the reader — would have to be revealed, and that cannot be done. (But see “Chronology of the Brahmins” at the close of Stanza II.) STANZA II. NATURE UNAIDED FAILS.
5. The Wheel whirled for thirty crores (of years, or 300,000,000 [43]). It constructed rupas (forms). Soft stones, that hardened (minerals); hard plants, that softened (vegetation). Visible from invisible, insects and small lives (sarisripa, swapada). She (the Earth) shook them off her back, whenever they overran the mother (a). After thirty crores of years, she turned round. She laid on her back; on her side. . . . . She would call no sons of Heaven, she would ask no sons of Wisdom. She created from her own bosom. she evolved water-men terrible and bad (b). (a) This relates to an inclination of the axis — of which there were several — to a consequent deluge and chaos on Earth (having, however, no reference to primeval chaos), in which monsters, half-human, half-animal, were generated. We find it mentioned in the “Book of the Dead,” and also in the Chaldean account of creation, on the Cutha Tablets, however mutilated. It is not even allegory. Here we have facts, that are found repeated in the account of Pymander, as well as in the Chaldean tablets of creation. The verses may almost be checked by the Cosmogony, as given by Berosus, which has been disfigured out of recognition by Eusebius, but some of the features of which may yet be found in fragments left by ancient Greek authors — Apollodorus, Alexander Polyhistor, etc., etc. “The water-men terrible and bad,” who were the production of physical nature alone, a result of the “evolutionary impulse” and the first attempt to create man the “crown,” and the aim and goal of all animal life on Earth — are shown to be failures in our Stanzas. Do we not find the same in the Berosian Cosmogony, denounced with such vehemence as the culmination of heathen absurdity? And yet who of the Evolutionists can say that things in the beginning have not come to pass as they are described? That, as maintained in the Puranas, the Egyptian and Chaldean fragments, and even in Genesis, there have not been two, and even more, “creations” before the last formation of the Globe; which, changing its geological and atmospheric conditions, changed also its flora, its fauna, and its men? This claim agrees not only with every ancient Cosmogony, but also with modern science, and even, to a certain degree, with the theory of evolution, as may be demonstrated in a few words. There is no “dark creation,” no “Evil Dragon” conquered by a Sun-God, in the earliest World-Cosmogonies. Even with the Akkads, the great Deep (the Watery Abyss, or Space) was the birthplace and abode of Ea, Wisdom, the incognizable infinite Deity. But with the Semites and the later Chaldeans, the fathomless Deep of Wisdom becomes gross matter, sinful Substance, and Ea is changed into Tiamat, the dragon slain by Merodach, or Satan, in the astral waves. In the Hindu Puranas, Brahma, the creator, is seen recommencing de novo several creations after as many failures; and two great creations are mentioned, [44] the Padma and the Varaha, the present, when the Earth was lifted out of the water by Brahma, in the shape of a boar, or “Varaha Avatar.” Creation is shown as a sport, an amusement (Lila) of the creative god. The Zohar speaks of primordial worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence. And the same is said in Midraish, Rabbi Abahu explaining distinctly (in Bereschith Rabba, Parscha IX.) that “the Holy One” had successively created and destroyed sundry worlds, before he succeeded in the present one. This does not relate only to other worlds in space, but to a mystery of our own globe contained in the allegory about the “kings of Edom.” For the words, “This one pleases me,” are repeated in Genesis i. 31, though in disfigured terms, as usual. The Chaldean fragments of Cosmogony on the Cuneiform inscriptions, and elsewhere, show two distinct creations of animals and men, the first being destroyed, as it was a failure. The Cosmogonical tablets prove that this our actual creation was preceded by others (See “Hibbert Lectures,” p. 390); and as shown by the author of “The Qabbalah,” in the Zohar, Siphrah Dzeniouta, in Jovah Rabbah, 128a, etc., etc. The Kabala states the same. (b) Oannes (or Dagon, the Chaldean “Man-fish”) divides his Cosmogony and Genesis into two portions. First the abyss of waters and darkness, wherein resided most hideous beings — men with wings, four and two-faced men, human beings with two heads, with the legs and horns of a goat (our “goat-men,”) [45] hippocentaurs, bulls with the heads of men, and dogs with tails of fishes. In short, combinations of various animals and men, of fishes, reptiles and other monstrous animals assuming each other’s shapes and countenances. The feminine element they resided in, is personified by Thalatth — the Sea, or “Water” — which was finally conquered by Belus, the male principle. And Polyhistor says: “Belus came and cut the woman asunder, and of one half of her he formed the Earth, and of the other half the heavens, and at the same time he destroyed the animals within her.” As pertinently remarked by I. Myer, “with the Akkadians each object and power of Nature had its Zi, Spirit. The Akkadians formed their deities into triads, usually males (sexless, rather?); the Semites also had triadic deities, but introduced sex” (p. 246) — or phallicism. With the Aryans and the earliest Akkadians all things are emanations through, not by, a creator or logos. With the Semites everything is begotten. 6. The Water-men terrible and bad she herself created. From the remains of others (from the mineral, vegetable and animal remains) from the first, second, and third (Rounds) she formed them. The Dhyani came and looked. . . . . The Dhyani from the bright Father-Mother, from the white (Solar-lunar) regions they came, [46] from the abodes of the Immortal-Mortals (a). (a) The explanations given in our Stanzas are far more clear than that which the legend of creation from the Cutha tablet would give, even were it complete. What is preserved on it, however, corroborates them. For, in the tablet, “the Lord of Angels” destroys the men in the abyss, when “there were not left the carcases and waste” after they were slaughtered. After which they, the Great Gods, create men with the bodies of birds of the desert, human beings, “seven kings, brothers of the same family,” etc., which is a reference to the locomotive qualities of the primary ethereal bodies of men, which could fly as well as they could walk, [47] but who “were destroyed” because they were not “perfect,” i.e., they “were sexless, like the Kings of Edom.” Weeded of metaphors and allegories, what will science say to this idea of a primordial creation of species? It will object to the “Angels” and “Spirits” having anything to do therewith: but if it is nature and the physical law of evolution that are the creators of all there is now on Earth, why could there be “no such abyss” when the globe was covered with waters, in which numbers of monstrous beings were generated? Is it the “human beings” and animals with human heads and double faces, which are a point of the objection? But if man is only a higher animal and has evolved from the brute species by an infinite series of transformations, why could not the “missing links” have had human heads attached to the bodies of animals, or, being two-headed, have heads of beasts and vice versa, in Nature’s early efforts? Are we not shown during the geological periods, in the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds’ wings, and serpents’ heads on animal bodies. [48] And, arguing from the standpoint of science, does not even our modern human race occasionally furnish us with monster-specimens: two-headed children, animal bodies with human heads, dog-headed babies, etc., etc.? And this proves that, if nature will still play such freaks now that she has settled for ages into the order of her evolutionary work, monsters, like those described by Berosus, were a possibility in her opening programme; which possibility may even have existed once upon a time as a law, before she sorted out her species and began regular work upon them; which indeed now admits of definite proof by the bare fact of “Reversion,” as science puts it. This is what the doctrine teaches and demonstrates by numerous proofs. But we shall not wait for the approval of either dogmatic theology or materialistic science, but proceed with the Stanzas. Let these speak for themselves, with the help of the light thrown by the Commentaries and their explanations; the scientific aspect of these questions will be considered later on. Thus physical nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal and man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two and the lower animal kingdoms, but when it comes to the turn of man, spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his creation, besides the “coats of skin” and the “Breath of animal Life.” The human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher than purely physical materials to build their personalities with, under the penalty of remaining even below any “Frankenstein” animal. [49] 7. Displeased they were. Our flesh is not there (they said). This is no fit rupa for our brothers of the fifth. No dwellings for the lives. [50] Pure waters, not turbid, they must drink (a). Let us dry them (the waters). (a) Says the Catechism (Commentaries): — “It is from the material Worlds that descend they, who fashion physical man at the new Manvantaras. They are inferior Lha (Spirits), possessed of a dual body (an astral within an ethereal form). They are the fashioners and creators of our body of illusion.” . . . . “Into the forms projected by the Lha (Pitris) the two letters [51] (the Monad, called also ‘the Double Dragon’) descend from the spheres of expectation. [52] But they are like a roof with no walls, nor pillars to rest upon.” . . . . “Man needs four flames and three fires to become one on Earth, and he requires the essence of the forty-nine fires [53] to be perfect. It is those who have deserted the Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will, [54] who complete the Manu of illusion. For the ‘Double Dragon’ has no hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where there is no tree or branch to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form where there is no agent of transmission (Manas, “Mind”) and the form knows it not.” “In the highest worlds, the three are one, [55] on Earth (at first) the one becomes two. They are like the two (side) lines of a triangle that has lost its bottom line — which is the third fire.” (Catechism Book III., sec. 9.) Now this requires some explanation before proceeding any further. To do so especially for the benefit of our Aryan Hindu brethren —whose esoteric interpretations may differ from our own — we shall have to explain to them the foregoing by certain passages in their own exoteric books, namely, the Puranas. In the allegories of the latter, Brahma, who is collectively the creative Force of the Universe, is said to be “at the beginning of the Yugas (cycles). . . . Possessed of the desire and of the power to create, and, impelled by the potencies of what is to be created, again and again does he, at the outset of a Kalpa, put forth a similar creation,” (see Vishnu Purana, Book I. ch. V., closing Sloka. Also “Manava Dharma Shastra” I. 30.) It is now proposed to examine the exoteric account in the Vishnu Purana, and see how much it may agree or disagree with our occult version. Creation of Divine Beings in the Exoteric Accounts. In the Vishnu Purana — which is certainly the earliest of all the scriptures of that name — we find, as in all the others, Brahma assuming as the male God, for purposes of creation, “four bodies invested by three qualities.” [56] It is said: “In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsna (dawn), Ratri (night), Ahan (day), and Sandhya (evening twilight) are the four bodies of Brahma” . . (p. 81, Vol. I., Wilson’s translation). As Parasara explains it, when Brahma wants to create the world anew and construct progeny through his will, in the fourfold condition (or the four orders of beings) termed gods (Dhyan Chohans), Demons [57] (i.e., more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and men, “he collects Yoga-like (Yuyuje) his mind.” Strange to say, he begins by creating demons, who thus take precedence over the angels or gods. This is no incongruity, nor is it due to inconsistency, but has, like all the rest, a profound esoteric meaning, quite clear to one free from Christian theological prejudice. He who bears in mind that the principle Mahat, or Intellect, the “Universal Mind” (literally “the great”), which esoteric philosophy explains as the “manifested Omniscience” — the “first product” of Pradhana (primordial matter) as Vishnu Purana says, but the first Cosmic aspect of Parabrahm or the esoteric sat, the Universal Soul, [58] as Occultism teaches — is at the root of Self-Consciousness, will understand the reason why. The so-called “Demons” — who are (esoterically) the Self-asserting and (intellectually) active Principle — are the positive poles of creation, so to say; hence, the first produced. This is in brief the process as narrated allegorically in the Puranas. “Having concentrated his mind into itself and the quality of darkness pervading Brahma’s assumed body, the Asuras, issuing from his thigh, were first produced; after which, abandoning this body, it was transformed into night.” (See Part II., § “The Fallen Angels.”) Two important points are involved herein: — (a) Primarily in the Rig-Veda, the “Asuras” are shown as spiritual divine beings; their etymology is derived from asu (breath), the “Breath of God,” and they mean the same as the Supreme Spirit or the Zoroastrian Ahura. It is later on, for purposes of theology and dogma, that they are shown issuing from Brahma’s thigh, and that their name began to be derived from a privative, and sura, god (solar deities), or not-a-god, and that they became the enemies of the gods. Every ancient theogony without exception — from the Aryan and the Egyptian down to that of Hesiod — places, in the order of Cosmogonical evolution, Night before the Day; even Genesis, where “darkness is upon the face of the deep” before “the first day.” The reason for this is that every Cosmogony — except in the Secret Doctrine — begins by the “Secondary Creation” so-called: to wit, the manifested Universe, the Genesis of which has to open by a marked differentiation between the eternal Light of Primary Creation, whose mystery must remain for ever “Darkness” to the prying finite conception and intellect of the profane, and the Secondary Evolution of manifested visible nature. The Veda contains the whole philosophy of that division without having ever been correctly explained by our Orientalists, because it has never been understood by them. Continuing to create, Brahma assumes another form, that of the Day, and creates from his breath the gods, who are endowed with the quality of goodness (passivity) [59]. In his next body the quality of great passivity prevailed, which is also (negative) goodness, and from the side of that personage issued the Pitris, the progenitors of men, because, as the text explains, “Brahma thought of himself (during the process) as the father of the world.” [60] This is Kriya-sakti — the mysterious Yoga power explained elsewhere. This body of Brahma when cast off became the Sandhya (evening twilight), the interval between day and night. Finally Brahma assumed his last form pervaded by the quality of foulness, “and from this men, in whom foulness and passion predominate, were produced.” This body when cast off became the dawn, or morning twilight — the twilight of Humanity. Here Brahma stands esoterically for the Pitris. He is collectively the Pitar, “father.” The true esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained. Brahma here symbolizes personally the collective creators of the World and Men — the universe with all its numberless productions of things movable and (seemingly) immovable. [61] He is collectively the Prajapatis, the Lords of Being; and the four bodies typify the four classes of creative powers or Dhyan Chohans, described in the Commentary directly following Stanza VII. in Book I. The whole philosophy of the so-called “Creation” of the good and evil in this world and of the whole cycle of Manvantaric results therefrom, hangs on the correct comprehension of these Four bodies of Brahma. The reader will now be prepared to understand the real, the esoteric significance of what follows. Moreover there is an important point to be cleared up. Christian theology having arbitrarily settled and agreed that Satan with his Fallen Angels belonged to the earliest creation, Satan being the first-created, the wisest and most beautiful of God’s Archangels, the word was given, the key-note struck. Henceforth all the pagan scriptures were made to yield the same meaning, and all were shown to be demoniacal, and it was and is claimed that truth and fact belong to, and commence only with, Christianity. Even the Orientalists and Mythologists, some of them no Christians at all but “infidels,” or men of science, entered unconsciously to themselves, and by the mere force of association of ideas and habit, into the theological groove. Purely Brahmanical considerations, based on greed of power and ambition, allowed the masses to remain in ignorance of great truths; and the same causes led the Initiates among the early Christians to remain silent, while those who had never known the truth disfigured the order of things, judging of the hierarchy of “Angels” by their exoteric form. Thus as the Asuras had become the rebellious inferior gods fighting the higher ones in popular creeds, so the highest archangel, in truth the Agathodaemon, the eldest benevolent Logos, became with theology the “Adversary” or Satan. But is this warranted by the correct interpretation of any old Scripture? The answer is, most certainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the Zend-Avesta, the Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the Asuras to their legitimate place in theogony, so the recent discoveries of the Chaldean tablets vindicate the good name of the first divine Emanations. This is easily proved. Christian Angelology is directly and solely derived from that of the Pharisees, who brought their tenets from Babylonia. The Sadducees, the real guardians of the Laws of Moses, knew not of, and rejected, any angels, opposing even the immortality of the human Soul (not impersonal Spirit). In the Bible the only “Angels” spoken of are the “Sons of God” mentioned in Genesis vi. (who are now regarded as the Nephilim, the Fallen Angels), and several angels in human form, the “Messengers” of the Jewish God, whose own rank needs a closer analysis than heretofore given. (Vide Supra, Stanza I., sub-sections 2, 3, et seq., where it is shown that the early Akkadians called Ea, Wisdom, that which was disfigured by the later Chaldees and Semites into Tismat, Tisalat and the Thallath of Berosus, the female Sea Dragon, now Satan.) Truly — “How art thou fallen (by the hand of man), O bright star and son of the morning”! Now what do the Babylonian accounts of “Creation,” as found on the Assyrian fragments of tiles, tell us; those very accounts upon which the Pharisees built their angelology? But compare Mr. G. Smith’s “Assyrian Discoveries,” p. 398, and his “Chaldean Account of Genesis,” p. 107. The “Tablet with the story of the Seven Wicked Gods or Spirits,” has the following account — we print the important passages in italics: —
Thus we are shown, as plainly as can be, on a fragment which remained unbroken, so that there can be no dubious reading, that the “rebellious angels” had been created in the lower part of heaven, i.e., that they belonged and do belong to a material plane of evolution, although as it is not the plane of which we are made cognizant through our senses, it remains generally invisible to us, and is thus regarded as subjective. Were the Gnostics so wrong, after this, in affirming that this our visible world, and especially the Earth, had been created by lower angels, the inferior Elohim, of which, as they taught, the God of Israel was one. These Gnostics were nearer in time to the records of the Archaic Secret Doctrine, and therefore ought to be allowed to have known better than non-initiated Christians, who took upon themselves, hundreds of years later, to remodel and correct what was said. But let us see what the same Tablet says further on: —
Now Anu belongs to the Chaldean trinity, and is identical with Sin, the “Moon,” in one aspect. And the Moon in the Hebrew Kabala is the Argha of the seed of all material life, and is still more closely connected, kabalistically, with Jehovah, who is double-sexed as Anu is. They are both represented in Esotericism and viewed from a dual aspect: male or spiritual, female or material, or Spirit and Matter, the two antagonistic principles. Hence the “Messengers of Anu,” (who is Sin, the “Moon,”) are shown, in verses 28 to 41, as being finally overpowered by the same Sin with the help of Bel (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus). This is regarded as a contradiction by the Assyriologists, but is simply metaphysics in the esoteric teaching. There is more than one interpretation, for there are seven keys to the mystery of the Fall. Moreover there are two “Falls” in Theology: the rebellion of the Archangels and their “Fall,” and the “Fall” of Adam and Eve. Thus the lower as well as the higher Hierarchies are charged with a supposed crime. The word “supposed” is the true and correct term, for in both cases it is founded on misconception. Both are considered in Occultism as Karmic effects, and both belong to the law of Evolution: intellectual and spiritual on the one hand, physical and psychic on the other. The “Fall” is a universal allegory. It sets forth at one end of the ladder of Evolution the “rebellion,” i.e., the action of differentiating intellection or consciousness on its various planes, seeking union with matter; and at the other, the lower end, the rebellion of matter against Spirit, or of action against spiritual inertia. And here lies the germ of an error which has had such disastrous effects on the intelligence of civilized societies for over 1,800 years. In the original allegory it is matter — hence the more material angels — which was regarded as the conqueror of Spirit, or the Archangels who “fell” on this plane. “They of the flaming sword (or animal passions) had put to flight the Spirits of Darkness.” Yet it is the latter who fought for the supremacy of the conscious and divine spirituality on Earth and failed, succumbing to the power of matter. But in theological dogma we see the reverse. It is Michael, “who is like unto God,” the representative of Jehovah, who is the leader of the celestial hosts — as Lucifer, in Milton’s fancy, is of the infernal hosts — who has the best of Satan. It is true that the nature of Michael depends upon that of his Creator and Master. Who the latter is, one may find out by carefully studying the allegory of the “War in Heaven” with the astronomical key. As shown by Bentley, the “War of the Titans against the gods” in Hesiod, and also the war of the Asuras (or the Tarakamaya) against the devas in Puranic legend, are identical in all save the names. The aspects of the stars show (Bentley taking the year 945 B.C. as the nearest date for such conjunction) that “all the planets, except Saturn, were on the same side of the heavens as the Sun and Moon,” and hence were his opponents. And yet it is Saturn, or the Jewish “Moon-god,” who is shown as prevailing, both by Hesiod and Moses, neither of whom was understood. Thus it was that the real meaning became distorted. STANZA II. — Continued.8. The flames came. The fires with the sparks; the night fires and the day fires (a). They dried out the turbid dark waters. With their heat they quenched them. The Lhas (Spirits) of the high; The lhamayin (those) of below, came (b). They slew the forms, which were two- and four-faced. They fought the goat-men, and the dog-headed men, and the men with fishes’ bodies. (a) The “Flames” are a Hierarchy of Spirits parallel to, if not identical with, the “burning” fiery Saraph (Seraphim) mentioned by Isaiah (vi. 2-6), those who attend, according to Hebrew Theogony, “the Throne of the Almighty.” Melha is the Lord of the “Flames.” When he appears on Earth, he assumes the personality of a Buddha, says a popular legend. He is one of the most ancient and revered Lhas, a Buddhist St. Michael. (b) The word “Below” must not be taken to mean infernal regions, but simply a spiritual, or rather ethereal, Being of a lower grade, because nearer to the Earth, or one step higher than our terrestrial sphere; while the Lhas are Spirits of the highest Spheres — whence the name of the capital of Tibet, Lha-ssa. Besides a statement of a purely physical nature and belonging to the evolution of life on Earth, there may be another allegorical meaning attached to this Sloka, or indeed, as is taught, several. The flames, or “Fires,” represent Spirit, or the male element, and “Water,” matter, or the opposite element. And here again we find, in the action of the Spirit slaying the purely material form, a reference to the eternal struggle, on the physical and psychic planes, between Spirit and Matter, besides a scientific cosmic fact. For, as said in the next verse: — 9. Mother-water, the great sea wept. She arose, she disappeared in the Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth (a). (a) Now what can this mean? Is it not an evident reference to tidal action in the early stage of the history of our planet in its fourth Round? Modern research has been busy of late in its speculations on the Palaeozoic high-tides. Mr. Darwin’s theory was that not less than 52,000,000 years ago — and probably much more — the Moon originated from the Earth’s plastic mass. Starting from the point where research was left by Helmholtz, Ferrel, Sir William Thomson and others, he retraced the course of tidal retardation of the earth’s rotary motions far back into the very night of time, and placed the Moon during the infancy of our planet at only “a fraction of its present distance.” In short, his theory was that it is the Moon which separated from the Earth. The tidal elevation concurring with the swing of the globular mass — centrifugal tendency being then nearly equal to gravity — the latter was overcome, and the tidally elevated mass could thus separate completely from the Earth. [62] The Occult teaching is the reverse of this. The Moon is far older than the Earth; and, as explained in Book I., it is the latter which owes its being to the former, however astronomy and geology may explain the fact. Hence, the tides and the attraction to the Moon, as shown by the liquid portion of the Globe ever striving to raise itself towards its parent. This is the meaning of the sentence that “the Mother-Water arose and disappeared in the Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth.” 10. When they (the Rupas) were destroyed, Mother-earth remained bare, [63] she asked to be dried (a). [64] (a) The time for its incrustation had arrived. The waters had separated and the process was started. It was the beginning of a new life. This is what one key divulges to us. Another key teaches the origin of Water, its admixture with Fire (liquid fire it calls it), [65] and enters upon an alchemical description of the progeny of the two — solid matter such as minerals and earths. From the “Waters of Space,” the progeny of the male Spirit-Fire and the female (gaseous) Water has become the Oceanic expanse on Earth. Varuna is dragged down from the infinite Space, to reign as Neptune over the finite Seas. As always, the popular fancy is found to be based on a strictly scientific foundation. Water is the symbol of the female
element everywhere; mater, from which the letter M, is
derived pictorially from
Hence Cupid or Love in his primitive sense is Eros, the Divine Will, or Desire of manifesting itself through visible creation. Thence Fohat, the prototype of Eros, becomes on Earth the great power “Life-electricity,” or the Spirit of “Life-giving.” Let us remember the Greek Theogony and enter into the spirit of its philosophy. We are taught by the Greeks (See “Iliad” IV., 201, 246) that all things, gods included, owe their being to the Ocean and his wife Tethys, the latter being Gaea, the Earth or Nature. But who is Ocean? Ocean is the immeasurable space (Spirit in Chaos), which is the Deity (see Book I.); and Tethys is not the Earth, but primordial matter in the process of formation. In our case it is no longer Aditi-Gaea who begets Ouranos or Varuna, the chief Aditya among the seven planetary gods, but Prakriti, materialised and localised. The Moon, masculine in its theogonic character, is, in its cosmic aspect only, the female generative principle, as the Sun is the male emblem thereof. Water is the progeny of the Moon, an androgyne deity with every nation. Evolution proceeds on the laws of analogy in Kosmos as in the formation of the smallest globe. Thus the above, applying to the modus operandi at the time when the Universe was appearing, applies also in the case of our Earth’s formation. This Stanza opens by speaking of thirty crores, 30,000,000, of years. We may be asked — What could the ancients know of the duration of geological periods, when no modern scientist or mathematician is able to calculate their duration with anything like approximate accuracy? Whether they had or had not better means (and it is maintained that they had them in their Zodiacs), still the chronology of the ancient Brahmins shall now be given as faithfully as possible. The Chronology of the Brahmins. No greater riddle exists in science, no problem is more hopelessly insoluble, than the question: How old — even approximately — are the Sun and Moon, the Earth and Man? What does modern science know of the duration of the ages of the World, or even of the length of geological periods? Nothing; absolutely nothing. If one turns to science for chronological information, one is told by those who are straightforward and truthful, as for instance Mr. Pengelly, the eminent geologist, “We do not know.” [66] One will learn that, so far, no trustworthy numerical estimate of the ages of the world and man could be made, and that both geology and anthropology are at sea. Yet when a student of esoteric philosophy presumes to bring forward the teachings of Occult Science, he is at once sat upon. Why should this be so, since, when reduced to their own physical methods, the greatest scientists have failed to arrive even at an approximate agreement? It is true that science can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, in the Cimmerian darkness of the prehistoric ages, the explorers are lost in a labyrinth, whose great corridors are doorless, allowing no visible exit into the Archaic past. Lost in the maze of their own conflicting speculations, rejecting, as they have always done, the evidence of Eastern tradition, without any clue, or one single certain milestone to guide them, what can geologists or anthropologists do but pick up the slender thread of Ariadne where they first perceive it, and then proceed at perfect random? Therefore we are first told that the farthest date to which documentary record extends is now generally regarded by Anthropology as but “the earliest distinctly visible point of the pre-historic period.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica.) At the same time it is confessed that “beyond that period stretches back a vast indefinite series of prehistoric ages.” (Ibid.) It is with those specified “Ages” that we shall begin. They are “prehistoric” to the naked eye of matter only. To the spiritual eagle eye of the seer and the prophet of every race, Ariadne’s thread stretches beyond that “historic period” without break or flaw, surely and steadily, into the very night of time; and the hand which holds it is too mighty to drop it, or even let it break. Records exist, although they may be rejected as fanciful by the profane; though many of them are tacitly accepted by philosophers and men of great learning, and meet with an unvarying refusal only from the official and collective body of orthodox science. And since the latter refuses to give us even an approximate idea of the duration of the geological ages — save in a few conflicting and contradictory hypotheses — let us see what Aryan philosophy can teach us. Such computations as are given in Manu and the Puranas — save trifling and most evidently intentional exaggerations — are, as already stated, almost identical with those taught in esoteric philosophy. This may be seen by comparing the two in any Hindu calendar of recognised orthodoxy. The best and most complete of all such calendars, at present, as vouched for by the learned Brahmins of Southern India, is the already mentioned Tamil calendar called the “Tirukkanda Panchanga,” compiled, as we are told, from, and in full accordance with, secret fragments of Asuramaya’s data. As Asuramaya is said to have been the greatest astronomer, so he is whispered to have also been the most powerful “Sorcerer” of the “White Island, which had become Black with sin,” i.e., of the islands of Atlantis. The “White Island” is a symbolical name. Asuramaya is said to have lived (see the tradition of Jhana-bhaskara) in Romaka-pura in the West: because the name is an allusion to the land and cradle of the “Sweat-born” of the Third Race. That land or continent had disappeared ages before Asuramaya lived, since he was an Atlantean; but he was a direct descendant of the Wise Race, the Race that never dies. Many are the legends concerning this hero, the pupil of Surya (the Sun-God) himself, as the Indian accounts allege. It matters little whether he lived on one or another island, but the question is to prove that he was no myth, as Dr. Weber and others would make him. The fact of “Romaka-pura in the West” being named as the birth-place of this hero of the archaic ages, is the more interesting because it is so very suggestive of the esoteric teaching about the “Sweat-born” Races, the men born from the pores of their parents. “Romakupas” means “hair-pores” in Sanskrit. In Mahabharata XII. 10,308, a people named Raumyas are said to have been created from the pores of Virabhadara, the terrible giant, who destroyed Daksha’s sacrifice. Other tribes and people are also represented as born in this way. All these are references to the later Second and the earlier Third Root Races. The following figures are from the calendar just referred to; a footnote marks the points of disagreement with the figures of the Arya Samaj school: —
To make this still clearer in its details, the following computations by Rao Bahadur P. Sreenivas Row, are given from the “Theosophist” of November, 1885.
These are the exoteric figures accepted throughout India, and they dovetail pretty nearly with those of the Secret works. The latter, moreover, amplify them by a division into a number of esoteric cycles, never mentioned in Brahmanical popular writings — one of which, the division of the Yugas into racial cycles, is given elsewhere as an instance. The rest, in their details, have of course never been made public. They are, nevertheless, known to every “Twice-born” (Dwija, or Initiated) Brahmin, and the Puranas contain references to some of them in veiled terms, which no matter-of-fact Orientalist has yet endeavoured to make out, nor could he if he would. These sacred astronomical cycles are of immense antiquity, and most of them pertain, as stated, to the calculations of Narada and Asuramaya. The latter has the reputation of a giant and a sorcerer. But the antediluvian giants (the Gibborim of the Bible) were not all bad or Sorcerers, as Christian Theology, which sees in every Occultist a servant of the Evil one, would have it; nor were they worse than many of “the faithful sons of the Church.” A Torquemada and a Catherine de Medicis certainly did more harm in their day and in the name of their Master than any Atlantean giant or demigod of antiquity ever did; whether his name was Cyclops, or Medusa, or yet the Orphic Titan, the anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There were good “giants” in days of old just as there are bad “pigmies” now; and the Rakshasas and Yakshas of Lanka are no worse than our modern dynamiters, and certain Christian and civilised generals during modern wars. Nor are they myths. “He who would laugh at Briareus and Orion ought to abstain from going to, or even talking of, Karnac or Stonehenge,” remarks somewhere a modern writer. As the Brahmanical figures given above are approximately the basic calculations of our esoteric system, the reader is requested to carefully keep them in mind. In the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” one finds, as the last word of science, that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over “tens of thousands of years.” [72] It becomes evident that as these figures may be made to fluctuate between 10,000 and 100,000, therefore they mean very little if anything, and only render still denser the darkness surrounding the question. Moreover, what matters it that science places the birth of man in the “pre- or post-glacial drift,” if we are told at the same time that the so-called “ice age” is simply a long succession of ages which “shaded without abrupt change of any kind into what is termed the human or Recent period . . . the overlapping of geological periods having been the rule from the beginning of time.” The latter “rule” only results in the still more puzzling, even if strictly scientific and correct, information, that “even to-day man is contemporary with the ice-age in the Alpine valleys and in the Finmark.” [73] Thus, had it not been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine, and even by exoteric Hinduism and its traditions, we should be left to this day to float in perplexed uncertainty between the indefinite ages of one school of science, the “tens of thousands” of years of the other, and the 6,000 years of the Bible interpreters. This is one of the several reasons why, with all the respect due to the conclusions of the men of learning of our modern day, we are forced to ignore them in all such questions of pre-historic antiquity. Modern Geology and Anthropology must, of course, disagree with our views. But Occultism will find as many weapons against these two sciences as it has against astronomical and physical theories, in spite of Mr. Laing’s assurances that [74] “in (chronological) calculations of this sort, concerning older and later formations, there is no theory, and they are based on positive facts, limited only by a certain possible (?) amount of error either way,” occultism will prove, scientific confessions in hand, that geology is very much in error, and very often even more so than Astronomy. In this very passage by Mr. Laing, which gives to Geology pre-eminence for correctness over Astronomy, we find a passage in flagrant contradiction to the admissions of the best Geologists themselves. Says the author — “In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian period, [75] when the present order of things was fairly inaugurated, are approximate (truly so) facts and not theories, while the astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly short . . . in others they give results almost incredibly long.” After which, the reader is advised that the safest course “seems to be to assume that Geology really proves the duration of the present order of things to have been somewhere over 100 millions of years,” as “Astronomy gives an enormous though unknown time in the past, and to come in the future, for the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death of the Solar System, of which our Earth is a small planet now passing through the habitable phase.” (p. 49.) Judging from past experience, we do not entertain the slightest doubt that, once called upon to answer “the absurd unscientific and preposterous claims of exoteric (and esoteric) Aryan chronology,” the scientist of “the results incredibly short,” i.e., only 15,000,000 years, and the scientist, who “would require 600,000,000 years,” together with those who accept Mr. Huxley’s figures of 1,000,000,000 “since sedimentation began in Europe” (World Life), would all be as dogmatic one as the other. Nor would they fail to remind the Occultist and the Brahmin, that it is the modern men of science alone who represent exact science, whose duty it is to fight inaccuracy and superstition. The earth is passing through the “habitable phase” only for the present order of things, and as far as our present mankind is concerned with its actual “coats of skin” and phosphorus for bones and brain. We are ready to concede the 100 millions of years offered by Geology, since we are taught that our present physical mankind — or the Vaivasvata humanity — began only 18 millions of years ago. But Geology has no facts to give us for the duration of geological periods, as we have shown, no more indeed than has Astronomy. The authentic letter from Mr. W. Pengelly, F.R.S., quoted elsewhere, says that: “It is at present, and perhaps always will be, IMPOSSIBLE to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even into millenniums.” And having never, hitherto, excavated a fossil man of any other than the present form — what does Geology know of him? It has traced zones or strata and, with these, primordial zoological life, down to the Silurian. When it has, in the same way, traced man down to his primordial protoplasmic form, then we will admit that it may know something of primordial man. If it is not very material “to the bearings of modern scientific discovery on modern thought,” whether “man has existed in state of constant though slow progression for the last 50,000 years of period of 15 millions, or for the last 500,000 years of a period of 150 millions” (“Modern Science, etc.” p. 49), as Mr. S. Laing tells his readers, it is very much so for the claims of the Occultists. Unless the latter show that it is a possibility, if not a perfect certainty, that man lived 18 millions of years ago, the Secret Doctrine might as well have remained unwritten. An attempt must, therefore, be made in this direction, and it is our modern geologists and men of science generally who will be brought to testify to this fact in the third part of this volume. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the fact that Hindu Chronology is constantly represented by the Orientalists as a fiction based on no “actual computation,” [76] but simply a “childish boasting,” it is nevertheless often twisted out of recognition to make it yield to, and fit in with, Western theories. No figures have ever been more meddled with and tortured than the famous 4, 3, 2, followed by cyphers of the Yugas and Maha-Yugas. As the whole cycle of prehistoric events, such as the evolution and transformation of Races and the extreme antiquity of man, hangs upon the said Chronology, it becomes extremely important to check it by other existing calculations. If the Eastern Chronology is rejected, we shall at least have the consolation of proving that no other — whether the figures of Science or of the Churches — is one whit more reliable. As Professor Max Muller expresses it, it is often as useful to prove what a thing is not as to show what it may be. And once we succeed in pointing out the fallacies of both Christian and scientific computations — by allowing them a fair chance of comparison with our Chronology — neither of the two will have a reasonable ground to stand upon, in pronouncing the esoteric figures less reliable than its own. We may here refer the reader to our earlier work “Isis Unveiled,” Vol. I., p. 32, for some remarks concerning the figures which were cited a few pages back. To-day a few more facts may be added to the information there given, which is already known to every Orientalist. The sacredness of the cycle of 4320, with additional cyphers, lies in the fact that the figures which compose it, taken separately or joined in various combinations, are each and all symbolical of the greatest mysteries in Nature. Indeed, whether one takes the 4 separately, or the 3 by itself, or the two together making 7, or again the three added together and yielding 9, all these numbers have their application in the most sacred and occult things, and record the workings of Nature in her eternally periodical phenomena. They are never erring, perpetually recurring numbers, unveiling, to him who studies the secrets of Nature, a truly divine System, an intelligent plan in Cosmogony, which results in natural cosmic divisions of times, seasons, invisible influences, astronomical phenomena, with their action and reaction on terrestrial and even moral nature; on birth, death, and growth, on health and disease. All these natural events are based and depend upon cyclical processes in the Kosmos itself, producing periodic agencies which, acting from without, affect the Earth and all that lives and breathes on it, from one end to the other of any Manvantara. Causes and effects are esoteric, exoteric, and endexoteric, so to say. In Isis Unveiled we wrote that which we now repeat: — “We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; ‘but their parts,’ owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), ‘are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature.’ When those circulations — which Eliphas Levi calls ‘currents of the astral light’ — in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the ‘ superior natures,’ and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these ‘inferior’ ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of scepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.” And philosophizing alone, how can it understand the “Soul Doctrine”? In order not to break the thread of the narrative we shall give some striking proofs of these cyclic laws in Part II., proceeding meanwhile with our explanations of geological and racial cycles. STANZA III. ATTEMPTS TO CREATE MAN.
11. The Lord of the Lords came. From her body he separated the waters, and that was heaven above, the first heaven (the atmosphere, or the air, the firmament) (a). (a) Here tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest version, repeated in the Puranas, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the first it is said: “He the Lord” (the god who has the form of Brahma) “when the world had become one ocean (Harivamsa I. 36) concluding that within the waters lay the earth, and desirous to raise it up,” to separate it, “created himself in another form. As in the preceding Kalpa (Manvantara) he had assumed the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the shape of a boar, etc. etc.” In the Elohistic “creation” (Genesis, verses 6, 7, 8, and 9) “God” creates a firmament in the midst of the waters . . . . . and says “let dry land appear.” And now comes the traditional peg whereunto is hung the esoteric portion of the Kabalistic interpretation. 11.. The great chohans (Lords), called the Lords of the Moon, of the airy bodies (a). “Bring forth men, (they were told), men of your nature. Give them (i.e., the Jivas or Monads) their forms within. She (Mother Earth or Nature) will build coverings without (external bodies). (For) males-females will they be. Lords of the flame, also.” (a) Who are the Lords of the Moon? In India they are called Pitris or “lunar ancestors,” but in the Hebrew scrolls it is Jehovah himself who is the “Lord of the Moon,” collectively as the Host, and also as one of the Elohim. The astronomy of the Hebrews and their observance of times was regulated by the moon. A Kabalist, having shown that “Daniel . . . told off God’s providence by set times,” and that the “Revelation” of John “speaks of a carefully measured cubical city descending out of the heavens,” etc., adds — “But the vitalizing power of heaven
lay chiefly with the moon. . . . It was the Hebrew
This may be regarded as a digression from the main subject; but it is a very necessary one with a view to Christian readers. For who, after studying dispassionately the respective legends of Abram or Abraham, Sarai or Sarah, who was “fair to look upon,” and those of Brahma and Sarasvati, or Sri, Lakshmi-Venus, with the relations of all these to the Moon and Water; — and especially one who understands the real Kabalistic meaning of the name Jehovah and its relation to, and connection with, the moon — who can doubt that the story of Abram is based upon that of Brahma, or that Genesis was written upon the old lines used by every ancient nation? All in the ancient Scriptures is allegorical — all based upon and inseparably connected with Astronomy and Cosmolatry. 13. They (the Moon-gods) went, each on his allotted land: seven of them, each on his lot. The Lords of the Flame remained behind. They would not go, they would not create (a). (a) The Secret teachings show the divine Progenitors creating men on seven portions of the globe “each on his lot” — i.e., each a different race of men externally and internally, and on different zones. This polygenistic claim is considered elsewhere (vide Stanza VII.). But who are “They” who create, and the “Lords of the Flame,” “who do not”? Occultism divides the “Creators” into twelve classes; of which four have reached liberation to the end of the “Great Age,” the fifth is ready to reach it, but still remains active on the intellectual planes, while seven are still under direct Karmic law. These last act on the man-bearing globes of our chain. Exoteric Hindu books mention seven classes of Pitris, and among them two distinct kinds of Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and the Agnishwatta; or those possessed of the “sacred fire” and those devoid of it. Hindu ritualism seems to connect them with sacrificial fires, and with Grihasta Brahmins in earlier incarnations: those who have, and those who have not attended as they should to their household sacred fires in their previous births. The distinction, as said, is derived from the Vedas. The first and highest class (esoterically) the Agnishwatta, are represented in the exoteric allegory as Grihasta (Brahman-householders) who, in their past births in other Manvantaras having failed to maintain their domestic fires and to offer burnt sacrifices, have lost every right to have oblations with fire presented to them. Whereas the Barhishad, being Brahmins who have kept up their household sacred fires, are thus honoured to this day. Thence the Agnishwatta are represented as devoid of, and the Barhishad as possessed of, fires. But esoteric philosophy explains the original qualifications as being due to the difference between the natures of the two classes: the Agnishwatta Pitris are devoid of fire (i.e., of creative passion), because too divine and pure (vide supra, Sloka 11th); whereas the Barhishad, being the lunar spirits more closely connected with Earth, became the creative Elohim of form, or the Adam of dust. The allegory says that Sanandana and other Vedhas, the Sons of Brahma, his first progeny, “were without desire or passion, inspired with the holy wisdom, estranged from the Universe and undesirous of progeny” (Vishnu Purana, Book I. vii.). This also is what is meant in Sloka 11 by the words: “They would not create,” and is explained as follows: — “The primordial Emanations from the creative Power are too near the absolute Cause. They are transitional and latent forces, which will develop only in the next and subsequent removes.” This makes it plain. Hence Brahma is said to have felt wrathful when he saw that those “embodied spirits, produced from his limbs (gatra), would not multiply themselves.” After which, in the allegory, he creates other seven mind-born Sons (see “Moksha-Darma” and “Mahabharata”), namely, Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasishta, the latter being often replaced by Daksha, the most prolific of the creators. In most of the texts these Seven Sons of Vasishta-Daksha are called the seven Rishis of the Third Manvantara; the latter referring both to the Third Round and also to the third Root-Race and its branch-Races in the Fourth Round. These are all the creators of the various beings on this Earth, the Prajapati, and at the same time they appear as divers reincarnations in the early Manvantaras or races. It thus becomes clear why the Agnishwatta, devoid of the grosser creative fire, hence unable to create physical man, having no double, or astral body, to project, since they were without any form, are shown in exoteric allegories as Yogis, Kumaras (chaste youths), who became “rebels,” Asuras, fighting and opposing gods, [81] etc., etc. Yet it is they alone who could complete man, i.e., make of him a self-conscious, almost a divine being — a god on Earth. The Barhishad, though possessed of creative fire, were devoid of the higher Mahat-mic element. Being on a level with the lower principles — those which precede gross objective matter — they could only give birth to the outer man, or rather to the model of the physical, the astral man. Thus, though we see them intrusted with the task by Brahma (the collective Mahat or Universal Divine Mind), the “Mystery of Creation” is repeated on Earth, only in an inverted sense, as in a mirror. It is those who are unable to create the spiritual immortal man, who project the senseless model (the Astral) of the physical Being; and, as will be seen, it was those who would not multiply, who sacrificed themselves to the good and salvation of Spiritual Humanity. For, to complete the septenary man, to add to his three lower principles and cement them with the spiritual Monad — which could never dwell in such a form otherwise than in an absolutely latent state — two connecting principles are needed: Manas and Kama. This requires a living Spiritual Fire of the middle principle from the fifth and third states of Pleroma. But this fire is the possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect) Cubes, which symbolize the Angelic Beings: [82] the former having from the first creation got hold of it and being said to have appropriated it for themselves, as in the allegory of Prometheus. These are the active, and therefore — in Heaven — no longer “pure” Beings. They have become the independent and free Intelligences, shown in every Theogony as fighting for that independence and freedom, and hence — in the ordinary sense — “rebellious to the divine passive law.” These are then those “Flames” (the Agnishwatta) who, as shown in Sloka 13, “remain behind” instead of going along with the others to create men on Earth. But the true esoteric meaning is that most of them were destined to incarnate as the Egos of the forthcoming crop of Mankind. The human Ego is neither Atman nor Buddhi, but the higher Manas: the intellectual fruition and the efflorescence of the intellectual self-conscious Egotism — in the higher spiritual sense. The ancient works refer to it as Karana Sarira on the plane of Sutratma, which is the golden thread on which, like beads, the various personalities of this higher Ego are strung. If the reader were told, as in the semi-esoteric allegories, that these Beings were returning Nirvanees, from preceding Maha-Manvantaras — ages of incalculable duration which have rolled away in the Eternity, a still more incalculable time ago — he would hardly understand the text correctly; while some Vedantins might say: “This is not so; the Nirvanee can never return”; which is true during the Manvantara he belongs to, and erroneous where Eternity is concerned. For it is said in the Sacred Slokas: “The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all things back into action. . . .” Hence, as the higher “Pitris or Dhyanis” had no hand in his physical creation, we find primeval man, issued from the bodies of his spiritually fireless progenitors, described as aeriform, devoid of compactness, and Mindless. He had no middle principle to serve him as a medium between the highest and the lowest, the spiritual man and the physical brain, for he lacked Manas. The Monads which incarnated in those empty Shells, remained as unconscious as when separated from their previous incomplete forms and vehicles. There is no potentiality for creation, or self-Consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because divine, nature is, so to say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower line of the Triangle — representing the first triad that emanates from the Universal Monad — that can furnish this needed consciousness on the plane of differentiated Nature. But how could these pure Emanations, which, on this principle, must have originally been themselves unconscious (in our sense), be of any use in supplying the required principle, as they could hardly have possessed it themselves? The answer is difficult to comprehend, unless one is well acquainted with the philosophical metaphysics of a beginningless and endless series of Cosmic Re-births; and becomes well impressed and familiarised with that immutable law of Nature which is Eternal Motion, cyclic and spiral, therefore progressive even in its seeming retrogression. The one divine Principle, the nameless that of the Vedas, is the universal Total, which, neither in its spiritual aspects and emanations, nor in its physical atoms, can ever be at “absolute rest” except during the “Nights” of Brahma. Hence, also, the “first-born” are those who are first set in motion at the beginning of a Manvantara, and thus the first to fall into the lower spheres of materiality. They who are called in Theology “the Thrones,” and are the “Seat of God,” must be the first incarnated men on Earth; and it becomes comprehensible, if we think of the endless series of past Manvantaras, to find that the last had to come first, and the first last. We find, in short, that the higher Angels had broken, countless aeons before, through the “Seven Circles,” and thus robbed them of the Sacred fire; which means in plain words, that they had assimilated during their past incarnations, in lower as well as in higher worlds, all the wisdom therefrom — the reflection of Mahat in its various degrees of intensity. No Entity, whether angelic or human, can reach the state of Nirvana, or of absolute purity, except through aeons of suffering and the knowledge of EVIL as well as of good, as otherwise the latter remains incomprehensible. Between man and the animal — whose Monads (or Jivas) are fundamentally identical — there is the impassable abyss of Mentality and Self-consciousness. What is human mind in its higher aspect, whence comes it, if it is not a portion of the essence — and, in some rare cases of incarnation, the very essence — of a higher Being: one from a higher and divine plane? Can man — a god in the animal form — be the product of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal, which differs from man in external shape, but by no means in the materials of its physical fabric, and is informed by the same, though undeveloped, Monad — seeing that the intellectual potentialities of the two differ as the Sun does from the Glow-worm? And what is it that creates such difference, unless man is an animal plus a living god within his physical shell? Let us pause and ask ourselves seriously the question, regardless of the vagaries and sophisms of both the materialistic and the psychological modern sciences. To some extent, it is admitted that even the esoteric teaching is allegorical. To make the latter comprehensible to the average intelligence, requires the use of symbols cast in an intelligible form. Hence the allegorical and semi-mythical narratives in the exoteric, and the (only) semi-metaphysical and objective representations in the esoteric teachings. For the purely and transcendentally spiritual conceptions are adapted only to the perceptions of those who “see without eyes, hear without ears, and sense without organs,” according to the graphic expression of the Commentary. The too puritan idealist is at liberty to spiritualise the tenet, whereas the modern psychologist would simply try to spirit away our “fallen,” yet still divine, human Soul in its connection with Buddhi. The mystery attached to the highly spiritual ancestors of the divine man within the earthly man is very great. His dual creation is hinted at in the Puranas, though its esoteric meaning can be approached only by collating together the many varying accounts, and reading them in their symbolical and allegorical character. So it is in the Bible, both in Genesis and even in the Epistles of Paul. For that creator, who is called in the second chapter of Genesis the “Lord God,” is in the original the Elohim, or Gods (the Lords), in the plural; and while one of them makes the earthly Adam of dust, the other breathes into him the breath of life, and the third makes of him a living soul (ii. 7), all of which readings are implied in the plural number of the Elohim. [83] “The first man is of the Earth, the second (the last, or rather highest) is from heaven,” says Paul in I. Corinthians xv. 47. In the Aryan allegory the rebellious Sons of Brahma are all represented as holy ascetics and Yogis. Re-born in every Kalpa, they generally try to impede the work of human procreation. When Daksha, the chief of the Prajapati (creators), brings forth 10,000 sons for the purpose of peopling the world, Narada — a son of Brahma, the great Rishi, and virtually a “Kumara,” if not so in name — interferes with, and twice frustrates Daksha’s aim, by persuading those Sons to remain holy ascetics and eschew marriage. For this, Daksha curses Narada to be re-born as a man, as Brahma had cursed him before for refusing to marry, and obtain progeny, saying: — “Perish in thy present (Deva or angelic) form and take up thy abode in the womb,” i.e., become a man (Vayu Purana; Harivamsa, 170). Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same story, it is easy to see that Narada belongs to that class of Brahma’s, “first-born,” who have all proven rebellious to the law of animal procreation, for which they had to incarnate as men. Of all the Vedic Rishis, Narada, as already shown, is the most incomprehensible, because the most closely connected with the occult doctrines — especially with the secret cycles and Kalpas (vide supra). Certain contradictory statements about this Sage have much distracted the Orientalists. Thus he is shown as refusing positively to create (have progeny), and even as calling his father Brahma “a false teacher” for advising him to get married (“Narada-Pancha-Ratra”); nevertheless, he is referred to as one of the Prajapati, “progenitors”! In Naradiya Purana, he describes the laws and the duties of the celibate adepts; and as these occult duties do not happen to be found in the fragment of about 3,000 Stanzas in the possession of European museums, the Brahmins are proclaimed liars; the Orientalists forgetting that the Naradiya is credited with containing 25,000 Stanzas, and that it is not very likely that such MSS. should be found in the hands of the Hindu profane, those who are ready to sell any precious olla for a red pottage. Suffice it to say, that Narada is the Deva-Rishi of Occultism par excellence; and that the Occultist who does not ponder, analyse, and study Narada from his seven esoteric facets, will never be able to fathom certain anthropological, chronological, and even Cosmic Mysteries. He is one of the Fires above-mentioned, and plays a part in the evolution of this Kalpa from its incipient, down to its final stage. He is an actor who appears in each of the successive acts (Root-Races) of the present Manvantaric drama, in the world allegories which strike the key-note of esotericism, and are now becoming more familiar to the reader. But shall we turn to other ancient Scriptures and documents for the corroboration of the “Fires,” “Sparks,” and “Flames?” They are plentiful, if one only seeks for them in the right places. In the “Book of the Concealed Mystery,” they are clearly enunciated, as also in the “Ha Idra Zuta Qadisha,” or the lesser holy Assembly. The language is very mystical and veiled, yet still comprehensible. Therein, among the sparks of Prior Worlds, “vibrating Flames and Sparks,” from the divine flint, the workmen proceed to create man, “male and female” (427); which “Flames and Sparks” (Angels and their Worlds, Stars and Planets) are said, figuratively, to “become extinct and die,” that is to say, remain unmanifested until a certain process of nature is accomplished. To show how thickly veiled from public view are the most important facts of anthropogenesis, two passages are now quoted from two Kabalistic books. The first is from the Book of the Concealed Mystery: — (429.) From a Light-Bearer (one of the seven sacred planets) of insupportable brightness proceeded a radiating Flame, dashing off, like a vast and mighty hammer, those sparks which were the prior worlds. (430.) And with most subtle ether were these intermingled and bound mutually together, but only when they were conjoined together, even the great Father and great Mother. (431.) From Hoa, himself, is ab, the Father; and from Hoa, himself, is ruach, the Spirit; who are hidden in the Ancient of Days, and therein is that Ether concealed. (432.) And it was connected with a Light-Bearer (a planet and its angel or regent), which went forth from that Light-Bearer of insupportable brightness, which is hidden in the bosom of Aima, the Great Mother. [84] Now the following extract from the Zohar [85] also deals with the same mystery: — “The Pre-Adamite Kings. ‘We have learned in the Siphrah D’Tzniootha: That the At-tee’kah D’At-tee’keen, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared his Form, built Kings, and engraved Kings, and sketched out Kings (men, the Kings of the animals), and they could not exist: till he overthrew them and hid them until after a time, therefore it is written: ‘And these are the Kings which reigned in the land of Edom’ . . . . And they could not exist till Resha’Hiv’rah, the White Head, the At’-tee-’kah D’At-tee’keen, Ancient of Ancients, arranged Himself . . . . and formed all forms above and below. . . . Before He arranged himself in his Form had not been formed all those whom he desired to form, and all worlds have been destroyed . . . . they did not remain in their places, because the form of the Kings had not been formed as it ought to be, and the Holy City had not been prepared.” (Zohar iii., 135a; 292a Idra Zootah. Brody, etc.) Now the plain meaning of these two
allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this: Worlds
and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of
evolution and from pre-existing material, until both
the planets and their men, in our case our Earth and its animal and
human races, became what they are now in the present cycle: opposite
polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and Matter, of the
positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before man
could become male and female physically, his prototype, the
creating Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane
astrally. That is to say, the atoms and the organic forces,
descending into the plane of the given differentiation, had to be
marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to be ever
carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabala calls
the Balance, through which everything that exists does so
as male and female in its final perfection, in this present stage of
materiality. Chochmah, Wisdom, the Male Sephiroth, had to
diffuse itself in, and through, Binah,
intelligent Nature, or Understanding. Therefore the First Root-race
of men, sexless and mindless, had to be overthrown and “hidden until
after a time”; i.e., the first race, instead of dying,
disappeared in the second race, as certain lower lives and
plants do in their progeny. It was a wholesale transformation. The
First became the Second Root-race, without either begetting it,
procreating it, or dying. “They passed by together,” as it
is written: “And he died and another reigned in his stead” (Genesis
xxvi. 31 et seq. Zohar iii., 292a). Why? Because
“the Holy City had not been prepared.” And what is the
“Holy City”? The Maquom (the Secret Place or the
Shrine) on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic
copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female
space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the
germ of the Son, or the visible Universe. [86] So much so, that in the
paragraph on “the Emanation of the Male and Female Principles” in
the Zohar (ibid.), it is said that, on
this earth, the Wisdom from the “Holy
Ancient” “does not shine except in male and female.” “Hohmah,
Wisdom, is the Father, and Binah,
understanding, is the Mother . . . . and when they connect one with
the other they bring forth and diffuse and emanate truth. In the
sayings of Rabbi Je-yeva Sabah, i.e., the Old, we learned
this: What is Binah Understanding? But when they connect in one
another, the This is also the “completeness” of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect apotheosis, the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the grossness of the terrestrial. Nothing so graphically gross exists in Eastern Occultism, nor in the primitive Kabala — the “Chaldean Book of Numbers.” We have said so in “Isis Unveiled”: — “We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: ‘In a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming, like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form of the lingham . . . the Maha Deva.’ Before casting slurs on a symbol whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that religion of sensualism par excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas of their own temples. The Mahody of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhangulpore, the minarets of Islam — either rounded or pointed — are the originals of the Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of the Rochester Cathedral, and of the modern Duomo of Milan. All of these steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian temples, are the reproductions of the primitive idea of the lithos, the upright phallus.” (Vol. II., p. 5.) Nevertheless, and however it may be, the fact that all these Hebrew Elohim, Sparks, and Cherubs are identical with the Devas, Rishis and the Fires and Flames, the Rudras and the forty-nine Agnis of the ancient Aryas, is sufficiently proven by and in the Kabala. STANZA IV. CREATION OF THE FIRST RACES.
14. The Seven Hosts, the “Will (or Mind)-Born” Lords, Propelled by the Spirit of Life-Giving (Fohat), separate men from themselves, each on his own Zone (a). (a) They threw off their “shadows” or astral bodies — if such an ethereal being as a “lunar Spirit” may be supposed to rejoice in an astral, besides a hardly tangible body. In another Commentary it is said that the “Ancestors” breathed out the first man, as Brahma is explained to have breathed out the Suras (Gods), when they became “Asuras” (from Asu, breath). In a third it is said that they, the newly-created men, “were the shadows of the Shadows.” With regard to this sentence — “They were the shadows of the Shadows” — a few more words may be said and a fuller explanation attempted. This first process of the evolution of mankind is far easier to accept than the one which follows it, though one and all will be rejected and doubted even by some Kabalists, especially the Western, who study the present effects, but have neglected to study their primary causes. Nor does the writer feel competent to explain a mode of procreation so difficult of appreciation save for an Eastern Occultist. Therefore it is useless to enter here into details concerning the process, though it is minutely described in the Secret Books, as it would only lead to speaking of facts hitherto unknown to the profane world, and hence to their being misunderstood. An “Adam” made of the dust of the ground will always be found preferable, by a certain class of students, to one projected out of the ethereal body of his creator; though the former process has never been heard of, while the latter is familiar, as all know, to many Spiritualists in Europe and America, who, of all men, ought to understand it. For who of those who have witnessed the phenomenon of a materialising form oozing out of the pores of a medium or, at other times, out of his left side, can fail to credit the possibility, at least, of such a birth? If there are in the Universe such beings as Angels or Spirits, whose incorporeal essence may constitute an intelligent entity notwithstanding the absence of any (to us) solid organism; and if there are those who believe that a god made the first man out of dust, and breathed into him a living Soul — and there are millions upon millions who believe both — what does this doctrine of ours contain that is so impossible? Very soon the day will dawn, when the world will have to choose whether it will accept the miraculous creation of man (and Kosmos too) out of nothing, according to the dead letter of Genesis, or a first man born from a fantastic link — absolutely “missing” so far — the common ancestor of man, and of the “true ape.” [88] Between these two fallacies, [89] Occult philosophy steps in. It teaches that the first human stock was projected by higher and semi-divine Beings out of their own essences. If the latter process is to be considered as abnormal or even inconceivable — because obsolete in Nature at this point of evolution — it is yet proven possible on the authority of certain “Spiritualistic” facts. Which, then, we ask of the three hypotheses or theories is the most reasonable and the least absurd? Certainly no one — provided he is not a soul-blind materialist — can ever object to the occult teaching. Now, as shown, we gather from the latter that man was not “created” the complete being he is now, however imperfect he still remains. There was a spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, and an animal evolution, from the highest to the lowest, as well as a physical development — from the simple and homogeneous, up to the more complex and heterogeneous; though not quite on the lines traced for us by the modern evolutionists. This double evolution in two contrary directions, required various ages, of divers natures and degrees of spirituality and intellectuality, to fabricate the being now known as man. Furthermore, the one absolute, ever acting and never erring law, which proceeds on the same lines from one eternity (or Manvantara) to the other — ever furnishing an ascending scale for the manifested, or that which we call the great Illusion (Maha-Maya), but plunging Spirit deeper and deeper into materiality on the one hand, and then redeeming it through flesh and liberating it — this law, we say, uses for these purposes the Beings from other and higher planes, men, or Minds (Manus), in accordance with their Karmic exigencies. At this juncture, the reader is again asked to turn to the Indian philosophy and religion. The Esotericism of both is at one with our Secret Doctrine, however much the form may differ and vary. On the Identity and Differences of the Incarnating Powers. The Progenitors of Man, called in India “Fathers,” Pitara or Pitris, are the creators of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves, as the first personalities, and we are they. Primeval man would be “the bone of their bone and the flesh of their flesh,” if they had body and flesh. As stated, they were “lunar Beings.” The Endowers of man with his conscious, immortal ego, are the “Solar Angels” — whether so regarded metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of the Conscious ego or human Soul are great. The esoteric name of these “Solar Angels” is, literally, the “Lords” (Nath) of “persevering ceaseless devotion” (pranidhana). Therefore they of the fifth principle (Manas) seem to be connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogis who make of pranidhana their fifth observance (see Yoga Shastra, II., 32.) It has already been explained why the trans-Himalayan Occultists regard them as evidently identical with those who in India are termed Kumaras, Agnishwattas, and the Barhishads. How precise and true is Plato’s expression, how profound and philosophical his remark on the (human) soul or ego, when he defined it as “a compound of the same and the other.” And yet how little this hint has been understood, since the world took it to mean that the soul was the breath of God, of Jehovah. It is “the same and the other,” as the great Initiate-Philosopher said; for the ego (the “Higher Self” when merged with and in the Divine Monad) is Man, and yet the same as the “other,” the Angel in him incarnated, as the same with the universal Mahat. The great classics and philosophers felt this truth, when saying that “there must be something within us which produces our thoughts. Something very subtle; it is a breath; it is fire; it is ether; it is quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an intellection; it is a number; it is harmony. . . . . ” (Voltaire). All these are the Manasam and Rajasas: the Kumaras, Asuras, and other rulers and Pitris, who incarnated in the Third Race, and in this and various other ways endowed mankind with Mind. There are seven classes of Pitris, as shown below, three incorporeal and four corporeal; and two kinds, the Agnishwatta and the Barhishad. And we may add that, as there are two kinds of Pitris, so there is a double and a triple set of Barhishad and Agnishwatta. The former, having given birth to their astral doubles, are reborn as Sons of Atri, and are the “Pitris of the Demons,” or corporeal beings, on the authority of Manu (III., 196); while the Agnishwatta are reborn as Sons of Marichi (a son of Brahma), and are the Pitris of the Gods (Manu again, Matsya and Padma Puranas and Kulluka in the Laws of the Manavas, III., 195). [90] Moreover, the Vayu Purana declares all the seven orders to have originally been the first gods, the Vairajas, whom Brahma “with the eye of Yoga, beheld in the eternal spheres, and who are the gods of gods”; and the Matsya adds that the Gods worshipped them; while the Harivansa (S. 1, 935) distinguishes the Virajas as one class of the Pitris only — a statement corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, however, identify the Virajas with the elder Agnishwattas [91] and the Rajasas, or Abhutarajasas, who are incorporeal without even an astral phantom. Vishnu is said, in most of the MSS., to have incarnated in and through them. “In the Raivata Manvantara, again, Hari, best of gods, was born of Sambhuti, as the divine Manasas — originating with the deities called Rajasas.” Sambhuti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife of Marichi, the father of the Agnishwatta, who, along with the Rajasas, are ever associated with Manasas. As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than Wilson, Mr. Fitzedward Hall, “Manasa is no inappropriate name for a deity associated with the Rajasas. We appear to have in it Manasam — the same as Manas — with the change of termination required to express male personification” (Vishnu Purana Bk. III., ch. I., p. 17 footnote). All the sons of Viraja are Manasa, says Nilakantha. And Viraja is Brahma, and, therefore, the incorporeal Pitris are called Vairajas from being the sons of Viraja, says Vayu Purana. We could multiply our proofs ad infinitum, but it is useless. The wise will understand our meaning, the unwise are not required to. There are thirty-three crores, or 330 millions, of gods in India. But, as remarked by the learned lecturer on the Bhagavad Gita, “they may be all devas, but are by no means all ‘gods’, in the high spiritual sense one attributes to the term.” “This is an unfortunate blunder,” he remarks, “generally committed by Europeans. Deva is a kind of spiritual being, and because the same word is used in ordinary parlance to mean god, it by no means follows that we have to worship thirty-three crores of gods.” And he adds suggestively: “These beings, as may be naturally inferred have a certain affinity with one of the three component Upadhis (basic principles) into which we have divided man.” — (Vide Theosophist, Feb., 1887, et seq.) The names of the deities of a certain mystic class change with every Manvantara. Thus the twelve great gods, Jayas, created by Brahma to assist him in the work of creation in the very beginning of the Kalpa, and who, lost in Samadhi, neglected to create — whereupon they were cursed to be repeatedly born in each Manvantara till the seventh — are respectively called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, Sadhyas, and Adityas: they are Tushitas (in the second Kalpa), and Adityas in this Vaivasvata period (see Vayu Purana), besides other names for each age. But they are identical with the Manasa or Rajasas, and these with our incarnating Dhyan Chohans. They are all classes of the Gnana-devas. Yes; besides those beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas, Kinaras, etc., etc., taken in their individualities, inhabit the astral plane, there are real Devagnanams, and to these classes of Devas belong the Adityas, the Vairajas, the Kumaras, the Asuras, and all those high celestial beings whom Occult teaching calls Manaswin, the Wise, foremost of all, and who would have made all men the self-conscious spiritually intellectual beings they will be, had they not been “cursed” to fall into generation, and to be reborn themselves as mortals for their neglect of duty. STANZA IV. — (Continued.)15. Seven times Seven Shadows (chhayas) of Future Men (or Amanasas) (a) were (thus) Born, each of his own colour (complexion) and kind (b). Each (also) inferior to his Father (creator). The Fathers, the Boneless, could give no Life to Beings with Bones. Their Progeny were Bhuta (phantoms) with neither Form nor Mind, Therefore they were called the Chhaya (image or shadow) Race (c). (a) Manu, as already remarked, comes from the root “man” to think, hence “a thinker.” It is from this Sanskrit word very likely that sprung the Latin “mens,” mind, the Egyptian “Menes,” the “Master-Mind,” the Pythagorean Monas, or conscious “thinking unit,” mind also, and even our “Manas” or mind, the fifth principle in man. Hence these shadows are called amanasa, “mindless.” With the Brahmins the Pitris are very sacred, because they are the Progenitors, [92] or ancestors of men — the first Manushya on this Earth — and offerings are made to them by the Brahmin when a son is born unto him. They are more honoured and their ritual is more important than the worship of the gods (See the “Laws of Manu,” Bk. III., p. 203). May we not now search for a philosophical meaning in this dual group of progenitors? The Pitris being divided into seven classes, we have here the mystic number again. Nearly all the Puranas agree that three of these are arupa, formless, while four are corporeal; the former being intellectual and spiritual, the latter material and devoid of intellect. Esoterically, it is the Asuras who form the first three classes of Pitris — “born in the body of night” — whereas the other four were produced from the body of twilight. Their fathers, the gods, were doomed to be born fools on Earth, according to Vayu Purana. The legends are purposely mixed up and made very hazy: the Pitris being in one the sons of the gods, and, in another those of Brahma; while a third makes them instructors of their own fathers. It is the Hosts of the four material classes who create men simultaneously on the seven zones. Now, with regard to the seven classes of Pitris, each of which is again divided into seven, a word to students and a query to the profane. That class of the “Fire Dhyanis,” which we identify on undeniable grounds with the Agnishwattas, is called in our school the “Heart” of the Dhyan-Chohanic Body; and it is said to have incarnated in the third race of men and made them perfect. The esoteric Mystagogy speaks of the mysterious relation existing between the hebdomadic essence or substance of this angelic Heart and that of man, whose every physical organ, and psychic, and spiritual function, is a reflection, so to say, a copy on the terrestrial plane of the model or prototype above. Why, it is asked, should there be such a strange repetition of the number seven in the anatomical structure of man? Why should the heart have four lower “cavities and three higher divisions,” answering so strangely to the septenary division of the human principles, separated into two groups, the higher and the lower; and why should the same division be found in the various classes of Pitris, and especially our Fire Dhyanis? For, as already stated, these Beings fall into four corporeal (or grosser) and three incorporeal (or subtler) “principles,” or call them by any other name you please. Why do the seven nervous plexuses of the body radiate seven rays? Why are there these seven plexuses, and why seven distinct layers in the human skin? “Having projected their shadows and made men of one element (ether), the progenitors re-ascend to Maha-loka, whence they descend periodically, when the world is renewed, to give birth to new men. “The subtle bodies remain without understanding (Manas) until the advent of the Suras (Gods) now called Asuras (not Gods),” says the Commentary. “Not-gods,” for the Brahmins, perhaps, but the highest Breaths, for the Occultist; since those progenitors (Pitar), the formless and the intellectual, refuse to build man, but endow him with mind; the four corporeal classes creating only his body. This is very plainly shown in various texts of the Rig Veda — the highest authority for a Hindu of any sect whatever. Therein Asura means “spiritual divine,” and the word is used as a synonym for Supreme Spirit, while in the sense of a “God,” the term “Asura” is applied to Varuna and Indra and pre-eminently to Agni — the three having been in days of old the three highest gods, before Brahmanical Theo-Mythology distorted the true meaning of almost everything in the Archaic Scriptures. But, as the key is now lost, the Asuras are hardly mentioned. In the Zendavesta the same is found. In the Mazdean, or Magian, religion, “Asura” is the lord Asura Visvavedas, the “all-knowing” or “omniscient Lord”; and Asura-Mazdha, become later Ahura-Mazdha, is, as Benfey shows, “the Lord who bestows Intelligence” — Asura-Medha and Ahura-Mazdao. Elsewhere in this work it is shown, on equally good authority, that the Indo-Iranian Asura was always regarded as sevenfold. This fact, combined with the name Mazdha, as above, which makes of the sevenfold Asura the “Lord,” or “Lords” collectively “who bestow Intelligence,” connects the Amshaspends with the Asuras and with our incarnating Dhyan Chohans, as well as with the Elohim, and the seven informing gods of Egypt, Chaldea, and every other country. Why these “gods” refused to create men is not, as stated in exoteric accounts, because their pride was too great to share the celestial power of their essence with the children of Earth, but for reasons already suggested. However, allegory has indulged in endless fancies and theology taken advantage thereof in every country to make out its case against these first-born, or the logoi, and to impress it as a truth on the minds of the ignorant and credulous. (Compare also what is said about Makara and the Kumaras in connection with the Zodiac.) The Christian system is not the only one which has degraded them into demons. Zoroastrianism and even Brahmanism have profited thereby to obtain hold over the people’s mind. Even in Chaldean exotericism, Beings who refuse to create, i.e., who are said to oppose thereby the Demiurgos, are also denounced as the Spirits of Darkness. The Suras, who win their intellectual independence, fight the Suras who are devoid thereof, who are shown as passing their lives in profitless ceremonial worship based on blind faith — a hint now ignored by the orthodox Brahmins — and forthwith the former become A-Suras. The first and mind-born Sons of the Deity refuse to create progeny, and are cursed by Brahma to be born as men. They are hurled down to Earth, which, later on, is transformed, in theological dogma, into the infernal regions. Ahriman destroys the Bull created by Ormazd — which is the emblem of terrestrial illusive life, the “germ of sorrow” — and, forgetting that the perishing finite seed must die, in order that the plant of immortality, the plant of spiritual, eternal life, should sprout and live, Ahriman is proclaimed the enemy, the opposing power, the devil. Typhon cuts Osiris into fourteen pieces, in order to prevent his peopling the world and thus creating misery; and Typhon becomes, in the exoteric, theological teaching, the Power of Darkness. But all this is the exoteric shell. It is the worshippers of the latter who attribute to disobedience and rebellion the effort and self-sacrifice of those who would help men to their original status of divinity through self-conscious efforts; and it is these worshippers of Form who have made demons of the Angels of Light. Esoteric philosophy, however, teaches that one third [93] of the Dhyanis — i.e., the three classes of the Arupa Pitris, endowed with intelligence, “which is a formless breath, composed of intellectual not elementary substances” (see Harivamsa, 932) — was simply doomed by the law of Karma and evolution to be reborn (or incarnated) on Earth. [94] Some of these were Nirmanakayas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the Puranas, reappearing on this globe, in the third Manvantara, as Kings, Rishis and heroes (read Third Root-Race). This tenet, being too philosophical and metaphysical to be grasped by the multitudes, was, as already stated, disfigured by the priesthood for the purpose of preserving a hold over them through superstitious fear. The supposed “rebels,” then, were simply those who, compelled by Karmic law to drink the cup of gall to its last bitter drop, had to incarnate anew, and thus make responsible thinking entities of the astral statues projected by their inferior brethren. Some are said to have refused, because they had not in them the requisite materials — i.e., an astral body — since they were arupa. The refusal of others had reference to their having been Adepts and Yogis of long past preceding Manvantaras; another mystery. But, later on, as Nirmanakayas, they sacrificed themselves for the good and salvation of the Monads which were waiting for their turn, and which otherwise would have had to linger for countless ages in irresponsible, animal-like, though in appearance human, forms. It may be a parable and an allegory within an allegory. Its solution is left to the intuition of the student, if he only reads that which follows with his spiritual eye. As to their fashioners or “Ancestors” — those Angels who, in the exoteric legends, obeyed the law — they must be identical with the Barhishad Pitris, or the Pitar-Devata, i.e., those possessed of the physical creative fire. They could only create, or rather clothe, the human Monads with their own astral Selves, but they could not make man in their image and likeness. “Man must not be like one of us,” say the creative gods, entrusted with the fabrication of the lower animal but higher; (see Gen. and Plato’s Timaeus). Their creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means, esoterically, that it is they who became the first Race, and thus shared its destiny and further evolution. They would not, simply because they could not, give to man that sacred spark which burns and expands into the flower of human reason and self-consciousness, for they had it not to give. This was left to that class of Devas who became symbolised in Greece under the name of Prometheus, to those who had nought to do with the physical body, yet everything with the purely spiritual man. (See Part II. of this volume, “The Fallen Angels”; also “The Gods of Light proceed from the Gods of Darkness.”) Each class of Creators endows man with what it has to give: the one builds his external form; the other gives him its essence, which later on becomes the Human Higher Self owing to the personal exertion of the individual; but they could not make men as they were themselves — perfect, because sinless; sinless, because having only the first, pale shadowy outlines of attributes, and these all perfect — from the human standpoint — white, pure and cold as the virgin snow. Where there is no struggle, there is no merit. Humanity, “of the Earth earthy,” was not destined to be created by the angels of the first divine Breath: therefore they are said to have refused to do so, and man had to be formed by more material creators, [95] who, in their turn, could give only what they had in their own natures, and no more. Subservient to eternal law, the pure gods could only project out of themselves shadowy men, a little less ethereal and spiritual, less divine and perfect than themselves — shadows still. The first humanity, therefore, was a pale copy of its progenitors; too material, even in its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of gods; too spiritual and pure to be men, endowed as it is with every negative (Nirguna) perfection. Perfection, to be fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the incorruptible must grow out of the corruptible, having the latter as its vehicle and basis and contrast. Absolute light is absolute darkness, and vice versa. In fact, there is neither light nor darkness in the realms of truth. Good and Evil are twins, the progeny of Space and Time, under the sway of Maya. Separate them, by cutting off one from the other, and they will both die. Neither exists per se, since each has to be generated and created out of the other, in order to come into being; both must be known and appreciated before becoming objects of perception, hence, in mortal mind, they must be divided. Nevertheless, as the illusionary distinction exists, it requires a lower order of creative angels to “create” inhabited globes — especially ours — or to deal with matter on this earthly plane. The philosophical Gnostics were the first to think so, in the historical period, and to invent various systems upon this theory. Therefore in their schemes of creation, one always finds their Creators occupying a place at the very foot of the ladder of spiritual Being. With them, those who created our earth and its mortals were placed on the very limit of mayavic matter, and their followers were taught to think — to the great disgust of the Church Fathers — that for the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe, no high divinity could be made responsible, but only angels of a low hierarchy, [96] to which class they relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah. Mankinds different from the present are mentioned in all the ancient Cosmogonies. Plato speaks, in the Phaedrus, of a winged race of men. Aristophanes (in Plato’s Banquet), speaks of a race androgynous and with round bodies. In Pymander, all the animal kingdom even is double-sexed. Thus in § 18, it is said: “The circuit having been accomplished, the knot was loosened. . . . and all the animals, which were equally androgynous, were untied (separated) together with man. . . . .” for. . . . “the causes had to produce effects on earth.” [97] Again, in the ancient Quiche Manuscript, the Popol Vuh — published by the late Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg — the first men are described as a race “whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once”: thus showing the divine knowledge of Gods, not mortals. The Secret Doctrine, correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the facts as they are recorded in the Archaic symbols. (b) These “shadows” were born “each of his own colour and kind,” each also “inferior to his creator,” because the latter was a complete being of his kind. The Commentaries refer the first sentence to the colour or complexion of each human race thus evolved. In Pymander, the Seven primitive men, created by Nature from the “heavenly Man,” all partake of the qualities of the “Seven Governors,” or Rulers, who loved Man — their own reflection and synthesis. In the Norse Legends, one recognizes in Asgard, the habitat of the gods, as also in the Ases themselves, the same mystical loci and personifications woven into the popular “myths,” as in our Secret Doctrine; and we find them in the Vedas, the Puranas, the Mazdean Scriptures and the Kabala. The Ases of Scandinavia, the rulers of the world which preceded ours, whose name means literally the “pillars of the world,” its “supports,” are thus identical with the Greek Cosmocratores, the “Seven Workmen or Rectors” of Pymander, the seven Rishis and Pitris of India, the seven Chaldean gods and seven evil spirits, the seven Kabalistic Sephiroth synthesised by the upper triad, and even the seven Planetary Spirits of the Christian mystics. The Ases create the earth, the seas, the sky and the clouds, the whole visible world, from the remains of the slain giant Ymir; but they do not create Man, but only his form from the Ask or ash-tree. It is Odin who endows him with life and soul, after Lodur had given him blood and bones, and finally it is Honir who furnishes him with his intellect (manas) and with his conscious senses. The Norse Ask, the Hesiodic Ash-tree, whence issued the men of the generation of bronze, the Third Root-Race, and the Tzite tree of the Popol-Vuh, out of which the Mexican third race of men was created, are all one. [98] This may be plainly seen by any reader. But the Occult reason why the Norse Yggdrasil, the Hindu Aswatha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, and the Tibetan Zampun, are one with the Kabalistic Sephirothal Tree, and even with the Holy Tree made by Ahura Mazda, and the Tree of Eden — who among the western scholars can tell? [99] Nevertheless, the fruits of all those “Trees,” whether Pippala or Haoma or yet the more prosaic apple, are the “plants of life,” in fact and verity. The prototypes of our races were all enclosed in the microcosmic tree, which grew and developed within and under the great mundane macrocosmic tree [100]; and the mystery is half revealed in the Dirghotamas, where it is said: “Pippala, the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come spirits who love the science, and where the gods produce all marvels.” As in the Gogard, among the luxuriant branches of all those mundane trees, the “Serpent” dwells. But while the Macroscosmic tree is the Serpent of Eternity and of absolute Wisdom itself, those who dwell in the Microcosmic tree are the Serpents of the manifested Wisdom. One is the One and All; the others are its reflected parts. The “tree” is man himself, of course, and the Serpents dwelling in each, the conscious Manas, the connecting link between Spirit and Matter, heaven and earth. Everywhere, it is the same. The creating powers produce Man, but fail in their final object. All these logoi strive to endow man with conscious immortal spirit, reflected in the Mind (manas) alone; they fail, and they are all represented as being punished for the failure, if not for the attempt. What is the nature of the punishment? A sentence of imprisonment in the lower or nether region, which is our earth; the lowest in its chain; an “eternity” — meaning the duration of the life-cycle — in the darkness of matter, or within animal Man. It has pleased the half ignorant and half designing Church Fathers to disfigure the graphic symbol. They took advantage of the metaphor and allegory found in every old religion to turn them to the benefit of the new one. Thus man was transformed into the darkness of a material hell; his divine consciousness, obtained from his indwelling Principle (the Manasa), or the incarnated Deva, became the glaring flames of the infernal region; and our globe that Hell itself. Pippala, Haoma, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, were denounced as the forbidden fruit, and the “Serpent of Wisdom,” the Voice of reason and consciousness, remained identified for ages with the Fallen Angel, which is the old Dragon, the Devil! (Vide Part II., “The Evil Spirit, who, or what?”) The same for the other high symbols. The Svastica, the most sacred and mystic symbol in India, the “Jaina-Cross” as it is now called by the Masons, notwithstanding its direct connection, and even identity with the Christian Cross, has become dishonoured in the same manner. It is the “devil’s sign,” we are told by the Indian missionaries. “Does it not shine on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thousand headed Sesha-Ananta, in the depths of Patala, the Hindu Naraka or Hell”? It does: but what is Ananta? As Sesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric cycle of time, and becomes infinite Time itself, when called Ananta, the great seven-headed Serpent, on which rests Vishnu, the eternal Deity, during Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do with this highly metaphysical symbol? The Svastica is the most philosophically scientific of all symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary in a few lines of the whole work of creation, or evolution, as one should rather say, from Cosmo-theogony down to Anthropogony, from the indivisible unknown Parabrahm to the humble moneron of materialistic science, whose genesis is as unknown to that science as is that of the All-Deity itself. The Svastica is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is the “Worker’s Hammer” in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the “Hammer” just referred to in the “Book of Concealed Mystery” (Ch. I., §§ 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), “which striketh sparks from the flint” (Space), those sparks becoming worlds. It is “Thor’s Hammer,” the magic weapon forged by the dwarfs against the Giants, or the pre-cosmic Titanic forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the region of matter, will not be subdued by the Gods, the Agents of Universal Harmony, but have first to be destroyed. This is why the world is formed out of the relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastica is the Miolnir, the “storm-hammer”; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy gods, after having been purified by fire (the fire of passions and suffering in their life-incarnations), become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal peace, then Miolnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of Hel (the goddess-queen of the region of the Dead) will bind them no longer, for the kingdom of evil will have passed away. “Surtur’s flames had not destroyed them, nor yet had the raging waters” of the several deluges. . . . . “Then came the sons of Thor. They brought Miolnir with them, no longer as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heaven and the new Earth. . . . . ” [101] Verily many are its meanings! In the
Macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of Creation,”
with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual
motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In
that of the manifested Kosmos and our Earth, it points to the
rotation in the cycles of Time of the world’s axes and their
equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastica
How prophetic are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the ravens of Odin whisper of the past and the future, as they flutter around in their abode of crystal beneath the flowing river. The songs are all written down in the “Scrolls of Wisdom,” of which many are lost but some still remain: and they repeat in poetical allegory the teachings of the archaic ages. To summarise from Dr. Wagner’s “Asgard and the Gods,” the “renewal of the world,” which is a prophecy about the seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense. The Miolnir had done its duty in this Round, and: — “. . . . on the field of Ida, the field of resurrection (for the Fifth Round), the sons of the highest gods assembled, and in them their fathers rose again (the Egos of all their past incarnations). They talked of the Past and the Present, and remembered the wisdom and prophecies of their ancestor which had all been fulfilled. Near them, but unseen of them, was the strong, the mighty One, who rules all things. . . . and ordains the eternal laws that govern the world. They all knew he was there, they felt his presence and his power, but were ignorant of his name. At his command the new Earth rose out of the Waters of Space. To the South above the Field of Ida, he made another heaven called Audlang, and further off, a third, Widblain. Over Gimil’s cave, a wondrous palace was erected, covered with gold and shining bright in the sun.” These are the three gradually ascending planets of our “Chain.” There the Gods were enthroned, as they used to be. . . . From Gimil’s heights (the seventh planet or globe, the highest and the purest), they looked down upon the happy descendants of lif and lifthrasir (the coming Adam and Eve of purified humanity), and signed to them to climb up higher, to rise in knowledge and wisdom, step by step, from one “heaven to another,” until they were at last fit to be united to the Gods in the house of All-Father (p. 305). He who knows the doctrines of Esoteric Budhism, (or Wisdom), though so imperfectly sketched hitherto, will see clearly the allegory contained in the above. Its more philosophical meaning will
be better understood if the reader thinks carefully over the myth of
Prometheus. It is examined further on in the light of the Hindu
Pramantha. Degraded into a purely physiological
symbol by some Orientalists, and taken in connection with
terrestrial fire only, their interpretation is an insult to every
religion, including Christianity, whose greatest mystery is thus
dragged down to matter. The “friction” of divine Pramantha and Arani
could suggest itself under this image only to the brutal conceptions
of the German materialists — than whom there are none worse. It is
true that the Divine babe, Agni with the Sanskrit-speaking
Race, who became Ignis with the Latins, is born from the
conjunction of Pramantha and Arani (Svastica) during the sacrificial
ceremony. But what of that? Twashtri (Viswakarman) is the
“divine artist and carpenter” [102] and is also the Father of
the gods and of creative fire in the Vedas. So ancient is
the symbol and so sacred, that there is hardly an excavation made on
the sites of old cities without its being found. A number of such
terra cotta discs, called fusaiolos, were found by
Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Both these
forms (c) Chhaya, as already explained, is the astral image. It bears this meaning in Sanskrit works. Thus Sanjna (Spiritual Consciousness), the wife of Surya, the Sun, is shown retiring into the jungle to lead an ascetic life, and leaving behind to her husband her Chhaya, shadow or image. 16. How are the (real) manushyas born? The manus with minds, how are they made? (a) The fathers (Barhishad (?) call to their help their own fire (the Kavyavahana, electric fire), which is the fire which burns in earth. The spirit of the earth called to his help the solar fire (Suchi, the spirit in the Sun). These three (the Pitris and the two fires) produced in their joint efforts a good rupa. It (the form) could stand, walk, run, recline and fly. Yet it was still but a chhaya, a shadow with no sense (b) . . . . . . (a) Here an explanation again becomes necessary in the light, and with the help of the exoteric added to the esoteric scriptures. The “Manushyas” (men) and the Manus are here equivalent to the Chaldean “Adam” — this term not meaning at all the first man, as with the Jews, or one solitary individual, but mankind collectively, as with the Chaldeans and Assyrians. It is the four orders or classes of Dhyan Chohans out of the seven, says the Commentary, “who were the progenitors of the concealed man, “i.e., the subtle inner man. The “Lha” of the Moon, the lunar spirits, were, as already stated, only the ancestors of his form, i.e., of the model according to which Nature began her external work upon him. Thus primitive man was, when he appeared, only a senseless Bhuta [103] or a “Phantom.” This “creation” was a failure, the reason of which will be explained in the Commentary on Sloka 20. (b) This attempt was again a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of physical nature’s unaided attempts to construct even a perfect animal — let alone man. For the “Fathers,” the lower Angels, are all Nature-Spirits and the higher Elementals also possess an intelligence of their own; but this is not enough to construct a thinking man. “Living Fire” was needed, that fire which gives the human mind its self-perception and self-consciousness, or Manas; and the progeny of Parvaka and Suchi are the animal electric and solar fires, which create animals, and could thus furnish but a physical living constitution to that first astral model of man. The first creators, then, were the Pygmalions of primeval man: they failed to animate the statue — intellectually. This Stanza we shall see is very suggestive. It explains the mystery of, and fills the gap between, the informing principle in man — the higher self or human Monad — and the animal Monad, both one and the same, although the former is endowed with divine intelligence, the latter with instinctual faculty alone. How is the difference to be explained, and the presence of that higher self in man accounted for? “The Sons of mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life eternal.” . . . . “In the beginning (in the Second Race) some (of the Lords) only breathed of their essence into Manushya (men); and some took in man their abode.” This shows that not all men became incarnations of the “divine Rebels,” but only a few among them. The remainder had their fifth principle simply quickened by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the “sons of Mahat,” speaking allegorically, skipped the intermediate worlds, in their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never have been able to reach upward from this earth, and attain through self-exertion his ultimate goal. The cyclic pilgrimage would have to be performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if not entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure spirit, that we are what we are — self-conscious, thinking men, with the capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil. Hence the rebels are our saviours. Let the philosopher ponder well over this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites — Spirit and Matter — can be cemented on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called “fables.” (Vide infra, “The Secret of Satan.”) It explains, to begin with, the statement made in Pymander: that the “heavenly man,” the “Son of the Father,” who partook of the nature and essence of the Seven Governors, or creators and Rulers of the material world, “peeped through the Harmony and, breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire, made manifest the downward-born nature.” [104] It explains every verse in that Hermetic narrative, as also the Greek allegory of Prometheus. Most important of all, it explains the many allegorical accounts about the “Wars in Heaven,” including that of Revelation with respect to the Christian dogma of the fallen angels. It explains the “rebellion” of the oldest and highest Angels, and the meaning of their being cast down from Heaven into the depths of Hell, i.e., matter. It even solves the recent perplexity of the Assyriologists, who express their wonder through the late George Smith. “My first idea of this part” (of the rebellion), he says, “was that the wars with the powers of Evil preceded the Creation; I now think it followed the account of the fall” (Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92). In this work Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early Babylonian cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The tree has seven branches: three on the man’s side, four on that of the female. These branches are typical of the seven Root-Races, in the third of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the so-called fall into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless, then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each other. “The Dragon,” says Mr. G. Smith, “which in the Chaldean account of the creation leads man to sin, is the creation of Tiamat, the living principle of the Sea, or Chaos . . . which was opposed to the deities at the creation of the world.” This is an error. The Dragon is the male principle, or Phallus, personified, or rather animalized; and Tiamat, “the embodiment of the Spirit of Chaos,” of the deep, or Abyss, is the female principle, the Womb. The “Spirit of Chaos and Disorder” refers to the mental perturbation which it led to. It is the sensual, attractive, magnetic principle which fascinates and seduces, the ever living active element which throws the whole world into disorder, chaos, and sin. The Serpent seduces the woman, but it is the latter who seduces man, and both are included in the Karmic curse, though only as a natural result of a cause produced. Says George Smith: “It is clear that the Dragon is included in the curse for the Fall, and that the Gods” (the Elohim, jealous at seeing the man of clay becoming a Creator in his turn, like all the animals,) “invoke on the head of the human Race all the evils which afflict humanity. Wisdom and knowledge shall injure him, he shall have family quarrels, he will anger the gods, he shall submit to tyranny. . . . he shall be disappointed in his desires, he shall pour out useless prayers, he shall commit future sin. . No doubt subsequent lines continue this topic, but again our narrative is broken, and it re-opens only where the gods are preparing for war with the powers of evil, which are led by Tiamat (the woman). . . . ” (Babylonian Legend of Creation, p. 92.) This account is omitted in Genesis, for monotheistic purposes. But it is a mistaken policy — born no doubt of fear, and regard for dogmatic religion and its superstitions — to have sought to restore the Chaldean fragments by Genesis, whereas it is the latter, far younger than any of the fragments, which ought to be explained by the former. 17. The Breath (human Monad) needed a form; the Fathers gave it. The breath needed a gross body; the Earth moulded it. The Breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it into its form. The breath needed a mirror of its body (astral shadow); “We gave it our own,” said the Dhyanis. The breath needed a vehicle of desires (Kama Rupa); “It has it,” said the Drainer of Waters (Suchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct). The breath needs a mind to embrace the Universe; “We cannot give that,” said the Fathers. “I never had it,” said the Spirit of the Earth. “The form would be consumed were I to give it mine,” said the Great (solar) Fire . . . . (nascent) Man remained an empty, senseless Bhuta . . . . Thus have the boneless given life to those who became (later) men with bones in the third (race) (a). As a full explanation is found in Stanza V. (Vide paragraph (a)), a few remarks will now suffice. The “Father” of primitive physical man, or of his body, is the vital electric principle residing in the Sun. The Moon is its Mother, because of that mysterious power in the Moon which has as decided an influence upon human gestation and generation, which it regulates, as it has on the growth of plants and animals. The “Wind” or Ether, standing in this case for the agent of transmission by which those influences are carried down from the two luminaries and diffused upon Earth, is referred to as the “nurse”; while “Spiritual Fire” alone makes of man a divine and perfect entity. Now what is that “Spiritual Fire”? In alchemy it is hydrogen, in general; while in esoteric actuality it is the emanation or the Ray which proceeds from its noumenon, the “Dhyan of the first Element.” Hydrogen is gas only on our terrestrial plane. But even in chemistry hydrogen “would be the only existing form of matter, in our sense of the term,” [105] and is very nearly allied to protyle, which is our layam. It is the father and generator, so to say, or rather the Upadhi (basis), of both air and water, and is “fire, air and water,” in fact: one under three aspects; hence the chemical and alchemical trinity. In the world of manifestation or matter it is the objective symbol and the material emanation from the subjective and purely spiritual entitative Being in the region of noumena. Well might Godfrey Higgins have compared Hydrogen to, and even identified it with, the To on, the “One” of the Greeks. For, as he remarks, Hydrogen is not Water, though it generates it; Hydrogen is not fire, though it manifests or creates it; nor is it Air, though air may be regarded as a product of the union of Water and Fire — since Hydrogen is found in the aqueous element of the atmosphere. It is three in one. If one studies comparative Theogony, it is easy to find that the secret of these “Fires” was taught in the Mysteries of every ancient people, pre-eminently in Samothrace. There is not the smallest doubt that the Kabeiri, the most arcane of all the ancient deities, gods and men, great deities and Titans, are identical with the Kumaras and Rudras headed by Kartikeya — a Kumara also. This is quite evident even exoterically; and these Hindu deities were, like the Kabeiri, the personified sacred Fires of the most occult powers of Nature. The several branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindu and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature, if not their importance. As in the case of the Kumaras, the number of the Kabeiri is uncertain. Some say that there were three or four only; others say seven. Aschieros, Achiosersa, Achiochersus, and Camillus may very well stand for the alter egos of the four Kumaras — Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana. The former deities, whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often confounded with the Dioscuri, Corybantes, Anaces, etc.; just as the Kumara, whose reputed father is Brahma, (or rather, the “Flame of his Wrath,” which prompted him to perform the ninth or Kumara creation, resulting in Rudra or Nilalohita (Siva) and the Kumaras), were confounded with the Asuras, the Rudras, and the Pitris, for the simple reason that they are all one — i.e., correlative Forces and Fires. There is no space to describe these “fires” and their real meaning here, though we may attempt to do so if the third and fourth volumes of this work are ever published. Meanwhile a few more explanations may be added. The foregoing are all mysteries which must be left to the personal intuition of the student for solution, rather than described. If he would learn something of the secret of the fires, let him turn to certain works of the Alchemists, who very correctly connect fire with every element, as do the Occultists. The reader must remember that the ancients considered religion, and the natural sciences along with philosophy, to be closely and inseparably linked together. AEsculapius was the Son of Apollo — the Sun or fire of Life; at once Helius, Pythius, and the god of oracular Wisdom. In exoteric religions, as much as in esoteric philosophy, the Elements — especially fire, water, and air — are made the progenitors of our five physical senses, and hence are directly connected (in an occult way) with them. These physical senses pertain even to a lower creation than the one called in the Puranas Pratisarga, or secondary Creation. “Liquid fire proceeds from indiscrete fire,” says an Occult axiom. “The Circle is the thought; the diameter (or the line) is the word; and their union is life.” In the Kabala, Bath-Kol is the daughter of the Divine Voice, or primordial light, Shekinah. In the Puranas and Hindu exotericism, Vach (the Voice) is the female Logos of Brahma — a permutation of Aditi, primordial light. And if Bath-Kol, in Jewish mysticism, is an articulate praeter-natural voice from heaven, revealing to the “chosen people” the sacred traditions and laws, it is only because Vach was called, before Judaism, the “Mother of the Vedas,” who entered into the Rishis and inspired them by her revelations; just as Bath-Kol is said to have inspired the prophets of Israel and the Jewish High-Priests. And both exist to this day, in their respective sacred symbologies, because the ancients associated sound or Speech with the Ether of Space, of which Sound is the characteristic. Hence Fire, Water and Air are the primordial Cosmic Trinity. “I am thy Thought, thy God, more ancient than the moist principle, the light that radiates within Darkness (Chaos), and the shining Word of God (Sound) is the Son of the Deity.” (“Pymander,” § 6.) [106] Thus we have to study well the “Primary creation,” before we can understand the Secondary. The first Race had three rudimentary elements in it; and no fire as yet; because, with the Ancients, the evolution of man, and the growth and development of his spiritual and physical senses, were subordinate to the evolution of the elements on the Cosmic plane of this Earth. All proceeds from Prabhavapyaya, the evolution of the creative and sentient principles in the gods, and even of the so-called creative deity himself. This is found in the names and appellations given to Vishnu in exoteric scriptures. As the Protologos (the Orphic), he is called Purvaja, “pregenetic,” and then the other names connect him in their descending order more and more with matter. The following order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution of the Elements and the Senses; or in Cosmic terrestrial “man” or “Spirit,” and mortal physical man: —
As seen, each Element adds to its own characteristics, those of its predecessor; as each Root-Race adds the characterizing sense of the preceding Race. The same is true in the septenary creation of man, who evolves gradually in seven stages, and on the same principles, as will be shown further on. Thus, while Gods or Dhyan Chohans (Devas) proceed from the First Cause — which is not Parabrahm, for the latter is the all cause, and cannot be referred to as the “First Cause,” — which First Cause is called in the Brahmanical Books Jagad-Yoni, “the womb of the world,” mankind emanates from these active agents in Kosmos. But men, during the first and the second races, were not physical beings, but merely rudiments of the future men: Bhutas, which proceeded from Bhutadi, “origin,” or the “original place whence sprung the Elements.” Hence they proceeded with all the rest from Prabhavapyaya, “the place whence is the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things,” as explained by the Commentator. Whence also our physical senses. Whence even the highest “created” deity itself, in our philosophy. As one with the Universe, whether we call him Brahma, Iswara, or Purusha, he is a manifested deity, — hence created, or limited and conditioned. This is easily proven, even from the exoteric teachings. After being called the incognizable, eternal Brahma (neuter or abstract), the Punda-Rikaksha, “supreme and imperishable glory,” once that instead of Sadaika-Rupa, “changeless” or “immutable” Nature, he is addressed as Ekanaka-Rupa, “both single and manifold,” he, the cause, becomes merged with his own effects; and his names, if placed in esoteric order, show the following descending scale: —
The last name means something perceived or conceived of, owing to false and erroneous apprehension, as a material form; but, in fact, only Maya, illusion, as all is in our physical universe. It is in strict analogy with its attributes in both the spiritual and material worlds, that the evolution of the Dhyan Chohanic Essences takes place; the characteristics of the latter being reflected, in their turn, in Man, collectively, and in each of his principles; every one of which contains in itself, in the same progressive order, a portion of their various “fires” and elements. STANZA V. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND RACE.
18. The first (Race) were the Sons of Yoga. Their sons, the children of the Yellow Father and the White Mother. In the later Commentary, the sentence is translated: — “The Sons of the Sun and of the Moon, the nursling of ether (or the wind ) (a) . . . . . . . “They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords (b). They (the shadows) expanded. The Spirits of the Earth clothed them; the solar Lhas warmed them (i.e. preserved the vital fire in the nascent physical forms). The Breaths had life, but had no understanding. They had no fire nor water of their own (c). (a) Remember in this connection the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes, the esoteric meaning of which has seven keys to it. The Astro-Chemical is well known to students, the anthropological may be given now. The “One thing” mentioned in it is man. It is said: “The Father of that one only thing is the Sun; its Mother the Moon; the Wind carries it in his bosom, and its nurse is the Spirituous Earth.” In the occult rendering of the same it is added: “and Spiritual Fire is its instructor (Guru).” This fire is the higher Self, the Spiritual Ego, or that which is eternally reincarnating under the influence of its lower personal Selves, changing with every re-birth, full of Tanha or desire to live. It is a strange law of Nature that, on this plane, the higher (Spiritual) Nature should be, so to say, in bondage to the lower. Unless the Ego takes refuge in the Atman, the all-spirit, and merges entirely into the essence thereof, the personal Ego may goad it to the bitter end. This cannot be thoroughly understood unless the student makes himself familiar with the mystery of evolution, which proceeds on triple lines — spiritual, psychic and physical. That which propels towards, and forces evolution, i.e., compels the growth and development of Man towards perfection, is (a) the monad,or that which acts in it unconsciously through a force inherent in itself; and (b) the lower astral body or the personal self. The former, whether imprisoned in a vegetable or an animal body, is endowed with, is indeed itself, that force. Owing to its identity with the all-force, which, as said, is inherent in the Monad, it is all-potent on the Arupa, or formless plane. On our plane, its essence being too pure, it remains all-potential, but individually becomes inactive: e.g., the rays of the Sun, which contribute to the growth of vegetation, do not select this or that plant to shine upon. Uproot the plant and transfer it to a piece of soil where the sunbeam cannot reach it, and the latter will not follow it. So with the Atman: unless the higher Self or ego gravitates towards its Sun — the Monad — the lower Ego, or personal Self, will have the upper hand in every case. For it is this Ego, with its fierce Selfishness and animal desire to live a Senseless life (Tanha), which is “the maker of the tabernacle,” as Buddha calls it in Dhammapada (153 and 154). Hence the expression, “the Spirits of the Earth clothed the shadows and expanded them.” To these “Spirits” belong temporarily the human astral selves; and it is they who give, or build, the physical tabernacle of man, for the Monad and its conscious principle, Manas, to dwell in. But the “Solar” Lhas, Spirits, warm them, the shadows. This is physically and literally true; metaphysically, or on the psychic and spiritual plane, it is equally true that the Atman alone warms the inner man; i.e., it enlightens it with the ray of divine life and alone is able to impart to the inner man, or the reincarnating Ego, its immortality. Thus, as we shall find, for the first three and a half Root-Races, up to the middle or turning point, it is the astral shadows of the “progenitors,” the lunar Pitris, which are the formative powers in the Races, and which build and gradually force the evolution of the physical form towards perfection — this, at the cost of a proportionate loss of spirituality. Then, from the turning point, it is the Higher Ego, or incarnating principle, the nous or Mind, which reigns over the animal Ego, and rules it whenever it is not carried down by the latter. In short, Spirituality is on its ascending arc, and the animal or physical impedes it from steadily progressing on the path of its evolution only when the selfishness of the personality has so strongly infected the real inner man with its lethal virus, that the upward attraction has lost all its power on the thinking reasonable man. In sober truth, vice and wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this period of our human evolution — at least they ought to be so. The fact that mankind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now, civilized nations having succeeded in making of the first an ethical characteristic, of the second an art, is an additional proof of the exceptional nature of the phenomenon. The entire scheme is in the “Chaldean
Book of Numbers,” and even in the Zohar, if one only
understood the meaning of the apocalyptic hints. First comes
En-Soph, the “Concealed of the Concealed,” then the Point,
Sephira and the later Sephiroth; then the Atzilatic World,
a World of Emanations that gives birth to three other
worlds — called the Throne, the abode of pure Spirits; the second,
the World of Formation, or Jetzira, the habitat of the
Angels who sent forth the Third, or World of Action, the Asiatic
World, which is the Earth or our World; and yet it is
said of it that this world, also called Kliphoth,
containing the (six other) Spheres,
“The Souls (Monads) are pre-existent in the world of Emanations,” (Book of Wisdom viii., 20); and the Zohar teaches that in the “Soul” “is the real man, i.e., the Ego and the conscious I am: ‘Manas.’ ” “They descend from the pure air to be chained to bodies, “says Josephus repeating the belief of the Essenes (De Bello Judaeo, 11, 12). “The air is full of Souls,” states Philo, “they descend to be tied to mortal bodies, being desirous to live in them.” (De Gignat, 222 c.; De Somniis, p. 455) [109]; because through, and in, the human form they will become progressive beings, whereas the nature of the angel is purely intransitive, therefore man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brahmin, the twice-born, who rules the gods or devas; and Paul repeated it in 1 Corinthians vi., 3: “Know ye not that we (the Initiates) shall judge angels”? Finally, it is shown in every ancient scripture and Cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a luminous incorporeal form, over which, like the molten brass round the clay model of the sculptor, the physical frame of his body was built by, through, and from, the lower forms and types of animal terrestrial life. “The Soul and the Form when descending on Earth put on an earthly garment,” says the Zohar. His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal frames are fashioned. “When Adam dwelt in the garden of Eden, he was clothed in the celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light. . . . light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden,” (Zohar II. 229 B). “Man (the heavenly Adam) was created by the ten Sephiroth of the Jetziric world, and by the common power they (the seven angels of a still lower world) engendered the earthly Adam . . . . First Samael fell, and then deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also.” (b) The sentence: “They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords,” i.e., the progenitors created man out of their own astral bodies, explains an universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East with having no shadows of their own. “The devas cast no shadows,” and this is the sure sign of a good holy Spirit. Why had they “no fire or water of their own”? [110] Because: — (c) That which Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its noumenon is in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its trinitarian latent nature is mirrored in its three active emanations from the three higher principles in man, namely, “Spirit, Soul, and Mind,” or Atma, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the material human basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the “air” or the “wind,” becomes the perfect man later on; when, with the development of “Spiritual fire,” the noumenon of the “Three in One” within his Self, he acquires from his inner Self, or Instructor, the Wisdom of Self-Consciousness, which he does not possess in the beginning. Thus here again divine Spirit is symbolised by the Sun or Fire; divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both standing for the Father and Mother of Pneuma, human Soul, or Mind, symbolised by the Wind or air, for Pneuma, means “breath.” Hence in the Smaragdine Tablet, disfigured by Christian hands: — “The Superior agrees with the Inferior; and the Inferior with the Superior; to effect that one truly wonderful Work” — which is Man. For the secret work of Chiram, or King Hiram in the Kabala, “one in Essence, but three in Aspect,” is the Universal Agent or Lapis Philosophorum. The culmination of the Secret Work is Spiritual Perfect Man, at one end of the line; the union of the three elements is the Occult Solvent in the “Soul of the World,” the Cosmic Soul or Astral Light, at the other; and, on the material plane, it is Hydrogen in its relation to the other gases. The To on, truly; the one “whom no person has seen except the Son” this sentence applying both to the metaphysical and physical Kosmos, and to the spiritual and material Man. For how could the latter understand the To on the “One Father,” if his Manas, the “Son,” does not become (as) “One with the Father,” and through this absorption receive enlightenment from the “divine instructor,” Guru — Atma-Buddhi? “If thou would’st understand the SECONDARY (“Creation,” so-called), oh Lanoo, thou should’st first study its relation to the PRIMARY.” (Commentary, Book of Dzyan, III. 19.) The first Race had three elements, but no living Fire. Why? Because: — “We say four elements, my
Son, but ought to say three,” says Hermes Trismegistus. “In the
Primary Circle” (creation) that which is marked
Thus in Alchemy or Western Hermetism (a variant on Eastern Esotericism) we find: —
And these three are all quaternaries
completed by their Root, Fire. The Spirit, beyond manifested Nature,
is the fiery breath in its absolute Unity.
In the manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the
electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the
Spirit of Nature, the terrestrial god. And in, on, and around the
Earth, the fiery Spirit thereof — air, fluidic fire; water,
liquid fire; Earth, solid fire. All is fire — ignis,
in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of which is O (nought)
in our conceptions, the All in nature and its mind. Pro-Mater
is divine fire. It is the Creator, the Destroyer, the Preserver. The
primitive names of the gods are all connected with fire, from
agni, the Aryan, to the Jewish god who “is a
consuming fire.” In India, God is called in various dialects,
Eashoor, Esur, Iswur, and Is’Vara,
in Sanskrit the Lord, from Isa, but this is primarily the
name of Siva, the Destroyer; and the three Vedic chief gods are Agni
(ignis), Vayu, and Surya — Fire, Air, and the Sun, three
occult degrees of fire. In the Hebrew
The four elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature represented by —
H, the Quintessence, [[HEPHLOX]], Flamma-Virgo (virgin oil), Flamma Durissima, Virgo, Lucis Aeterna Mater. The first race of men were, then, simply the images, the astral doubles, of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most progressed Entities from a preceding though lower sphere, the shell of which is now our Moon. But even this shell is all-potential, for, having generated the Earth, it is the phantom of the Moon which, attracted by magnetic affinity, sought to form its first inhabitants, the pre-human monsters, (vide supra, Stanza II.). To assure himself of this, the student has again to turn to the Chaldean Fragments, and read what Berosus says. Berosus obtained his information, he tells us, from Ea, the male-female deity of Wisdom. While the gods were generated in its androgynous bosom (Svabhavat, Mother-space) its (the Wisdom’s) reflections became on Earth the woman Omoroka, who is the Chaldean Thavatth, or the Greek Thalassa, the Deep or the Sea, which esoterically and even exoterically is the Moon. It was the Moon (Omoroka) who presided over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings which were slain by the Dyanis. (Vide Hibbert Lectures, p. 370 et seq.; also in Part II. “Adam-Adami.”) Evolutionary law compelled the lunar “Fathers” to pass, in their monadic condition, through all the forms of life and being on this globe; but at the end of the Third Round, they were already human in their divine nature, and were thus called upon to become the creators of the forms destined to fashion the tabernacles of the less progressed Monads, whose turn it was to incarnate. These “Forms” are called “Sons of Yoga,” because Yoga (union with Brahma exoterically) is the supreme condition of the passive infinite deity, since it contains all the divine energies and is the essence of Brahma, who is said (as Brahma) to create everything through Yoga power. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva are the most powerful energies of God, Brahma, the Neuter, says a Puranic text. Yoga here is the same as Dhyana, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan text, where the “Sons of Yoga” are called “Sons of Dhyana,” or of that abstract meditation through which the Dhyani-Buddhas create their celestial sons, the Dhyani-Bodhisattvas. All the creatures in the world have each a superior above. “This superior, whose inner pleasure it is to emanate into them, cannot impart efflux until they have adored” — i.e., meditated as during Yoga. (Sepher M’bo Ska-arim, translated by Isaac Myer, Qabbalah, pp. 109-111.) 19. The second race (was) the product by budding and expansion; the a-sexual (form) from the sexless (shadow). Thus was, O Lanoo, the second race produced (a). (a) What will be most contested by scientific authorities is this a-sexual Race, the Second, the fathers of the “Sweat-born” so-called, and perhaps still more the Third Race, the “Egg-born” androgynes. These two modes of procreation are the most difficult to comprehend, especially for the Western mind. It is evident that no explanation can be attempted for those who are not students of Occult metaphysics. European language has no words to express things which Nature repeats no more at this stage of evolution, things which therefore can have no meaning for the materialist. But there are analogies. It is not denied that in the beginning of physical evolution there must have been processes in Nature, spontaneous generation, for instance, now extinct, which are repeated in other forms. Thus we are told that microscopic research shows no permanence of any particular mode of reproducing life. For “it shows that the same organism may run through various metamorphoses in the course of its life-cycle, during some of which it may be sexual, and in others a-sexual; i.e., it may reproduce itself alternately by the co-operation of two beings of opposite sex, and also by fissure or budding from one being only, which is of no sex.” [112] “Budding” is the very word used in the Stanza. How could these Chhayas reproduce themselves otherwise; viz., procreate the Second Race, since they were ethereal, a-sexual, and even devoid, as yet, of the vehicle of desire, or Kama Rupa, which evolved only in the Third Race? They evolved the Second Race unconsciously, as do some plants. Or, perhaps, as the Amoeba, only on a more ethereal, impressive, and larger scale. If, indeed, the cell-theory applies equally to Botany and Zoology, and extends to Morphology, as well as to the Physiology of organisms, and if the microscopic cells are looked upon by physical science as independent living beings — just as Occultism regards the “fiery lives” [113] — there is no difficulty in the conception of the primitive process of procreation. Consider the first stages of the
development of a germ-cell. Its nucleus grows, changes, and
forms a double cone or spindle, thus,
This may, perhaps, serve as an analogy to give some idea of the process by which the Second Race was formed from the First. The astral form clothing the Monad was surrounded, as it still is, by its egg-shaped sphere of aura, which here corresponds to the substance of the germ-cell or ovum. The astral form itself is the nucleus, now, as then, instinct with the principle of life. When the season of reproduction arrives, the sub-astral “extrudes” a miniature of itself from the egg of surrounding aura. This germ grows and feeds on the aura till it becomes fully developed, when it gradually separates from its parent, carrying with it its own sphere of aura; just as we see living cells reproducing their like by growth and subsequent division into two. The analogy with the “polar cells” would seem to hold good, since their death would now correspond to the change introduced by the separation of the sexes, when gestation in utero, i.e., within the cell, became the rule. “The early Second (Root) Race were the Fathers of the ‘Sweat-born’; the later Second (Root) Race were ‘Sweat-born’ themselves.” This passage from the Commentary refers to the work of evolution from the beginning of a Race to its close. The “Sons of Yoga,” or the primitive astral race, had seven stages of evolution racially, or collectively; as every individual Being in it had, and has now. It is not Shakespeare only who divided the ages of man into a series of seven, but Nature herself. Thus the first sub-races of the Second Race were born at first by the process described on the law of analogy; while the last began gradually, pari passu with the evolution of the human body, to be formed otherwise. The process of reproduction had seven stages also in each Race, each covering aeons of time. What physiologist or biologist could tell whether the present mode of generation, with all its phases of gestation, is older than half a million, or at most one million of years, since their cycle of observation began hardly half a century ago. Primeval human hermaphrodites are a fact in Nature well known to the ancients, and form one of Darwin’s greatest perplexities. Yet there is certainly no impossibility, but, on the contrary, a great probability that hermaphroditism existed in the evolution of the early races; while on the grounds of analogy, and on that of the existence of one universal law in physical evolution, acting indifferently in the construction of plant, animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken theories of mono-genesis, and the descent of man from the mammals instead of the reverse, are fatal to the completeness of evolution as taught in modern schools on Darwinian lines, and they will have to be abandoned in view of the insuperable difficulties which they encounter. Occult tradition — if the terms Science and Knowledge are denied in this particular to antiquity — can alone reconcile the inconsistencies and fill the gap. “If thou wilt know the invisible, open thine eye wide on the visible,” says a Talmudic axiom. In the “Descent of Man” [114] occurs the following passage; which shows how near Darwin came to the acceptance of this ancient teaching. “It has been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex. . . . Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous [115] . . . But here we encounter a singular difficulty. In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the Vesiculae prostaticae; they bear also rudiments of mammae, and some male marsupials have traces of a marsupial sac. Other analogous facts could be added. Are we then to suppose that some extremely ancient mammal continued androgynous after it had acquired the chief distinctions of its class, and therefore after it had diverged from the lower classes of the vertebrate kingdom? This seems very improbable, [116] for we have to look to fishes, the lowest of all the classes, to find any still existent androgynous forms.” Mr. Darwin is evidently strongly disinclined to adopt the hypothesis which the facts so forcibly suggest, viz., that of a primeval androgynous stem from which the mammalia sprang. His explanation runs: — “The fact that various accessory organs proper to each sex, are found in a rudimentary condition in the opposite sex may be explained by such organs having been gradually acquired by the one sex and then transmitted in a more or less imperfect condition to the other.” He instances the case of “spurs, plumes, and brilliant colours, acquired for battle or for ornament by male birds” and only partially inherited by their female descendants. In the problem to be dealt with, however, the need of a more satisfactory explanation is evident, the facts being of so much more prominent and important a character than the mere superficial details with which they are compared by Darwin. Why not candidly admit the argument in favour of the hermaphroditism which characterises the old fauna? Occultism proposes a solution which embraces the facts in a most comprehensive and simple manner. These relics of a prior androgyne stock must be placed in the same category as the pineal gland, and other organs as mysterious, which afford us silent testimony as to the reality of functions which have long since become atrophied in the course of animal and human progress, but which once played a signal part in the general economy of primeval life. The occult doctrine, anyhow, can be advantageously compared with that of the most liberal men of science, who have theorised upon the origin of the first man. Long before Darwin, Naudin, who gave the name of Blastema to that which the Darwinists call protoplasm, put forward a theory half occult and half scientifico-materialistic. He made Adam, the a-sexual, spring suddenly from the clay, as it is called in the Bible, the Blastema of Science. “It is from this larval form of mankind that the evolutive force effected the completion of species. For the accomplishment of this great phenomenon, Adam had to pass through a phase of immobility and unconsciousness, very analogous to the nymphal state of animals undergoing metamorphosis,” explains Naudin. For the eminent botanist, Adam was not one man, however, but mankind, “which remained concealed within a temporary organism . . . . distinct from all others and never contracting alliance with any of these.” He shows the differentiation of sexes accomplished by “a process of germination similar to that of Medusae and Ascidians.” Mankind, thus constituted physiologically, “would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid production of the various great human races.” De Quatrefages criticises this position in the “Human Species.” It is unscientific, he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin’s ideas “do not form a scientific theory,” inasmuch as primordial Blastema is connected in his theory with the First Cause, which is credited with having made potentially in the Blastema all past, present, and future beings, and thus of having in reality created these beings en masse; moreover, Naudin does not even consider the secondary Causes, or their action in this evolution of the organic world. Science, which is only occupied with Secondary Causes, has thus “nothing to say to the theory of Naudin” (p. 125). Nor will it have any more to say to the occult teachings, which are to some extent approached by Naudin. For if we but see in his “primordial Blastema” the Dhyan-Chohanic essence, the Chhaya or double of the Pitris, which contains within itself the potentiality of all forms, we are quite in accord. But there are two real and vital differences between our teachings. M. Naudin declares that evolution has progressed by sudden leaps and bounds, instead of extending slowly over millions of years; and his primordial Blastema is endowed only with blind instincts — a kind of unconscious First Cause in the manifested Kosmos — which is an absurdity. Whereas it is our Dhyan Chohanic essence — the causality of the primal cause which creates physical man — which is the living, active and potential matter, pregnant per se with that animal consciousness of a superior kind, such as is found in the ant and the beaver, which produces the long series of physiological differentiations. Apart from this his “ancient and general process of creation” from proto-organisms is as occult as any theory of Paracelsus or Khunrath could be. Moreover, the Kabalistic works are full of the proof of this. The Zohar, for instance, says that every type in the visible has its prototype in the invisible Universe. “All that which is in the lower (our) world is found in the upper. The Lower and the Upper act and react upon each other.” (Zohar, fol. 186.) Vide infra, Part II., “Esoteric Tenets corroborated in every Scripture.” 20. Their Fathers were the self-born. The self-born, the Chhaya from the brilliant bodies of the Lords, the Fathers, the Sons of Twilight (a). (a) The “shadows,” or Chhayas, are called the sons of the “self-born,” as the latter name is applied to all the gods and Beings born through the will, whether of Deity or Adept. The Homunculi of Paracelsus would, perhaps, be also given this name, though the latter process is on a far more material plane. The name “Sons of Twilight” shows that the “Self-born” progenitors of our doctrine are identical with the Pitris of the Brahmanical system, as the title is a reference to their mode of birth, these Pitris being stated to have issued from Brahma’s “body of twilight.” (See the Puranas.) 21. When the race became old, the old waters mixed with the fresher waters (a); when the drops became turbid, they vanished and disappeared, in the new stream, in the hot stream of life. The outer of the first became the inner of the second. (b). The old wing became the shadow, and the shadow of the wing (c). (a) The old (primitive) Race merged in the second race, and became one with it. (b) This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution of mankind. The material of the first forms — shadowy, ethereal, and negative — was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary explains this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed of the astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course neither astral nor physical bodies of their own — this Race never died. Its “men” melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own “sweat-born” progeny, more solid than their own. The old form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent material was used for the formation of the new being, to form the body and even the inner or lower principles or bodies of the progeny. (c) When the shadow retires, i.e. when the astral body becomes covered with more solid flesh, man develops a physical body. The “wing,” or the ethereal form that produced its shadow and image, became the shadow of the astral body and its own progeny. The expression is queer but original. As there may be no occasion to refer to this mystery later, it is as well to point out at once the dual meaning contained in the Greek myth bearing upon this particular phase of evolution. It is found in the several variants of the allegory of Leda and her two sons Castor and Pollux, which variants have each a special meaning. Thus in Book XI. of the Odyssey, Leda is spoken of as the spouse of Tyndarus, who gave birth by her husband “to two sons of valiant heart” — Castor and Pollux. Jupiter endows them with a marvellous gift and privilege. They are semi-immortal; they live and die, each in turn, and every alternate day; ([[eteremeroi [117]]]). As the Tyndaridae, the twin brothers are an astronomical symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives, Phoebe and Hilasira, the daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight. [118] Again, in the allegory where Zeus is shown as the father of the two heroes — born from the egg to which Leda gives birth — the myth is entirely theogonical. It relates to that group of cosmic allegories in which the world is described as born from an egg. For Leda assumes in it the shape of a white swan when uniting herself to the Divine Swan. [119] Leda is the mythical bird, then, to which, in the traditions of various peoples of the Aryan race, are attributed various ornithological forms of birds which all lay golden eggs. [120] In the Kalevala (the Epic Poem of Finland), the beauteous daughter of the Ether, “the Water Mother,” creates the world in conjunction with a “Duck” (another form of the Swan or Goose, Kalahansa), who lays six golden eggs, and the seventh, “an egg of iron,” in her lap. But the variant of the Leda allegory which has a direct reference to mystic man is found in Pindar [121] only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric hymns. [122] Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri (of Apollodorus III. 10, 7); but become the highly significant symbol of the dual man, the Mortal and the Immortal. Not only this, but as will now be seen, they are also the symbol of the Third Race, and its transformation from the animal man into a god-man with only an animal body. Pindar shows Leda uniting herself in the same night to her husband and also to the father of the gods — Zeus. Thus Castor is the son of the Mortal, Pollux the progeny of the Immortal. In the allegory made up for the occasion, it is said that in a riot of vengeance against the Apherides [123] Pollux kills Lynceus — “of all mortals he whose sight is the most penetrating” — but Castor is wounded by Idas, “he who sees and knows.” Zeus puts an end to the fight by hurling his thunderbolt and killing the last two combatants. Pollux finds his brother dying. [124] In his despair he calls upon Zeus to slay him also. “Thou canst not die altogether,” answers the master of the Gods; “thou art of a divine race.” But he gives him the choice: Pollux will either remain immortal, living eternally in Olympus; or, if he would share his brother’s fate in all things, he must pass half his existence underground, and the other half in the golden heavenly abodes. This semi-immortality, which is also to be shared by Castor, is accepted by Pollux. [125] And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night. [126] Is this a poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those “solar myth” interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to soar? Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the “Egg-born,” Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, i.e., unconscious in its personality, and having nothing within itself to survive [127]; and the latter half of which becomes immortal in its individuality, by reason of its fifth principle being called to life by the informing gods, and thus connecting the Monad with this Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor represents the personal, mortal man, an animal of not even a superior kind, when unlinked from the divine individuality. “Twins” truly; yet divorced by death forever, unless Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship, bestows on his less favoured mortal brother a share of his own divine nature, thus associating him with his own immortality. Such is the occult meaning of the metaphysical aspect of the allegory. The widely spread modern interpretation of it — so celebrated in antiquity, Plutarch tells us, [128] as symbolical of brotherly devotion — namely, that it was an image borrowed from the spectacle of Nature — is weak and inadequate to explain the secret meaning. Besides the fact that the Moon, with the Greeks, was feminine in exoteric mythology, and could therefore hardly be regarded as Castor — and at the same time be identified with Diana — ancient symbologists who held the Sun, the King of all sidereal orbs, as the visible image of the highest deity, would not have personified it by Pollux, a demi-god only. [129] If from Greek mythology we pass to the Mosaic allegories and symbolism, we shall find a still more striking corroboration of the same tenet under another form. Unable to trace in Genesis the “Egg-born,” we shall still find there unmistakably the androgynes, and the first three races of the Secret Doctrine hidden under most ingenious symbology in the first four chapters of Genesis. The Divine Hermaphrodite. An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught, after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so desecrated. Of these sciences several have now become exoteric — such as Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas and tenets, being all symbolised and left to the sole guardianship of parable and allegory, have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted. Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction? It is this secrecy which led the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the re-establishment of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and symbolism. Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution of the human races from the divine, and especially from the androgynous Race — the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages! Divine wisdom incarnating on earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated under the shade of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil — a secret first known only to the Elohim, the self-initiated, “higher gods” — on earth only. [130] In the Book of Enoch we have Adam, [131] the first divine androgyne, separating into man and woman, and becoming Jah-Heva in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel [132] (male and female) in its other form or Race — the double-sexed Jehovah [133] — an echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahma-Vach. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind [134] — that is to say, Races of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no longer sexless semi-spirits and androgynes, as were the two Races which precede them. This fact is hinted at in every Anthropogony. It is found in fable and allegory, in myth and revealed Scriptures, in legend and tradition. Because, of all the great Mysteries, inherited by Initiates from hoary antiquity, this is one of the greatest. It accounts for the bi-sexual element found in every creative deity, in Brahma-Viraj-Vach, as in Adam-Jehovah-Eve, also in “Cain-Jehovah-Abel.” For “The Book of the Generations of Adam” does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only: “Male and female created he them. . . and called their name Adam” (ch. v. 5). Then it proceeds to say: “And Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth” (v. 3); after which he begets other sons and daughters, thus proving that Cain and Abel are his own allegorical permutations. Adam stands for the primitive human race, especially in its cosmo-sidereal sense. Not so, however, in its theo-anthropological meaning. The compound name of Jehovah, or Jah-Hovah, meaning male life and female life — first androgynous, then separated into sexes — is used in this sense in Genesis from ch. v. onwards. As the author of “The Source of Measures” says (p. 159): “The two words of which Jehovah is composed make up the original idea of male-female, as the birth originators”; for the Hebrew letter Jod was the membrum virile and Hovah was Eve, the mother of all living, or the procreatrix, Earth and Nature. The author believes, therefore, that “It is seen that the perfect one” (the perfect female circle or Yoni, 20612, numerically), “as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth-origin, as Hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic form and use.” Precisely; only “the phallic form and use” came long ages later; and the first and original meaning of Enos, the son of Seth, was the First Race born in the present usual way from man and woman —for Seth is no man, but a race. Before him humanity was hermaphrodite. While Seth is the first result (physiologically) after the fall, he is also the first man; hence his son Enos is referred to as the “Son of man.” (Vide infra.) Seth represents the later Third Race. To screen the real mystery name of ain-soph — the Boundless and Endless No-Thing — the Kabalists have brought forward the compound attribute-appellation of one of the personal creative Elohim, whose name was Yah and Jah, the letters i or j or y being interchangeable, or Jah-Hovah, i.e. male and female; [135] Jah-Eve an hermaphrodite, or the first form of humanity, the original Adam of Earth, not even Adam Kadmon, whose “mind-born son” is the earthly Jah-Hovah, mystically. And knowing this, the crafty Rabbin-Kabalist has made of it a name so secret, that he could not divulge it later on without exposing the whole scheme; and thus he was obliged to make it sacred. How close is the identity between Brahma-Prajapati and Jehovah-Sephiroth, between Brahma-Viraj and Jehovah-Adam, the Bible and the Puranas compared can alone show. Analysed and read in the same light, they afford cogent evidence that they are two copies of the same original — made at two periods far distant from each other. Compare once more in relation to this subject Genesis ch. 4. verses 1 and 26 and Manu I., and they will both yield their meaning. In Manu (Book I. 32) Brahma, who is also both man and god, and divides his body into male and female, stands in his esoteric meaning, as does Jehovah or Adam in the Bible, for the symbolical personification of creative and generative power, both divine and human. The Zohar affords still more convincing proof of identity, while some Rabbins repeat word for word certain original Puranic expressions; e.g., the “creation” of the world is generally considered in the Brahmanical books to be the Lila, delight or sport, the amusement of the Supreme Creator, “Vishnu being thus discrete and indiscrete substance, spirit, and time, sports like a playful boy in frolics.” (Vishnu Purana, Book I., ch. ii.) Now compare this with what is said in the Book, “Nobeleth’ Hokhmah”: “The Kabalists say that the entering into existence of the worlds happens through delight, in that Ain-Soph (? !) rejoiced in Itself, and flashed and beamed from Itself to Itself . . . . which are all called delight,” etc. (Quoted in Myer’s “Qabbalah,” p. 110). Thus it is not a “curious idea of the Qabbalists,” as the author just quoted remarks, but a purely Puranic, Aryan idea. Only, why make of Ain-Soph a Creator? The “Divine Hermaphrodite” is then Brahma-Vach-Viraj; and that of the Semites, or rather of the Jews, is Jehovah-Cain-Abel. Only the “Heathen” were, and are, more sincere and frank than were the later Israelites and Rabbis, who undeniably knew the real meaning of their exoteric deity. The Jews regard the name given to them — the Yah-oudi — as an insult. Yet they have, or would have if they only wished it, as undeniable a right to call themselves the ancient Yah-oudi, “Jah-hovians,” as the Brahmins have to call themselves Brahmins, after their national deity. For Jah-hovah is the generic name of that group or hierarchy of creative planetary angels, under whose star their nation has evolved. He is one of the planetary Elohim of the regent group of Saturn. Verse 26 of Genesis, ch. iv., when read correctly, would alone give them such a right, for it calls the new race of men sprung from Seth and Enos, Jehovah, something quite different from the translation adopted in the Bible: — “To him also, was born a son, Enos; then began men to call themselves Jah or Yah-hovah,” to wit men and women, the “lords of creation.” One has but to read the above-mentioned verse in the original Hebrew text and by the light of the Kabala, to find that, instead of the words as they now stand translated, it is: — “Then began men to call themselves Jehovah,” which is the correct translation, and not “Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord”; the latter being a mistranslation, whether deliberate or not. Again the well-known passage: “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” should read: “I have gotten a man, even Jehovah.” [136] Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman Catholics quite differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it: “Cain — I have gotten Kain, from Kanithi, I have gotten.” Luther: “I have gotten a man — even the Lord” (Jehovah); and the author of “The Source of Measures”: “I have measured a man, even Jehovah.” The last is the correct rendering, because (a) a famous Rabbin, a Kabalist, explained the passage to the writer in precisely this way, and (b) because this rendering is identical with that in the Secret Doctrine of the East with regard to Brahma. In “Isis Unveiled,” [137] it was explained by the writer that “Cain . . . is the son of the ‘Lord’ not of Adam (Genesis iv. 1)” The “Lord” is Adam Kadmon, the “father” of Yodcheva, “Adam-Eve,” or Jehovah, the son of sinful thought, not the progeny of flesh and blood. Seth, on the other hand, is the leader and the progenitor of the Races of the Earth; for he is the son of Adam, exoterically, but esoterically he is the progeny of Cain and Abel, since Abel or Hebel is a female, the counterpart and female half of the male Cain, and Adam is the collective name for man and woman: “male and female (Zachar va Nakobeh) created he them . . . and called their name Adam.” The verses in Genesis from chs. i. to v., are purposely mixed up for Kabalistic reasons. After man of Genesis ch. i. 26 and Enos, Son of Man of ch. iv. v. 26, after Adam, the first androgyne, after Adam Kadmon, the sexless (the first) Logos, Adam and Eve once separated, come finally Jehovah-Eve and Cain-Jehovah. These represent distinct Root-Races, for millions of years elapsed between them. Hence the Aryan and the Semitic Theo-anthropographies are two leaves on the same stem; their respective personifications and symbolic personages standing in relation to each other in this way. I. The Unknowable, referred
to in various ways in Rig Vedic verse, such as “Nought
Was,” called, later on “Parabrahm;” the
II. The “Heavenly” Manu-Swayambhuva, who sprang from Swayambhu-Narayana, the “Self-existent,” and Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and the androgyne man of Genesis ch. 1 are also identical. III. Manu-swayambhuva is Brahma, or the Logos; and he is Adam Kadmon, who in Genesis iv., 5, separates himself into two halves, male and female, thus becoming Jah-Hovah or Jehovah-Eve; as Manu Swayambhuva or Brahma separates himself to become “Brahma-Viraj and Vach-Viraj,” male and female; all the rest of the texts and versions being blinds. IV. Vach is the daughter of Brahma and is named Sata-Rupa, “the hundred-formed,” and Savitri, “generatrix,” the mother of the gods and of all living. She is identical with Eve, “the mother (of all the lords or gods or) of all living.” Besides this there are many other occult meanings. What is written in “Isis,” although scattered about and very cautiously expressed at the time, is correct: Explaining esoterically Ezekiel’s wheel, [138] it is said of Jodhevah or Jehovah: — “When the ternary is taken in the beginning of the Tetragram, it expresses the divine creation spiritually, without any carnal sin; taken at its opposite end it expresses the latter: it is feminine. The name of Eva is composed of three letters, that of the primitive or heavenly Adam, is written with one letter, Jod or Yodh; therefore it must not be read Jehovah but Ieva, or Eve. The Adam of the first chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure, androgyne Adam Kadmon. When woman issues from the rib of the second Adam (of dust), the pure Virgo is separated, and falling “into generation,” or the downward cycle, becomes Scorpio, emblem of sin and matter. While the ascending cycle points to the purely spiritual races, or the ten prediluvian patriarchs, the Prajapatis and Sephiroth are led on by the creative Deity itself, who is Adam Kadmon or Yod-cheva. Spiritually, the lower one (Jehovah) is that of the terrestrial races, led on by Enoch or Libra, the seventh; who, because he is half-divine, half-terrestrial, is said to have been taken by God alive. Enoch, Hermes, and Libra, are one.” This is only one of the several meanings. No need to remind the scholar that Scorpio is the astrological sign of the organs of reproduction. Like the Indian Rishis, the Patriarchs are all convertible in their numbers, as well as interchangeable. According to the subject to which they relate they become ten, twelve, seven or five, and even fourteen, and they have the same esoteric meaning as the Manus or Rishis. Moreover, Jehovah, as may be shown,
has a variety of etymologies, but only those are true which
are found in the Kabala. Finding in Sanskrit such syllables as Jah and Yah, e.g., Jah (navi) “Ganges” and Jagan-natha, “Lord of the World,” it becomes clear why Mr. Rawlinson is so very confident in his works of an Aryan or Vedic influence on the early mythology of Babylon. Nor is it to be much wondered at that the alleged ten tribes of Israel disappeared during the captivity period, without leaving a trace behind them, when we are informed that the Jews had de facto but two tribes — those of Judah and of Levi. The Levites, moreover, were not a tribe at all, but a priestly caste. The descendants have only followed their progenitors, the various patriarchs, into thin, sidereal air. There were Brahms and A-brahms, in days of old, truly, and before the first Jew had been born. Every nation held its first god and gods to be androgynous; nor could it be otherwise, since they regarded their distant primeval progenitors, their dual-sexed ancestors, as divine Beings and Gods, just as do the Chinese to this day. And they were divine in one sense, as also were their first human progeny, the “mind-born” primitive humanity, which were most assuredly bi-sexuals as all the more ancient symbols and traditions show. “Under the emblematical devices and peculiar phraseology of the priesthood of old, lie latent hints of sciences as yet undiscovered during the present cycle. Well acquainted as may be a scholar with the hieratic writing and hieroglyphical system of the Egyptians, he must first of all learn to sift their records. He has to assure himself, compasses and rule in hand, that the picture writing he is examining fits, to a line, certain fixed geometrical figures which are the hidden keys to such records, before he ventures on an interpretation.” “But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators of every Cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (AEther), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona — the former god also representing AEther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light; the goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras, the rock-born god, the symbol of the male mundane fire, or the personified primordial light, and Mithra, the fire goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or Matter, the female or passive element of cosmical generation” — all these are records of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite. STANZA VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THE “SWEAT-BORN.”
22. Then the Second evolved the Sweat-Born, the Third (Race). The sweat grew, its drops grew, and the drops became hard and round. The Sun warmed it; the Moon cooled and shaped it; the Wind fed it until its ripeness. The white swan from the starry vault (the Moon), overshadowed the big drop. The egg of the future race, the Man-Swan (Hamsa) of the later Third (a). First Male-Female, then Man and Woman (b). (a) The text of the Stanza clearly implies that the human embryo was nourished ab extra by Cosmic forces, and that the “Father-Mother” furnished apparently the germ that ripened: in all probability a “sweat-born egg,” to be hatched out, in some mysterious way, disconnected from the “double” parent. It is comparatively easy to conceive of an oviparous humanity, since even now man is, in one sense, “egg-born.” Magendie, moreover, in his Precis Elementaire de Physiologie, citing “a case where the umbilical cord was ruptured and perfectly cicatrized,” yet the infant was born alive, pertinently asks, “How was the circulation carried on in this organ?” On the next page he says: “Nothing is at present known respecting the use of digestion in the foetus;” and respecting its nutrition, propounds this query: “What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the foetus? Physiological works contain only vague conjectures on this point.” “Ah, but,” the sceptic may urge, “Magendie’s book belongs to the last generation, and Science has since made such strides that his stigma of ignorance can no longer be fixed upon the profession.” Indeed; then let us turn to a very great authority upon Physiology, viz., Sir M. Foster (Text-Book of Physiology, third edition, 1879, p. 623); and to the disadvantage of modern Science we shall find him saying, “Concerning the rise and development of the functional activities of the embryo, our knowledge is almost a blank. We know scarcely anything about the various steps by which the primary fundamental qualities of the protoplasm of the ovum are differentiated into the complex phenomena which we have attempted in this book to explain.” The students of Trin. Coll. Cantab. will now kindly draw a veil before the statue of Hygeia and bandage the eyes of the busts of Galen and Hippocrates, lest they look reproachfully at their degenerate descendants. One further fact we must note. Sir M. Foster is discreetly silent about the case of the ruptured umbilical cord cited by his great French confrere. This is a very curious statement as explained in the Commentaries. To make it clear: The First Race having created the Second by “budding,” as just explained, the Second Race gives birth to the Third — which itself is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform ball — or shall we say egg? — which served as an extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a foetus and child, the mode of procreation by the later races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of the earlier races were entirely sexless — shapeless even for all one knows [140]; but those of the later races were born androgynous. It is in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally the man-bearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women. And now let us search for corroboration of these statements in the religious legends of East and West. Let us take the “Egg-born Race” first. Think of Kasyapa, the Vedic sage, and the most prolific of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahma’s mind-born son; and he is made to become the father of the Nagas, or Serpents, among other beings. Exoterically, the Nagas are semi-divine beings which have a human face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of Nagas, said to be a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung from Kadra, Kasyapa’s wife, for the purpose of peopling Patala, which is undeniably America, as will be shown; and there was a Naga-Dwipa, one of the seven divisions of Bharata-Varsha, India, inhabited by a people bearing the same name, who are allowed, even by some Orientalists, to be historical, and to have left many a trace behind them to this day. Now the point most insisted upon at present is that, whatever origin be claimed for man, his evolution took place in this order: (1) Sexless, as all the earlier forms are; (2) then, by a natural transition, he became, “a solitary hermaphrodite,” a bi-sexual being; and (3) finally separated and became what he is now. Science teaches us that all the primitive forms, though sexless, “still retained the power of undergoing the processes of A-Sexual multiplication;” why, then, should man be excluded from that law of Nature? Bi-sexual reproduction is an evolution, a specialized and perfected form on the scale of matter of the fissiparous act of reproduction. Occult teachings are pre-eminently panspermic, and the early history of humanity is hidden only “from ordinary mortals;” nor is the history of the primitive Races buried from the Initiates in the tomb of time, as it is for profane science. Therefore, supported on the one hand by that science which shows to us progressive development and an internal cause for every external modification, as a law in Nature; and, on the other hand, by an implicit faith in the wisdom — we may say pansophia even — of the universal traditions gathered and preserved by the Initiates, who have perfected them into an almost faultless system — thus supported, we venture to state the doctrine clearly. In an able article, written some fifteen years ago, our learned and respected friend Prof. Alex. Wilder, of New York, shows the absolute logic and necessity of believing “The Primeval Race Double-Sexed,” and gives a number of scientific reasons for it. [141] He argues firstly, “that a large part of the vegetable creation exhibits the phenomenon of bisexuality . . . the Linnaean classification enumerating thus almost all plants. This is the case in the superior families of the vegetable kingdoms as much as in the lower forms, from the Hemp to the Lombardy Poplar and Ailanthus. In the animal kingdom, in insect life, the moth generates a worm, as in the Mysteries the great secret was expressed: “Taurus Draconem genuit, et Taurum Draco.” The coral-producing family, which, according to Agassiz, ‘has spent many hundreds of thousands of years, during the present geological period, in building out the peninsula of Florida . . . . . produce their offspring from themselves like the buds and ramifications in a tree.’ Bees are somewhat in the same line . . . . The Aphides or plant lice keep house like Amazons, and virgin parents perpetuate the Race for ten successive generations.” What say the old sages, the philosopher-teachers of antiquity. Aristophanes speaks thus on the subject in Plato’s “Banquet”: “Our nature of old was not the same as it is now. It was androgynous, the form and name partaking of, and being common to both the male and female. . . . Their bodies were round, and the manner of their running circular. [142] They were terrible in force and strength and had prodigious ambition. Hence Zeus divided each of them into two, making them weaker; Apollo, under his direction, closed up the skin.” Meshia and Meshiane were but a single individual with the old Persians. “They also taught that man was the product of the tree of life, growing in androgynous pairs, till they were separated at a subsequent modification of the human form. [143]” In the Toleduth (generation) of Adam, the verse “God created (bara, brought forth) man in his image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them,” if read esoterically will yield the true sense, viz.: “The Elohim (Gods) brought forth from themselves (by modification) man in their image . . . . created they him (collective humanity, or Adam), male and female created he (collective deity) them.” [144] This will show the esoteric point. The sexless Race was their first production, a modification of and from themselves, the pure spiritual existences; and this was Adam solus. Thence came the second Race: Adam-Eve or Jod-Heva, inactive androgynes; and finally the Third, or the “Separating Hermaphrodite,” Cain and Abel, who produce the Fourth, Seth-Enos, etc. It is that Third, the last semi-spiritual race, which was also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, ingenerate in the Enochs, the Seers of that Mankind. The Fourth, which had tasted from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil — Wisdom united already to earthy, and therefore impure, intelligence [145] — had consequently to acquire that Wisdom by initiation and great struggle. And the union of Wisdom and Intelligence, the former ruling the latter, is called in the Hermetic books “the God possessing the double fecundity of the two sexes.” Mystically Jesus was held to be man-woman. See also in the Orphic hymns, sung during the Mysteries, we find: “Zeus is a male, Zeus is an immortal maid.” The Egyptian Ammon was the goddess Neith, in his other half. Jupiter has female breasts, Venus is bearded in some of her statues, and Ila, the goddess, is also Su-Dyumna, the god, as Vaivasvata’s progeny. “The name Adam,” says Professor A. Wilder, “or man, itself implies this double form of existence. It is identical with Athamas, or Thomas (Tamil Tam), which is rendered by the Greek Didumos, a twin; if, therefore, the first woman was formed subsequently to the first man, she must, as a logical necessity, be ‘taken out of man’ . . . and the side which the Elohim had taken from man, ‘made he a woman’ (Gen. ii.). The Hebrew word here used is Tzala, which bears the translation we have given. It is easy to trace the legend in Berosus, who says that Thalatth (the Omoroca, or Lady of Urka) was the beginning of creation. She was also Melita, the queen of the Moon. . . . The two twin births of Genesis, that of Cain and Abel, and of Esau and Jacob, shadow the same idea. The name ‘Hebel’ is the same as Eve, and its characteristic seems to be feminine,” continues the author. “Unto thee shall be his desire,” said the Lord God to Cain, “and thou shalt rule over him.” The same language had been uttered to Eve: “Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” . . . Thus the pristine bi-sexual unity of the human Third Root-Race is an axiom in the Secret Doctrine. Its virgin individuals were raised to “Gods,” because that Race represented their “divine Dynasty.” The moderns are satisfied with worshipping the male heroes of the Fourth Race, who created gods after their own sexual image, whereas the gods of primeval mankind were “male and female.” As stated in Book I, the humanities developed coordinately, and on parallel lines with the four Elements, every new Race being physiologically adapted to meet the additional element. Our Fifth Race is rapidly approaching the Fifth Element — call it interstellar ether, if you will — which has more to do, however, with psychology than with physics. We men have learned to live in every climate, whether frigid or tropical, but the first two Races had nought to do with climate, nor were they subservient to any temperature or change therein. And thus, we are taught, men lived down to the close of the Third Root-Race, when eternal spring reigned over the whole globe, such as is now enjoyed by the inhabitants of Jupiter; a “world,” says M. Flammarion, “which is not subject like our own to the vicissitudes of seasons nor to abrupt alternations of temperature, but which is enriched with all the treasures of eternal spring.” (“Pluralite des Mondes,” p. 69.) Those astronomers who maintain that Jupiter is in a molten condition, in our sense of the term, are invited to settle their dispute with this learned French Astronomer. [146] It must, however, be always borne in mind that the “eternal spring” referred to is only a condition cognised as such by the Jovians. It is not “spring” as we know it. In this reservation is to be found the reconciliation between the two theories here cited. Both embrace partial truths. It is thus a universal tradition that mankind has evolved gradually into its present shape from an almost transparent condition of texture, and neither by miracle nor by sexual intercourse. Moreover, this is in full accord with the ancient philosophies; from those of Egypt and India with their Divine Dynasties down to that of Plato. And all these universal beliefs must be classed with the “presentiments” and “obstinate conceptions,” some of them ineradicable, in popular faiths. Such beliefs, as remarked by Louis Figuier, are “frequently the outcome of the wisdom and observation of an infinite number of generations of men.” For, “a tradition which has an uniform and universal existence, has all the weight of scientific testimony.” [147] And there is more than one such tradition in the Puranic allegories, as has been shown. Moreover, the doctrine that the first Race of mankind was formed out of the chhayas (astral images) of the Pitris, is fully corroborated in the Zohar. “In the Tzalam (shadow image) of Elohim (the Pitris), was made Adam (man). (Cremona, Ed. iii., 76a; Brody, Ed. iii., 159a; “Qabbalah,” Isaac Myer, p. 420.) It has been repeatedly urged as an objection that, however high the degree of metaphysical thought in ancient India, yet the old Egyptians had nothing but crass idolatry and zoolatry to boast of; Hermes, as alleged, being the work of mystic Greeks who lived in Egypt. To this, one answer can be given — a direct proof that the Egyptians believed in the Secret Doctrine is, that it was taught to them at Initiation. Let the objectors open the “Eclogae Physicae et Ethicae” of Stobaeus, the Greek compiler of ancient fragments, who lived in the fifth century, A.D. The following is a transcription by him of an old Hermetic fragment, showing the Egyptian theory of the Soul. Translated word for word, it says: — “From one Soul, that of all, spring all the Souls, which spread themselves as if purposely distributed through the world. These souls undergo many transformations; those which are already creeping creatures turn into aquatic animals; from these aquatic animals are derived land animals; and from the latter the birds. From the beings who live aloft in the air (heaven) men are born. On reaching that status of men, the Souls receive the principle of (conscious) immortality, become Spirits, then pass into the choir of gods.” 23. The Self-Born were the Chhayas, the shadows from the bodies of the sons of twilight. Neither water nor fire could destroy them. Their sons were (so destroyed) (a). (a) This verse cannot be understood without the help of the Commentaries. It means that the First Root-Race, the “Shadows” of the Progenitors, could not be injured, or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal and so little human in constitution, they could not be affected by any element — flood or fire. But their “Sons,” the Second Root-Race, could be and were so destroyed. As the “progenitors” merged wholly in their own astral bodies, which were their progeny; so that progeny was absorbed in its descendants, the “Sweat-born.” These were the second Humanity — composed of the most heterogeneous gigantic semi-human monsters — the first attempts of material nature at building human bodies. The ever-blooming lands of the Second Continent (Greenland, among others) were transformed, in order, from Edens with their eternal spring, into hyperborean Hades. This transformation was due to the displacement of the great waters of the globe, to oceans changing their beds; and the bulk of the Second Race perished in this first great throe of the evolution and consolidation of the globe during the human period. Of such great cataclysms there have already been four. [148] And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time. A Few Words about “Deluges” and “Noahs.” The accounts in the various Puranas about our Progenitors are as contradictory in their details as everything else. Thus while, in the Rig Veda, Ida (or Ila) is called the Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu, Sayana makes of her a goddess presiding over the Earth, and the Sathapatha Brahmana shows her to be the Manu’s daughter, an offering of his sacrifice, and, later on, his (Vaivasvata’s) wife, by whom he begat the race of Manus. In the Puranas, again, she is Vaivasvata’s daughter, yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma) and the planet Jupiter’s (Brihhaspati’s) wife, Tara. All this, which seems a jumble to the profane, is full of philosophical meaning to the Occultist. On the very face of the narrative a secret and sacred meaning is perceivable, all the details, however, being so purposely mixed up that the experienced eye of an Initiate alone can follow them and place the events in their proper order. The story as told in the “Mahabharata” strikes the key-note, and yet it needs to be explained by the secret sense contained in the Bhagavad Gita. It is the prologue to the drama of our (Fifth) Humanity. While Vaivasvata was engaged in devotion on the river bank, a fish craves his protection from a bigger fish. He saves and places it in a jar, where, growing larger and larger, it communicates to him the news of the forthcoming deluge. It is the well-known “Matsya Avatar,” the first Avatar of Vishnu, the Dagon [149] of the Chaldean Xisuthrus, and many other things besides. The story is too well known to need repetition. Vishnu orders a ship to be built, in which Manu is said to be saved along with the seven Rishis, the latter, however, being absent from other texts. Here the seven Rishis stand for the seven Races, the seven principles, and various other things; for there is again a double mystery involved in this manifold allegory. We have said elsewhere that the great Flood had several meanings, and that it referred, as also does the fall, to both spiritual and physical, cosmic and terrestrial, events: as above, so it is below. The ship or ark — navis — in short, being the symbol of the female generative principle, is typified in the heavens by the Moon, and on Earth by the Womb: both being the vessels and bearers of the seeds of life and being, which the sun, or Vishnu, the male principle, vivifies and fructifies. [150] The First Cosmic Flood refers to primordial creation, or the formation of Heaven and the Earths; in which case Chaos and the great Deep stand for the “Flood,” and the Moon for the “Mother,” from whom proceed all the life-germs. [151] But the terrestrial Deluge and its story has also its dual application. In one case it has reference to that mystery when mankind was saved from utter destruction, by the mortal woman being made the receptacle of the human seed at the end of the Third Race, [152] and in the other to the real and historical Atlantean submersion. In both cases the “Host” — or the Manu which saved the seed — is called Vaivasvata Manu. Hence the diversity between the Puranic and other versions; while in the Sathapatha Brahmana, Vaivasvata produces a daughter and begets from her the race of Manu; which is a reference to the first human Manushyas, who had to create women by will (Kriyasakti), before they were naturally born from the hermaphrodites as an independent sex, and who were, therefore, regarded as their creator’s daughters. The Puranic accounts make of her (Ida or Ila) the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the latter version referring to the events of the Atlantean flood, when Vaivasvata, the great Sage on Earth, saved the Fifth Root-race from being destroyed along with the remnants of the Fourth. This is shown very clearly in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna is made to say: — “The Seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my essence, were born from my mind: from them sprung (were born) the human races and the world.” (Chapter X., verse 6). Here the four preceding “Manus,” out of the seven, are the four Races [153] which have already lived, since Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata Manu, the son of Surya (the Sun), and the saviour of our Race, is connected with the Seed of Life, both physically and spiritually. But, at present, while speaking of all, we have to concern ourselves only with the first two. The “Deluge” is undeniably an universal tradition. “Glacial periods” were numerous, and so were the “Deluges,” for various reasons. Stockwell and Croll enumerate some half dozen Glacial Periods and subsequent Deluges — the earliest of all being dated by them 850,000, and the last about 100,000, years ago. [154] But which was our Deluge? Assuredly the former, the one which to this date remains recorded in the traditions of all the peoples, from the remotest antiquity; the one that finally swept away the last peninsulas of Atlantis, beginning with Ruta and Daitya and ending with the (comparatively) small island mentioned by Plato. This is shown by the agreement of certain details in all the legends. It was the last of its gigantic character. The little deluge, the traces of which Baron Bunsen found in Central Asia, and which he places at about 10,000 years B.C., had nothing to do with either the semi-universal Deluge, or Noah’s flood — the latter being a purely mythical rendering of old traditions — nor even with the submersion of the last Atlantean island; at least, only a moral connection. Our Fifth Race (the non-initiated portions), hearing of many deluges, confused them, and now know of but one. This one altered the whole aspect of the globe in its interchange and shifting of land and sea. We may compare the traditions of the Peruvians: — “The Incas, seven in number, have repeopled the Earth after the deluge,” they say (Coste I, IV., p. 19); Humboldt mentions the Mexican version of the same legend, but confuses somewhat the details of the still-preserved legend concerning the American Noah. Nevertheless, the eminent Naturalist mentions twice seven companions and the divine bird which preceded the boat of the Aztecs, and thus makes fifteen elect instead of the seven and the fourteen. This was written probably under some involuntary reminiscence of Moses, who is said to have mentioned fifteen grandsons of Noah, who escaped with their grandsire. Then again Xisuthrus, the Chaldean Noah, is saved and translated alive to heaven — like Enoch — with the seven gods, the Kabirim, or the seven divine Titans; again the Chinese Yao has seven figures which sail with him and which he will animate when he lands, and use for “human seed.” Osiris, when he enters the ark, or solar boat, takes seven Rays with him, etc., etc. Sanchoniathon makes the Aletae or Titans (the Kabirim) contemporary with Agruerus, the great Phoenician god (whom Faber sought to identify with Noah [155]); further, it is suspected that the name of “Titan” is derived from Tit-Ain — “the fountains of the chaotic abyss” [156] (Tit-Theus, or Tityus is “the divine deluge”); and thus the Titans, who are seven, are shown to be connected with the Flood and the seven Rishis saved by Vaivasvata Manu. [157] They are the sons of Kronos (Time) and Rhea (the Earth); and as Agruerus, Saturn and Sydyk are one and the same personage, and as the seven Kabiri are said to be the sons of Sydyk or Kronos-Saturn, the Kabiri and Titans are identical. For once the pious Faber was right in his conclusions when he wrote: “I have no doubt of the seven Titans and Kabiri being the same as the seven Rishis of the Hindu mythology (?), who are said to have escaped in a boat along with Manu, the head (?) of the family.” But he is less fortunate in his speculations when he adds “The Hindoos, in their wild legends have variously perverted the history of the Noachidae (? !), yet it is remarkable that they seem to have religiously adhered to the number seven.” [158] Hence Captain (Col.) Wilford very judiciously observes: that perhaps the seven Manus, the seven Brahmadicas and the seven Rishis are the same, and make only seven individual persons. [159] The seven Brahmadicas were Prajapatis, or lords ‘of the prajas or creatures.’ From them mankind was born, and they are probably the same with the seven Manus. . . . These seven grand ancestors of the human race were created for the purpose of replenishing the Earth with inhabitants.” (Asiatic Researches, Vol. V. p. 246); and Faber adds that: — “the mutual resemblance of the Kabirs, the Titans, the Rishis, and the Noetic family, is too striking to be the effect of mere accident.” [160] Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural Japhet is on the list of the Titans contained in a verse of the Orphic hymns. According to Orpheus the names of the seven “Arkite” Titans (whom Faber refuses to identify with the impious Titans, their descendants) were Koeus, Kroeus, Phorcys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperion, and Iapetus: —
But why could not the Babylonian Ezra have adopted the name of Iapetos for one of Noah’s sons? The Kabiri, who are the Titans, are also called Manes and their mother Mania, according to Arnobius. (Adversum Gentes, lib. III., p. 124.) The Hindus can therefore claim with far more reason that the Manes mean their Manus, and that Mania is the female Manu. (See Ramayana.) Mania is Ila or Ida, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu, from whom “he begat the race of Manus.” Like Rhea, the mother of the Titans, she is the Earth (Sayana making her the goddess of the Earth), and she is but the second edition and repetition of Vach. Both Ida and Vach are turned into males and females; Ida becoming Sudyumna, and Vach, “the female Viraj,” turning into a woman in order to punish the Gandharvas; one version referring to cosmic and divine theogony, the other to the later period. The Manes and Mania of Arnobius are names of Indian origin, appropriated by the Greeks and Latins and disfigured by them. Thus it is no accident, but the result of one archaic doctrine common to all, of which the Israelites, through Ezra, the author of the modernised Mosaic books, were the latest adapters. So unceremonious were they with other people’s property, that Berosus (Antiquitates Libyae, 1, fol. 8), shows that Titea — of whom Diodorus makes the mother of the Titans or Diluvians (See Bibl. lib. III. p. 170) — was the wife of Noah. For this Faber calls him the “pseudo-Berosus,” yet accepts the information in order to register one proof more that the pagans have borrowed all their gods from the Jews, by transforming patriarchal material. According to our humble opinion, this is one of the best proofs possible of exactly the reverse. It shows as clearly as facts can show, that it is the Biblical pseudo-personages which are all borrowed from pagan myths, if myths they must be. It shows, at any rate, that Berosus was well aware of the source of Genesis, and that it bore the same cosmic astronomical character as the allegories of Isis-Osiris, and the Ark, and other older “Arkite” symbols. For, Berosus says that “Titea magna” was afterwards called Aretia, [161] and worshipped with the Earth; and this identifies “Titea,” Noah’s consort, with Rhea, the mother of the Titans, and with Ida — both being goddesses who preside over the Earth, and the mothers of the Manus and Manes (or Tit-an-Kabiri). And “Titea-Aretia” was worshipped as Horchia, says the same Berosus, and this is a title of Vesta, goddess of the Earth. “Sicanus deificavit Aretiam, et nominavit eam lingua Janigena Horchiam.” (Ibid. lib. V. fol. 64.) Scarce an ancient poet of historic or prehistoric days who failed to mention the sinking of the two continents — often called isles — in one form or another. Hence the destruction, besides Atlantis, of the Phlegyae. (See Pausanias and Nonus, who both tell how:
Faber felt convinced that the “insulae Phlegyae” were Atlantis. But all such allegories are more or less distorted echoes of the Hindu tradition about that great Cataclysm, which befell the Fourth, really human, though gigantic, Race, the one which preceded the Aryan. Yet, as just said, like all other legends, that of “the Deluge has more than one meaning. It refers in Theogony, to pre-cosmic transformations, to spiritual correlations — however absurd the term may sound to a scientific ear — and also to subsequent Cosmogony; to the great flood of waters (matter) in chaos, awakened and fructified by those Spirit-Rays which were swamped by, and perished in, the mysterious differentiation — a pre-cosmic mystery, the Prologue to the drama of Being. Anu, Bel, and Noah preceded Adam Kadmon, Adam the Red, and Noah; just as Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva preceded Vaivasvata and the rest.” (See “Isis Unveiled.,” Vol. II., pp. 420 et seq., where one or two of the seven meanings are hinted at.) All this goes to show that the semi-universal deluge known to geology (first glacial period) must have occurred just at the time allotted to it by the Secret Doctrine: namely, 200,000 years (in round numbers) after the commencement of our fifth race, or about the time assigned by Messrs. Croll and Stockwell for the first glacial period: i.e., about 850,000 years ago. Thus, as the latter disturbance is attributed by geologists and astronomers to “an extreme eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit,” and as the Secret Doctrine attributes it to the same source, but with the addition of another factor, the shifting of the Earth’s axis — a proof of which may be found in the Book of Enoch, [162] if the veiled language of the Puranas is not understood — all this should tend to show that the ancients knew something of the “modern discoveries” of Science. Enoch, when speaking of “the great inclination of the Earth,” which “is in travail,” is quite significant and clear. Is not this evident? Nuah is Noah, floating on the waters in his ark; the latter being the emblem of the Argha, or Moon, the feminine principle; Noah is the “spirit” falling into matter. We find him, as soon as he descends upon the Earth, planting a vineyard, drinking of the wine, and getting drunk on it, i.e., the pure spirit becomes intoxicated as soon as it is finally imprisoned in matter. The seventh chapter of Genesis is only another version of the First. Thus, while the latter reads: “and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” in ch. 7 it is said “ . . . and the waters prevailed . . . and the ark went (with Noah, the spirit) upon the face of the waters.” Thus Noah, if identical with the Chaldean Nuah, is the spirit vivifying matter, which latter is Chaos, represented by the Deep, or the Waters of the Flood. In the Babylonian legend (the pre-cosmical blended with the terrestrial event) it is Ishtar (Astaroth or Venus, the lunar goddess) who is shut up in the ark and sends out “a dove in search of dry land.” (“Isis Unveiled” Vol. II, pp. 423 and 424). George Smith notes in the “Tablets,” first the creation of the moon, and then that of the sun: “Its beauty and perfection are extolled, and the regularity of its orbit, which led to its being considered the type of a judge and the regulator of the world.” If this story related simply to a cosmogonical cataclysm — even were this latter universal — why should the goddess Ishtar or Astoreth, the Moon, speak of the creation of the sun after the deluge? The waters might have reached as high as the mountain of Nizir (Chaldean version), or Jebel Djudi (the deluge mountains of the Arabian legend), or yet Ararat (of the Biblical narrative), and even the Himalaya (of the Hindu tradition), and yet not reach the sun: the Bible itself stopped short of such a miracle! It is evident that the deluge of the people who first recorded it had another meaning, less problematical and far more philosophical than that of an universal deluge, of which there are no geological traces whatever. As all such Cataclysms are periodical and cyclical, and as Manu Vaivasvata figures as a generic character, under various circumstances and events (vide infra: “The Seven Manus of Humanity”), there seems to be no serious objection to the supposition that the first “great flood” had an allegorical, as well as a cosmic meaning, and that it happened at the end of the Satya Yuga, the “age of Truth,” when the Second Root Race, “The Manu with bones,” made its primeval appearance as “the Sweat-Born.” [163] The Second Flood — the so-called “universal” — which affected the Fourth Root Race (now conveniently regarded by theology as “the accursed race of giants,” the Cainites, and “the sons of Ham”) is that flood which was first perceived by geology. If one carefully compares the accounts in the various legends of the Chaldees and other exoteric works of the nations, it will be found that all of them agree with the orthodox narratives given in the Brahmanical books. And it may be perceived that while, in the first account, “there is no God or mortal yet on Earth,” when Manu Vaivasvata lands on the Himavan; in the second, the Seven Rishis are allowed to keep him company: thus showing that whereas some accounts refer to the sidereal and cosmic Flood before the so-called creation, the others treat, one of the Great Flood of Matter on Earth, and the other of a real watery deluge. In the Satapatha Brahmana, Manu finds that “the Flood had swept away all living creatures, and he alone was left” — i.e., the seed of life alone remained from the previous dissolution of the Universe, or Mahapralaya, after a “Day of Brahma”; and the Mahabharata refers simply to the geological cataclysm which swept away nearly all the Fourth Race to make room for the Fifth. Therefore is Vaivasvata Manu shown under three distinct attributes in our esoteric Cosmogony: [164] (a) as the “Root-Manu” on Globe A in the First Round; (b) as the “seed of life” on Globe D in the Fourth Round; and (c) as the “Seed of Man” at the beginning of every Root-Race — in our Fifth Race especially. The very commencement of the latter witnesses, during the Dvapara Yuga, [165] the destruction of the accursed sorcerers; “of that island (Plato speaking only of its last island) beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean, from which there was an easy transition to other islands in the neighbourhood of another large Continent” (America). It is this “Atlantic” land which was connected with the “White Island,” and this White Island was Ruta; but it was not the Atala and the “White Devil” of Colonel Wilford (see “Asiatic Researches, “ Vol. VIII., p. 280), as already shown. It may well be remarked here that the Dvapara Yuga lasts 864,000 years, according to the Sanskrit texts; and that, if the Kali Yuga began only about 5,000 years ago, that it is just 869,000 since that destruction took place. Again, these figures are not very widely different from those given by the geologists, who place their “glacial period” 850,000 years ago. Then “a woman was produced who came to Manu and declared herself his daughter, with whom he lived and begat the offspring of Manu.” This refers to the physiological transformation of sexes during the Third Root-Race. And the allegory is too transparently clear to need much explanation. Of course, as already remarked, in the separation of sexes an androgyne being was supposed to divide his body into two halves (as in the case of Brahma and Vach, and even of Adam and Eve), and thus the female is, in a certain sense, his daughter, just as he will be her son, “the flesh of his (and her) flesh and the bone of his (and her) bone.” Let it be also well remembered that not one of our Orientalists have yet learned to discern in those “contradictions and amazing nonsense,” as some call the Puranas, that a reference to a Yuga may mean a Round, a Root-Race, and often a Sub-Race, as well as form a page torn out of pre-cosmic theogony. This double and triple meaning is proved by various references to one and the same individual apparently, under an identical name, while it refers, in fact, to events divided by entire Kalpas. A good instance is that of Ila. She is first represented as one thing and then as another. In the exoteric legends it is said that Manu Vaivasvata, desiring to create sons, instituted a sacrifice to Mitra and Varuna; but, through a mistake of the officiating Brahman, a daughter only was obtained — Ila. Then, “through the favour of the gods,” her sex is changed and she becomes a man, Su-dyumna. Then she is again turned into a woman, and so on; the fable adding that Siva and his consort were pleased that “she would be male one month and female another.” This has a direct reference to the Third Root-Race, whose men were androgynes. But some very learned Orientalists think (see “Hindu Classical Dictionary”) and have declared that “Ila was primarily food, nourishment, or a libation of milk; thence a stream of praise, personified as the goddess of speech.” The “profane” are not told, however, the reason why “a libation of milk,” or “a stream of praise,” should be male and female by turn: unless, indeed there is some “internal evidence” which the occultists fail to perceive. In their most mystical meanings, the union of Swayambhuva Manu with Vach-Sata-Rupa, his own daughter (this being the first “euhemerization” of the dual principle of which Vaivasvata Manu and Ila are a secondary and a third form), stands in Cosmic symbolism as the Root-life, the germ from which spring all the Solar Systems, the worlds, angels and the gods. For, as says Vishnu: —
But we may find worse opponents than even the Western Scientists and Orientalists. If, on the question of figures, Brahmins may agree with our teaching, we are not so sure that some of them, orthodox conservatives, may not raise objections to the modes of procreation attributed to their Pitar Devatas. We shall be called upon to produce the works from which we quote, while they will be invited by us to read their own Puranas a little more carefully and with an eye to the esoteric meaning. And then, we repeat again, they will find, under the veil of more or less transparent allegories, every statement made herein corroborated by their own works. One or two instances have already been given as regards the appearance of the Second Race, which is called the “Sweat-Born.” This allegory is regarded as a fairy-tale, and yet it conceals a psycho-physiological phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature. But in view of the chronological statements made herein, it is natural to ask: — Could Men Exist 18,000,000 Years Ago?To this Occultism answers in the affirmative, notwithstanding all scientific objectors. Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivasvata-Manu Man, i.e., the male and female entity already separated into distinct sexes. The two and a half Races that preceded that event may have lived 300,000,000 years ago for all that science can tell. For the geological and physical difficulties in the way of the theory could not exist for the primeval, ethereal man of the Occult teachings. The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter. Paul d’Assier, the Positivist, seems to have proven the fact pretty plainly, [166] not to speak of the accumulated testimony of the ages, and that of the modern spiritualists and mystics. It will be found difficult to reject this fact in our age of proofs, tests, and ocular demonstrations. The Secret Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms and disturbances of our globe, which — owing to its being the period of its greatest physical development, for the Fourth Round is the middle-point of the life allotted to it — were far more terrible and intense than during any of the three preceding Rounds (the cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual life and of its semi-ethereal conditions) physical Humanity has existed upon it for the last 18,000,000 years. [167] This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to accept the theory of a “boneless,” purely ethereal, man, will object. Science, which knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic theology still more so. The first will object on logical and reasonable grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the last on a tissue of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought forward by theologians, is based on the virtual assumption that mankind (read Christians) on this planet have the honour of being the only human beings in the whole Kosmos, who dwell on a globe, and that they are consequently, the best of their kind. [168] The Occultists, who believe firmly in the teachings of the mother-philosophy, repel the objections of both theologians and scientists. They maintain, on their side, that, during those periods when there must have been insufferable heat, even at the two poles, successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an impediment to human life and organization, such as is assigned by them to the early mankind. Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious gases, nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First and Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous, or the Silurian age itself. Thus the Monads destined to animate future Races were ready for the new transformation. They had passed their phases of immetalization, of plant and animal life, from the lowest to the highest, and were waiting for their human, more intelligent form. Yet, what could the plastic modellers do but follow the laws of evolutionary Nature? Could they, as claimed by the Biblical dead-letter, form “Lord-God”-like, or as Pygmalion in the Greek allegory, Adam-Galatea out of volcanic dust, and breathe a living soul into Man? No: because the soul was already there, latent in its Monad, and needed but a coating. Pygmalion, who fails to animate his statue, and Bahak-Zivo of the Nazarean Gnostics, who fails to construct “a human soul in the creature,” are, as conceptions, far more philosophical and scientific than Adam, taken in the dead-letter sense, or the Biblical Elohim-Creators. Esoteric philosophy, which teaches spontaneous generation — after the Sishta and Prajapati have thrown the seed of life on the Earth — shows the lower angels able to construct physical man only, even with the help of Nature, after having evolved the ethereal form out of themselves, and leaving the physical form to evolve gradually from its ethereal, or what would now be called, protoplasmic model. This will again be objected to: “Spontaneous Generation” is an exploded theory, we shall be told. Pasteur’s experiments disposed of it twenty years ago, and Professor Tyndall is against it. Well, suppose he is? He ought to know that, should spontaneous generation be indeed proven impossible in our present world-period and actual conditions — which the Occultists deny — still it would be no demonstration that it could not have taken place under different cosmic conditions, not only in the seas of the Laurentian period, but even on the then convulsed Earth. It would be interesting to know how Science could ever account for the appearance of species and life on Earth, especially of Man, once that she rejects both the Biblical teachings and spontaneous generation. Pasteur’s observations, however, are far from being perfect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud reject their importance and show that they have none. The question is so far left sub judice, as well as that other one “when, at what period, life appeared on the Earth?” As to the idea that Haeckel’s Moneron — a pinch of salt! — has solved the problem of the origin of life, it is simply absurd. Those materialists, who feel inclined to pooh-pooh the theory of the “Self-existent,” the “Self-born heavenly man,” represented as an ethereal, astral man, must excuse even a tyro in Occultism laughing, in his turn, at some speculations of modern thought. After proving most learnedly that the primitive speck of protoplasm (moneron) is neither animal nor plant, but both, and that it has no ancestors among either of these, since it is that moneron which serves as a point of departure for all organized existence, we are finally told that the Monera are their own ancestors. This may be very scientific, but it is very metaphysical also; too much so, even for the Occultist. If spontaneous generation has changed its methods now, owing perhaps to accumulated material on hand, so as to almost escape detection, it was in full swing in the genesis of terrestrial life. Even the simple physical form and the evolution of species show how Nature proceeds. The scale-bound, gigantic sauria, the winged pterodactyl, the Megalosaurus, and the hundred-feet long Iguanodon of the later period, are the transformations of the earliest representatives of the animal kingdom found in the sediments of the primary epoch. There was a time when all those above enumerated “antediluvian” monsters appeared as filamentoid infusoria without shell or crust, with neither nerves, muscles, organs nor sex, and reproduced their kind by gemmation: as do microscopical animals also, the architects and builders of our mountain ranges, agreeably to the teachings of science. Why not man in this case? Why should he not have followed the same law in his growth, i.e., gradual condensation? Every unprejudiced person would prefer to believe that primeval humanity had at first an ethereal — or, if so preferred, a huge filamentoid, jelly-like form, evolved by gods or natural “forces,” which grew, condensed throughout millions of ages, and became gigantic in its physical impulse and tendency, until it settled into the huge, physical form of the Fourth Race Man, — rather than believe him created of the dust of the Earth (literally), or from some unknown anthropoid ancestor. Nor does our esoteric theory clash with scientific data, except on first appearance, as Dr. A. Wilson, F.R.S., says, in a letter to “Knowledge,” (Dec. 23, 1881). “Evolution — rather Nature, in the light of evolution — has only been studied for some twenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.” And just because of that we do not lose all hope that materialistic science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the esoteric teachings — if even at first divorced from their (to science) too metaphysical elements. Has the last word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? “Each . . . . answer to the great Question (Man’s Real Place in Nature), invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for twenty,” writes Prof. Huxley; “but, as invariably, time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth — tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors”! ! Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his pithecoid ancestry being assignable to the list of “wholly intolerable beliefs,” in the “larger knowledge” of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere “rising to the civilized state” does not account for the evolution of form. In the same letter, “The Evolution of Man,” Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put to “Knowledge” by “G. M.”: — “ ‘Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?’ . . . If we refuse to admit (as science does) that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition — that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution. We do not yet know, because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals. But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies ‘evolution,’ and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man’s evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man’s ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his ‘evolution’ very difficult to trace.” This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if “man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded?” At best it can only apply to the outward, physical man. As remarked in “Isis Unveiled,” Darwin’s evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from the universals. The Aristotle-Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has undeniably already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from the Universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of modern science, than was Aristotle. For he opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the earth and even of its rotundity. “Almost all those,” he wrote, “who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary. . . .” Because (a) the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and (b) they followed the deductive method. Whereas, Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that “the centre of our system was occupied by the Sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day” (Vide De Coelo, Book II., c. 13.) The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which can — without falling into the absurdity of a “miraculous” man created out of the dust of the Earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of lime-salt, (the ex-protoplasmic moneron) — account for his appearance on Earth. Analogy is the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne’s thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries. Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of physical scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods, however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball of Fire-mist becoming gradually — as it rolls through aeons of time in the interstellar spaces — a planet, a self-luminous globe, to settle into a man-bearing world or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a rock-bound globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the sarcode [169] of the moneron, then passes from its protistic state [170] into the form of an animal, to grow into a gigantic reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindles again into the (comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical regions, and the universally common lizard [171] — how can man alone escape the general law? “There were giants on earth in those days,” says Genesis, repeating the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded on anthropological and physiological fact. And, as the hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, “a thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition,” so was the outward covering of primitive man, his early “coat of skin,” plus an immortal spiritual monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that shell. The modern, hard, muscular man almost impervious to any climate, was, perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Haeckelian Moneron is, strictly “an organism without organs,” an entirely homogeneous substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only outwardly. No man of science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brahmins preposterous in the question of Chronology; for their own calculations often exceed by far the claims made by esoteric science. This may easily be shown. Helmholtz calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than 350,000,000 years. Western science (including geology) seems generally to allow our globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir W. Thomson, however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000 years ago — a statement respectfully contradicted by the archaic records. Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of science. Meanwhile, some geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. “Volger . . . . calculates, that the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years . . . . ” Both time and space are infinite and eternal. “The Earth, as a material existence, is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined by finite periods of time” (Burmeister). “We must therefore assume that the starry heaven is not merely in space, what no astronomer doubts, but also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is imperishable.” (See Czolbe). [172] Czolbe repeats exactly what the Occultists say. But the Aryan Occultists, we may be told, knew nothing of these later speculations. “They were even ignorant of the globular form of our earth.” (Coleman.) To this the Vishnu Purana contains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists to open their eyes very widely. . . . “The Sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against midnight, in all the Dwipas (continents), Maitreya! But the rising and the setting of the Sun being perpetually opposite to each other — and in the same way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya; people speak of the rising of the Sun where they see it; and where the Sun disappears, there, to them, is his setting. Of the Sun, which is always in one and the same place, there is neither setting nor rising, for what is called rising and setting are only the seeing and the not seeing the Sun.” (Vishnu Purana, Book II, ch. viii.) To this Fitzedward Hall remarks, “The Heliocentricism taught in this passage is remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on.” Contradicted purposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the Aryans any longer. To return to the Chronology of the geologists and anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in this direction. Except that “of man, the highest organic being of creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost, the so-called alluvial layer,” is all that can be urged, so far. That man was not the last member in the mammalian family, but the first in this Round, is something that science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view also has already been mooted in France on very high authority. That man can be shown to have lived in the mid-Tertiary period, and in a geological age when there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals, is a statement that science cannot deny and which has now been proven by de Quatrefages. [173] But even supposing his existence in the Eocene period is not yet demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous period? We are aware of the fact that only the boldest geologists dare to place man further back than the Miocene age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of speculation and wrangling, science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the subject being compelled to answer to the question: “We do not know.” This ought to show that the men of science are no greater authorities in this matter than are the profane. If, according to Prof. Huxley, “the time represented by the coal formation would be six millions of years, [174] how many more millions would be required to cover the time from the Jurassic period, or the middle of the so-called “Reptilian” age (when the Third Race appeared), up to the Miocene, when the bulk of the Fourth Race was submerged? [175] The writer is well aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the globe and man are the most liberal, always had the shyer majority against them. But this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day (in the Encyclopaedias) along with Cagliostro, and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer’s claims, and that “Mesmerism” under its new name of Hypnotism — a false nose on a very old face — is accepted by science, it does not strengthen one’s respect for that majority, when one sees the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of “Hypnotism,” “Telepathic Impacts,” and its other phenomena. They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed in it since the days of Solomon, and had never called its votaries, only a few years ago, “lunatics and impostors!” [176] The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years, claimed by esoteric philosophy as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says: — “The mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the will-born with bones”; adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago — has yet a chance of being accepted by future scientists. As far as XIXth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, to the effect that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld, and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races with certainty to either the early Secondary, or the Primary ages of geology, one thing is clear: that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration of sexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene Man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the secondary or “Reptilian” age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of the ethereal astral races proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution — the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages, astral evolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical, [177] though developing on parallel lines, had no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow-like ethereal man is related by virtue of his organization — if such it can be called — only to that plane from which the substance of his Upadhi is derived. There are things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing — but not all-seeing — eyes of our modern naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates “Special creation” and the “Evolutionist” Anthropogenesis equally. Again, to take up the question of “Spontaneous generation”; life — as science shows — has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane. There was a time when even the Haeckelian Moneron — that simple globule of Protoplasm — had not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came the Impulse which caused the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the Urschleim of Oken, that organic “slime,” now christened protoplasm. What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen in meteorites from other globes already formed, Sir W. Thomson’s wild theory to this effect, notwithstanding. And if they have so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other planets; who, or what, had carried them into those planets? Here, again, unless the Occult teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face a miracle; to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower level, in these respects, than the philosophers of Eastern Aryan antiquity. Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism. It is the only possible escape from idiotic atheism based on lethal materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the monotheists; between which two it stands on its own entirely neutral ground. Hylozoism demands absolute Divine Thought, which would pervade the numberless active, creating Forces, or “Creators”; which entities are moved by, and have their being in, from, and through that Divine Thought; the latter, nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or their creations, than the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such active “Creators” are known to exist and are believed in, because perceived and sensed by the inner man in the Occultist. Thus the latter says that an absolute Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living god, without immediate degradation of the ideal. [178] A Deity that manifests in Space and Time — these two being simply the forms of that which is the Absolute all — can be but a fractional part of the whole. And since that “all” cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore that sensed creator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mere aspect thereof. To use the same metaphor — inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted to the case in hand — these creators are like the numerous rays of the solar orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring — the Manvantaric dawn of the Earth — in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God — [[aprepes toi theo]]. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own hand to creation, — [[autournein hapanta]]. This Cudworth calls “Hylozoism.” As old Zeno is credited by Laertius with having said, “Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles; perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was secreted.” [179] Let us return to our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed, notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human life also, in its incipient physical form, i.e., in a race of beings adapted for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, science confesses that it knows nothing of the real length of “geological periods.” But the chief question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that which is called the “Azoic” age, there ever was such an atmosphere as that hypothesised by the Naturalists. Not all the physicists agree with this idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine by exact science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first condensation of the oceans — i.e., since the Laurentian period, the Pyrolithic age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of Bischof — as the experiments of the latter scientist with basalts have shown. For were we to take the word of the majority of scientists as to the quantity of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with carbon and nitrogen, in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven, and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there were, in those days, oceans of liquid carbonic acid, instead of water. With such an element, it becomes doubtful whether the Ganoids, or even the Primitive Trilobites themselves could live in the oceans of the primary age — let alone in those of the Silurian, as shown by Blanchard. The conditions that were necessary for the earliest race of mankind, however, require no elements, whether simple or compound. That which was stated at the beginning is maintained. The spiritual ethereal Entity which lived in Spaces unknown to Earth, before the first sidereal “jelly-speck” evolved in the ocean of crude Cosmic Matter, — billions and trillions of years before our globular speck in infinity, called Earth, came into being and generated the Moneron in its drops, called Oceans — needed no “elements.” The “Manu with soft bones” could well dispense with calcic phosphate, as he had no bones, save in a figurative sense. And while even the Monera, however homogeneous their organism, still required physical conditions of life that would help them toward further evolution, the being which became primitive Man and the “Father of man,” after evolving on planes of existence undreamt of by science, could well remain impervious to any state of atmospheric conditions around him. The primitive ancestor, in Brasseur de Bourbourg’s “Popul-Vuh,” who — in the Mexican legends — could act and live with equal ease under ground and water as upon the Earth, answers only to the Second and early Third Races in our texts. And if the three kingdoms of Nature were so different in pre-diluvian ages, why should not man have been composed of materials and combinations of atoms now entirely unknown to physical science? The plants and animals now known, in almost numberless varieties and species, have all developed, according to scientific hypotheses, from primitive and far fewer organic forms. Why should not the same have occurred in the case of man, the elements, and the rest? “Universal Genesis starts from the one, breaks into three, then five, and finally culminates into seven, to return into four, three, and one.” (Commentary.) For additional proofs consult Part II. of this Volume, “The Septenary in Nature.” STANZA VII. FROM THE SEMI-DIVINE DOWN TO THE FIRST HUMAN RACES.
24. The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night (issued from the body of Brahma when it became Night), ready for re-birth, came down. They saw the (intellectually) vile forms of the first third (still senseless Race) (a). “We can choose,” said the Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some entered the Chhayas. Some projected a spark. Some deferred till the Fourth (Race). From their own essence they filled (intensified) the Kama (the vehicle of desire). Those who received but a spark remained destitute of (higher) knowledge. The spark burnt low (b). The Third remained mind-less. Their Jivas (Monads) were not ready. These were set apart among the Seven (primitive human species). They (became the) narrow-headed. The third were ready. In these shall we dwell, said the Lords of the Flame and of the Dark Wisdom (c). This Stanza contains, in itself, the whole key to the mysteries of evil, the so-called Fall of the angels, and the many problems that have puzzled the brains of the philosophers from the time that the memory of man began. It solves the secret of the subsequent inequalities of intellectual capacity, of birth or social position, and gives a logical explanation to the incomprehensible Karmic course throughout the aeons which followed. The best explanation which can be given, in view of the difficulties of the subject, shall now be attempted. (a) Up to the Fourth Round, and even to the later part of the Third Race in this Round, Man — if the ever-changing forms that clothed the Monads during the first three Rounds and the first two and a half races of the present one can be given that misleading name — is, so far, only an animal intellectually. It is only in the actual midway Round that he develops in himself entirely the fourth principle as a fit vehicle for the fifth. But Manas will be relatively fully developed only in the following Round, when it will have an opportunity of becoming entirely divine until the end of the Rounds. As Christian Schoettgen says in Horae Hebraicae, etc., the first terrestrial Adam “had only the breath of life,” Nephesh, but not the living Soul. (b) Here the inferior Races, of which there are still some analogues left — as the Australians (now fast dying out) and some African and Oceanic tribes — are meant. “They were not ready” signifies that the Karmic development of these Monads had not yet fitted them to occupy the forms of men destined for incarnation in higher intellectual Races. But this is explained later on. (c) The Zohar speaks of “Black Fire,” which is Absolute Light-Wisdom. To those who, prompted by old theological prejudice, may say: “But the Asuras are the rebel Devas, the opponents of the Gods — hence devils, and the spirits of Evil,” it is answered: Esoteric philosophy admits neither good nor evil per se, as existing independently in nature. The cause for both is found, as regards the Kosmos, in the necessity of contraries or contrasts, and with respect to man, in his human nature, his ignorance and passions. There is no devil or the utterly depraved, as there are no Angels absolutely perfect, though there may be spirits of Light and of Darkness; thus Lucifer — the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought — is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the Logos in his highest, and the “Adversary” in his lowest aspect — both of which are reflected in our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of Christ, makes the Logos, the Word, the first-born brother of Satan, the “first of all creatures.” (Inst. div. Book II., c. viii., “Qabbalah,” 116.) The Vishnu Purana describes these primeval creatures (the Arvaksrota) with crooked digestive canals: They were “endowed with inward manifestations, but mutually in ignorance about their kind and nature.” The twenty-eight kinds of Badha, or imperfections, do not apply, as Wilson thought, to the animals now known and specified by him, [180] for these did not exist in those geological periods. This is quite plain in the said work, in which the first created (on this globe) are the “five-fold immovable creation,” minerals and vegetables; then come those fabulous animals, Tiryaksrota, (the monsters of the abyss slain by the “Lords,” see Stanzas II. and III.); then the Urdhwasrotas, the happy celestial beings, which feed on ambrosia; then lastly, the Arvaksrotas, human beings — Brahma’s seventh creation so-called. But these “creations,” including the latter, did not occur on this globe, wherever else they may have taken place. It is not Brahma who creates things and men on this Earth, but the chief and Lord of the Prajapati, the Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation. [181] Obeying the command of Brahma, Daksha (the synthesis, or the aggregate, of the terrestrial creators and progenitors, Pitris included) made superior and inferior (vara and avara) things “referring to putra” progeny, and “bipeds and quadrupeds, and subsequently by his will (the Sons of Will and Yoga) made females,” i.e., separated the androgynes. Here again, we have “bipeds” or men, created before the “quadrupeds” as in the esoteric teachings. (Vide supra and Stanza XII. as explained.) Since, in the exoteric accounts, the Asuras are the first beings created from the “body of night,” while the Pitris issue from that of Twilight; the “gods” being placed by Parasara (Vishnu Purana) between the two, and shown to evolve from the “body of the day,” it is easy to discover a determined purpose to veil the order of creation. Man is the Arvaksrota coming from the “Body of the Dawn”; and elsewhere, man is again referred to, when the creator of the world, Brahma, is shown “creating fierce beings, denominated Bhutas and eaters of flesh,” or as the text has it, “fiends frightful from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous.” [182] Whereas the Rakshasas are generally translated by “Evil Spirits” and “the enemies of the gods,” which identifies them with the Asuras. In the Ramayana, when Hanuman is reconnoitering the enemy in Lanka, he finds there Rakshasas, some hideous, “while some were beautiful to look upon,” and, in Vishnu Purana, there is a direct reference to their becoming the Saviours of “Humanity,” or of Brahma. The allegory is very ingenious. Great intellect and too much knowledge are a two-edged weapon in life, and instruments for evil as well as for good. When combined with Selfishness, they will make of the whole of Humanity a footstool for the elevation of him who possesses them, and a means for the attainment of his objects; while, applied to altruistic humanitarian purposes, they may become the means of the salvation of many. At all events, the absence of self-consciousness and intellect will make of man an idiot, a brute in human form. Brahma is Mahat — the universal Mind — hence the too-selfish among the Rakshasas showing the desire to become possessed of it all — to “devour” Mahat. The allegory is transparent. At any rate, esoteric philosophy identifies the pre-Brahmanical Asuras, Rudras, [183] Rakshasas and all the “Adversaries” of the Gods in the allegories, with the Egos, which, by incarnating in the still witless man of the Third Race, made him consciously immortal. They are, then, during the cycle of Incarnations, the true dual Logos — the conflicting and two-faced divine Principle in Man. The Commentary that follows, and the next Stanzas may, no doubt, throw more light on this very difficult tenet, but the writer does not feel competent to give it out fully. Of the succession of Races, however, they say: — “First come the SELF-EXISTENT on this Earth. They are the ‘Spiritual Lives’ projected by the absolute WILL and LAW, at the dawn of every rebirth of the worlds. These LIVES are the divine ‘Sishta,’ (the seed-Manus, or the Prajapati and the Pitris).” From these proceed — 1. The First Race, the “Self-born,” which are the (astral) shadows of their Progenitors. [184] The body was devoid of all understanding (mind, intelligence, and will). The inner being (the higher self or Monad), though within the earthly frame, was unconnected with it. The link, the Manas, was not there as yet. 2. From the First (race) emanated the second, called the “Sweat-born” [185] and the “Boneless.” This is the Second Root-Race, endowed by the preservers (Rakshasas) [186] and the incarnating gods (Asuras and the Kumaras) with the first primitive and weak spark (the germ of intelligence) . . And from these in turn proceeds: — 3. The Third Root-Race, the “Two-fold” (Androgynes). The first Races hereof are shells, till the last is “inhabited” (i.e., informed) by the Dhyanis. The Second Race, as stated above, being also sexless, evolved out of itself, at its beginning, the Third Androgyne Race by an analogous, but already more complicated process. As described in the Commentary, the very earliest of that race were: — “The ‘Sons of Passive Yoga.’ [187] They issued from the second Manushyas (human race), and became oviparous. The emanations that came out of their bodies during the seasons of procreation were ovulary; the small spheroidal nuclei developing into a large soft, egg-like vehicle, gradually hardened, when, after a period of gestation, it broke and the young human animal issued from it unaided, as the fowls do in our race.” This must seem to the reader ludicrously absurd. Nevertheless, it is strictly on the lines of evolutionary analogy, which science perceives in the development of the living animal species. First the moneron-like procreation by self-division (vide Haeckel); then, after a few stages, the oviparous, as in the case of the reptiles, which are followed by the birds; then, finally, the mammals with their ovoviviparous modes of producing their young ones. If the term ovoviviparous is applied to some fish and reptiles, which hatch their eggs within their bodies, why should it not be applied to female mammalians, including woman? The ovule, in which, after impregnation, the development of the foetus takes place, is an egg. At all events, this conception is more philosophical than that of Eve with a suddenly created placenta giving birth to Cain, because of the Apple, when even the marsupial, the earliest of mammals, is not placental yet. Moreover, the progressive order of the methods of reproduction, as unveiled by science, is a brilliant confirmation of esoteric Ethnology. It is only necessary to tabulate the data in order to prove our assertion. (Cf. especially Schmidt’s “Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,” p. 39, et. seq., and Laing’s “A Modern Zoroastrian,” pp. 102-111.) I 1. Fission: — (a) As seen in the division of the homogeneous speck of protoplasm, known as Moneron or Amoeba, into two. (b) As seen in the division of the nucleated cell, in which the cell-nucleus splits into two sub-nuclei, which either develop within the original cell-wall or burst it, and multiply outside as independent entities. (Cf., the First Root-Race.) II. Budding: — A small portion of the parent structure swells out at the surface and finally parts company, growing to the size of the original organism; e.g., many vegetables, the sea-anemone, etc. (Cf., the Second Root-Race.) [188] III. Spores: — A single cell thrown off by the parent organism, which develops into a multicellular organism reproducing the features of the latter, e.g., bacteria and mosses. IV. Intermediate Hermaphroditism: — Male and female organs inhering in the same individual; e.g., the majority of plants, worms, and snails, etc.; allied to budding. (Cf. Second and early Third Root-Races.) V. True sexual union: — (Cf. later Third Root-Race.) We now come to an important point with regard to the double evolution of the human race. The Sons of Wisdom, or the spiritual Dhyanis, had become “intellectual” through their contact with matter, because they had already reached, during previous cycles of incarnation, that degree of intellect which enabled them to become independent and self-conscious entities, on this plane of matter. They were reborn only by reason of Karmic effects. They entered those who were “ready,” and became the Arhats, or sages, alluded to above. This needs explanation. It does not mean that Monads entered forms in which other Monads already were. They were “Essences,” “Intelligences,” and conscious spirits; entities seeking to become still more conscious by uniting with more developed matter. Their essence was too pure to be distinct from the universal essence; but their “Egos,” or Manas (since they are called Manasaputra, born of “Mahat,” or Brahma) had to pass through earthly human experiences to become all-wise, and be able to start on the returning ascending cycle. The Monads are not discrete principles, limited or conditioned, but rays from that one universal absolute Principle. The entrance into a dark room through the same aperture of one ray of sunlight following another will not constitute two rays, but one ray intensified. It is not in the course of natural law that man should become a perfect septenary being, before the seventh race in the seventh Round. Yet he has all these principles latent in him from his birth. Nor is it part of the evolutionary law that the Fifth principle (Manas), should receive its complete development before the Fifth Round. All such prematurely developed intellects (on the spiritual plane) in our Race are abnormal; they are those whom we call the “Fifth-Rounders.” Even in the coming seventh Race, at the close of this Fourth Round, while our four lower principles will be fully developed, that of Manas will be only proportionately so. This limitation, however, refers solely to the spiritual development. The intellectual, on the physical plane, was reached during the Fourth Root-Race. Thus, those who were “half ready,” who received “but a spark,” constitute the average humanity which has to acquire its intellectuality during the present Manvantaric evolution, after which they will be ready in the next for the full reception of the “Sons of Wisdom.” While those which “were not ready” at all, the latest Monads, which had hardly evolved from their last transitional and lower animal forms at the close of the Third Round, remained the “narrow-brained” of the Stanza. This explains the otherwise unaccountable degrees of intellectuality among the various races of men — the savage Bushman and the European — even now. Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are very little above the level of the animals, are not the unjustly disinherited, or the unfavoured, as some may think — nothing of the kind. They are simply those latest arrivals among the human Monads, which were not ready: which have to evolve during the present Round, as on the three remaining globes (hence on four different planes of being) so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth Round. One remark may prove useful, as food for thought to the student in this connection. The monads of the lowest specimens of humanity (the “narrow-brained” [189] savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had. The former are spinning out Karma only now; the latter are burdened with past, present, and future Karma. In this respect the poor savage is more fortunate than the greatest genius of civilised countries. Let us pause before giving any more such strange teachings. Let us try and find out how far any ancient Scriptures, and even Science, permit the possibility of, or even distinctly corroborate, such wild notions as are found in our Anthropogenesis. Recapitulating that which has been said we find: — That the Secret Doctrine claims for man, (1) a polygenetic origin. (2) A variety of modes of procreation before humanity fell into the ordinary method of generation. (3) That the evolution of animals — of the mammalians at any rate — follows that of man instead of preceding it. And this is diametrically opposed to the now generally accepted theories of evolution and the descent of man from an animal ancestor. Let us, by giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, examine, first of all, the chances for the polygenetic theory among the men of science. Now the majority of the Darwinian evolutionists incline to a polygenetic explanation of the origin of Races. On this particular question, however, scientists are, as in many other cases, at sixes and sevens; they agree to disagree. “Does man descend from one single couple or from several groups — monogenism or polygenism? As far as one can venture to pronounce on what in the absence of witnesses (?) will never be known (?), the second hypothesis is far the most probable.” [190] Abel Hovelacque, in his “Science of Language,” comes to a similar conclusion, arguing from the evidence available to a linguistic enquirer. In an address delivered before the British Association, Professor W. H. Flower remarked on this question: — “The view which appears best to accord with what is now known of the characters and distribution of the races of man . . . . is a modification of the monogenistic hypothesis (!). Without entering into the difficult question of the method of man’s first appearance upon the world, we must assume for it a vast antiquity, at all events as measured by any historical standard. If we had any approach to a complete palaeontological record, the history of Man could be re-constructed, but nothing of the kind is forthcoming.” Such an admission must be regarded as fatal to the dogmatism of the physical Evolutionists, and as opening a wide margin to occult speculations. The opponents of the Darwinian theory were, and still remain, polygenists. Such “intellectual giants” as John Crawford and James Hunt discussed the problem and favoured polygenesis, and in their day there was a far stronger feeling in favour of than against this theory. It is only in 1864 that Darwinians began to be wedded to the theory of unity, of which Messrs. Huxley and Lubbock became the first coryphaei. As regards that other question, of the priority of man to the animals in the order of evolution, the answer is as promptly given. If man is really the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, then the teaching has nothing so very impossible in it, and is but logical. For, man becomes that Macrocosm for the three lower kingdoms under him. Arguing from a physical standpoint, all the lower kingdoms, save the mineral — which is light itself, crystallised and immetallised — from plants to the creatures which preceded the first mammalians, all have been consolidated in their physical structures by means of the “cast-off dust” of those minerals, and the refuse of the human matter, whether from living or dead bodies, on which they fed and which gave them their outer bodies. In his turn, man grew more physical, by re-absorbing into his system that which he had given out, and which became transformed in the living animal crucibles through which it had passed, owing to Nature’s alchemical transmutations. There were animals in those days of which our modern naturalists have never dreamed; and the stronger became physical material man, the giants of those times, the more powerful were his emanations. Once that Androgyne “humanity” separated into sexes, transformed by Nature into child-bearing engines, it ceased to procreate its like through drops of vital energy oozing out of the body. But while man was still ignorant of his procreative powers on the human plane, (before his Fall, as a believer in Adam would say,) all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammal-animal forms. Evolution is an eternal cycle of becoming, we are taught; and nature never leaves an atom unused. Moreover, from the beginning of the Round, all in Nature tends to become Man. All the impulses of the dual, centripetal and centrifugal Force are directed towards one point — Man. The progress in the succession of beings, says Agassiz, “consists in an increasing similarity of the living fauna, and, among the vertebrates, especially, in the increasing resemblance to man. Man is the end towards which all animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first palaeozoic fishes.” [191] Just so; but “the palaeozoic fishes” being at the lower curve of the arc of the evolution of forms, this Round began with astral man, the reflection of the Dhyan Chohans, called the “Builders.” Man is the alpha and the omega of objective creation. As said in “Isis Unveiled,” “all things had their origin in spirit — evolution having originally begun from above and proceeding downwards, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory.” [192] Therefore, the tendency spoken of by the eminent naturalist above quoted, is one inherent in every atom. Only, were one to apply it to both sides of the evolution, the observations made would greatly interfere with the modern theory, which has now almost become (Darwinian) law. But in citing the passage from Agassiz’ work with approval, it must not be understood that the occultists are making any concession to the theory, which derives man from the animal kingdom. The fact that in this Round he preceded the mammalia is obviously not impugned by the consideration that the latter (mammalia) follow in the wake of man. 25. How did the Manasa, the Sons of Wisdom act? They rejected the Self-born, (the boneless). They are not ready. They spurned the (First) Sweat-Born. [193] They are not quite ready. They would not enter the (First) egg-born. [194] To a Theist or a Christian this verse would suggest a rather theological idea: that of the Fall of the Angels through Pride. In the Secret Doctrine, however, the reasons for the refusal to incarnate in half-ready physical bodies seem to be more connected with physiological than metaphysical reasons. Not all the organisms were sufficiently ready. The incarnating powers chose the ripest fruits and spurned the rest. [195] By a curious coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the continent on which the first androgynes, the Third Root-Race, separated, the writer chose, on geographical considerations, that of “Lemuria,” invented by Mr. P. L. Sclater. It is only later, that reading Haeckel’s “Pedigree of Man,” it was found that the German “Animalist” had chosen the name for his late continent. He traces, properly enough, the centre of human evolution to “Lemuria,” but with a slight scientific variation. Speaking of it as that “cradle of mankind,” he pictures the gradual transformation of the anthropoid mammal into the primeval savage!! Vogt, again, holds that in America Man sprang from a branch of the platyrrhine apes, independently of the origination of the African and Asian root-stocks from the old world catarrhinians. Anthropologists are, as usual, at loggerheads on this question, as on many others. We shall examine this claim in the light of esoteric philosophy in Stanza VIII. Meanwhile, let us give a few moments of attention to the various consecutive modes of procreation according to the laws of Evolution. Let us begin by the mode of reproduction of the later sub-races of the Third human race, by those who found themselves endowed with the sacred fire from the spark of higher and then independent Beings, who were the psychic and spiritual parents of Man, as the lower Pitar Devata (the Pitris) were the progenitors of his physical body. That Third and holy Race consisted of men who, at their zenith, were described as, “towering giants of godly strength and beauty, and the depositories of all the mysteries of Heaven and Earth.” Have they likewise fallen, if, then, incarnation was the Fall? Of this presently. The only thing now to be noted of these is, that the chief gods and heroes of the Fourth and Fifth Races, as of later antiquity, are the deified images of these men of the Third. The days of their physiological purity, and those of their so-called Fall, have equally survived in the hearts and memories of their descendants. Hence, the dual nature shown in those gods, both virtue and sin being exalted to their highest degree, in the biographies composed by posterity. They were the pre-Adamite and the divine Races, with which even theology, in whose sight they are all “the accursed Cainite Races,” now begins to busy itself. But the action of “spiritual progenitors” of that Race has first to be disposed of. A very difficult and abstruse point has to be explained with regard to Stanzas 26 and 27. These say: — 26. When the Sweat-born produced the Egg-born, the Two-fold (androgyne Third Race [196]), the Mighty, the Powerful with Bones, the Lords of Wisdom said: “Now shall we create” (a). Why “now” — and not earlier? This the following sloka explains. 27. (Then) the Third (race) became the vahan (vehicle) of the Lords of Wisdom. It created Sons of “Will and Yoga,” by Kriyasakti (b), it created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. . . . (a) How did they create, since the “Lords of Wisdom” are identical with the Hindu Devas, who refuse “to create”? Clearly they are the Kumaras of the Hindu Pantheon and Puranas, those elder sons of Brahma, “Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas,” who, previously created by him “without desire or passion, remained chaste, full of holy wisdom and undesirous of progeny?” [197] The power, by which they first created, is just that which has since caused them to be degraded from their high status to the position of evil spirits, of Satan and his Host, created in their turn by the unclean fancy of exoteric creeds. It was by Kriyasakti, that mysterious and divine power latent in the will of every man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and developed by Yogi-training, remains dormant in 999,999 men out of a million, and gets atrophied. This power is explained in the “Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,” [198] as follows: — (b) “Kriyasakti — the mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancients held that any idea will manifest itself externally, if one’s attention (and Will) is deeply concentrated upon it; similarly, an intense volition will be followed by the desired result. A Yogi generally performs his wonders by means of Itchasakti (Will-power) and Kriyasakti.” The Third Race had thus created the so-called Sons of Will and Yoga, or the “ancestors” (the spiritual forefathers) of all the subsequent and present Arhats, or Mahatmas, in a truly immaculate way. They were indeed created, not begotten, as were their brethren of the Fourth Race, who were generated sexually after the separation of sexes, the Fall of Man. For creation is but the result of will acting on phenomenal matter, the calling forth out of it the primordial divine Light and eternal Life. They were the “holy seed-grain” of the future Saviours of Humanity. Here we have to make again a break, in order to explain certain difficult points, of which there are so many. It is almost impossible to avoid such interruptions. For explanations and a philosophical account of the nature of those beings, which are now viewed as the “Evil” and rebellious Spirits, the creators by Kriyasakti, the reader is referred to the chapters on “The Fallen Angels” and “The Mystic Dragons,” in Part II. of this Volume. The order of the evolution of the human Races stands thus in the Fifth Book of the Commentaries, and was already given: — The First men were Chhayas (1) ; the second, the “Sweat-born” (2), the Third, “Egg-born,” and the holy Fathers born by the power of Kriyasakti (3); the Fourth were the children of the Padmapani (Chenresi) (4). Of course such primeval modes of procreation — by the evolution of one’s image, through drops of perspiration, after that by Yoga, and then by what people will regard as magic (Kriyasakti) — are doomed beforehand to be regarded as fairy-tales. Nevertheless, beginning with the first and ending with the last, there is really nothing miraculous in them, nor anything which could not be shown natural. This must be proven. 1. Chhaya-birth, or that primeval mode of sexless procreation, the first Race having oozed out, so to say, from the bodies of the Pitris, is hinted at in a Cosmic allegory in the Puranas. [199] It is the beautiful allegory and story of Sanjna, the daughter of Viswakarman — married to the Sun, who, “unable to endure the fervours of her lord,” gave him her chhaya (shadow, image, or astral body), while she herself repaired to the jungle to perform religious devotions, or Tapas. The Sun, supposing the “chhaya” to be his wife begat by her children, like Adam with Lilith — an ethereal shadow also, as in the legend, though an actual living female monster millions of years ago. But, perhaps, this instance proves little except the exuberant fancy of the Puranic authors. We have another proof ready. If the materialised forms, which are sometimes seen oozing out of the bodies of certain mediums could, instead of vanishing, be fixed and made solid — the creation of the first Race would become quite comprehensible. This kind of procreation cannot fail to be suggestive to the student. Neither the mystery nor the impossibility of such a mode is certainly any greater — while it is far more comprehensible to the mind of the true metaphysical thinker — than the mystery of the conception of the foetus, its gestation and birth as a child, as we now know it. Now to the curious and little understood corroboration in the Puranas about the “Sweat-born.” 2. Kandu is a sage and a Yogi, eminent in holy wisdom and pious austerities, which, finally, awaken the jealousy of the gods, who are represented in the Hindu Scriptures as being in never-ending strife with the ascetics. Indra, the “King of the Gods,” [200] finally sends one of his female Apsarasas to tempt the sage. This is no worse than Jehovah sending Sarah, Abraham’s wife, to tempt Pharaoh; but in truth it is those gods (and god), who are ever trying to disturb ascetics and thus make them lose the fruit of their austerities, who ought to be regarded as “tempting demons,” instead of applying the term to the Rudras, Kumaras, and Asuras, whose great sanctity and chastity seem a standing reproach to the Don Juanic gods of the Pantheon. But it is the reverse that we find in all the Puranic allegories, and not without good esoteric reason. The king of the gods (or Indra) sends a beautiful Apsarasas (nymph) named Pramlocha to seduce Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her unholy purpose and “907 years six months and three days” [201] spent in her company seem to the sage as one day. When this psychological or hypnotic state ends, the Muni curses bitterly the creature who seduced him, thus disturbing his devotions. “Depart, begone!” he cries, “vile bundle of illusions!” . . . And Pramlocha, terrified, flies away, wiping the perspiration from her body with the leaves of the trees as she passes through the air. She went from tree to tree, and as, with the dusky shoots that crowned their summits, she dried her limbs, the child she had conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores of her skin in drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and the winds collected them into one mass. “This,” said Soma (the Moon), “I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till the exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely girl named Marisha.” [202] Now Kandu stands here for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one devoid of mind, which is hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the “Lord-god” breathes the breath of life but not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the Earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the divine Soul. Pramlocha is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan Adam; and Marisha, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the “sweat-born,” and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of Mankind. As remarked in the foot note (vide supra) it is not Indra, who now figures in the Puranas, but Kamadeva, the god of love and desire, who sends Pramlocha on Earth. Logic, besides the esoteric doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kama is the king and lord of the Apsarasas, of whom Pramlocha is one; and, therefore, when Kandu, in cursing her, exclaims “Thou hast performed the office assigned by the monarch of the gods, go!” he must mean by that monarch Kama and not Indra, to whom the Apsarasas are not subservient. For Kama, again, is in the Rig Veda (x. 129) the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation. He was the first movement that stirred the One, after its manifestation from the purely abstract principle, to create, “Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind; and which sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” A hymn in the Atharva Veda exalts Kama into a supreme God and Creator, and says: “Kama was born the first. Him, neither gods nor fathers (Pitara) nor men have equalled.” . . . . The Atharva Veda identifies him with Agni, but makes him superior to that god. The Taittariya Brahmana makes him allegorically the son of Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Sraddha (faith). Elsewhere Kama is born from the heart of Brahma; therefore he is Atma-Bhu “Self-Existent,” and Aja, the “unborn.” His sending Pramlocha has a deep philosophical meaning; sent by Indra — the narrative has none. As Eros was connected in early Greek mythology with the world’s creation, and only afterwards became the sexual Cupid, so was Kama in his original Vedic character, (Harivansa making him a son of Lakshmi, who is Venus). The allegory, as said, shows the psychic element developing the physiological, before the birth of Daksha, the progenitor of real physical men, made to be born from Marisha and before whose time living beings and men were procreated “by the will, by sight, by touch and by Yoga,” as will be shown. This, then, is the allegory built on the mode of procreation of the Second or the “Sweat-born.” The same for the Third Race in its final development. Marisha, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the Prachetasas, the production of the “Mind-born” sons of Brahma also [203], from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha, a son of Brahma also, in a former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Puranas, in order to mislead, yet speaking the truth. (3.) The early Third Race, then, is formed from drops of “sweat,” which, after many a transformation, grow into human bodies. This is not more difficult to imagine or realise than the growth of the foetus from an imperceptible germ, which foetus develops into a child, and then into a strong, heavy man. But this race again changes its mode of procreation according to the Commentaries. It is said to have emanated a vis formativa, which changed the drops of perspiration into greater drops, which grew, expanded, and became ovoid bodies — huge eggs. In these the human foetus gestated for several years. In the Puranas, Marisha, the daughter of Kandu, the sage, becomes the wife of the Prachetasas and the mother of Daksha. Now Daksha is the father of the first human-like progenitors, having been born in this way. He is mentioned later on. The evolution of man, the microcosm, is analogous to that of the Universe, the macrocosm. His evolution stands between that of the latter and that of the animal, for which man, in his turn, is a macrocosm. Then the race becomes: — (4.) The androgyne, or hermaphrodite. This process of men-bearing explains, perhaps, why Aristophanes [204] describes the nature of the old race as androgynous, the form of every individual being rounded, “having the back and sides as in a circle,” whose “manner of running was circular . . . . terrible in force and strength and with prodigious ambition.” Therefore, to make them weaker, “Zeus divided them (in the Third Root-Race) into two, and Apollo (the Sun), under his direction, closed up the skin.” The Madagascans (the island belonged to Lemuria) have a tradition about the first man, who lived at first without eating, and, having indulged in food, a swelling appeared in his leg; this bursting, there emerged from it a female, who became the mother of their race. Truly . . . “We have our sciences of Heterogenesis and Parthenogenesis, showing that the field is yet open. . . . . The polyps . . . . produce their offspring from themselves, like the buds and ramifications of a tree. . . . ” Why not the primitive human polyp? The very interesting polyp Stauridium passes alternately from gemmation into the sex method of reproduction. Curiously enough, though it grows merely as a polyp on a stalk, it produces gemmules, which ultimately develop into a sea-nettle or Medusa. The Medusa is utterly dissimilar to its parent-organism, the Stauridium. It also reproduces itself differently, by sexual method, and from the resulting eggs Stauridia once more put in an appearance. This striking fact may assist many to understand that a form may be evolved — as in the sexual Lemurians from Hermaphrodite parentage — quite unlike its immediate progenitors. It is, moreover, unquestionable that in the case of human incarnations the law of Karma, racial or individual, overrides the subordinate tendencies of “Heredity,” its servant. The meaning of the last sentence in the above-quoted Commentary on Stanza 27, namely, that the Fourth Race were the children of Padmapani, may find its explanation in a certain letter from the Inspirer of “Esoteric Buddhism” quoted on p. 68. “The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race — the above-mentioned Chinamen and their off-shoots and branchlets. (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hungarians, Finns, and even the Esquimaux are all remnants of this last offshoot.)” Padmapani, or Avalokiteswara in
Sanskrit, is, in Tibetan, Chenresi. Now, Avalokiteswara is the great
Logos in its higher aspect and in the divine regions. But
in the manifested planes, he is, like Daksha, the progenitor (in a
spiritual sense) of men. Padmapani-Avalokiteswara is called
esoterically Bhodhisatva (or Dhyan Chohan) Chenresi Vanchug,
“the powerful and all-seeing.” He is considered now as the greatest
protector of Asia in general, and of Tibet in particular. In order
to guide the Tibetans and Lamas in holiness, and preserve the great
Arhats in the world, this heavenly Being is credited with
manifesting himself from age to age in human form. A popular legend
has it that whenever faith begins to die out in the world, Padmapani
Chenresi, the “lotus-bearer,” emits a brilliant ray of light, and
forthwith incarnates himself in one of the two great Lamas — the
Dalai and Teschu Lamas; finally, it is believed that he will
incarnate as “the most perfect Buddha” in Tibet, instead of in
India, where his predecessors, the great Rishis and Manus had
appeared in the beginning of our Race, but now appear no longer.
Even the exoteric appearance of Dhyani Chenresi is suggestive of the
esoteric teaching. He is evidently, like Daksha, the synthesis of
all the preceding Races and the progenitor of all the human
Races after the Third, the first complete one, and thus is
represented as the culmination of the four primeval races
in his eleven-faced form. It is a column built in four
rows, each series having three faces or heads of different
complexions: the three faces for each race being typical of its
three fundamental physiological transformations. The first is white
(moon-coloured); the second is yellow; the third, red-brown; the
fourth, in which are only two faces — the third face being left a
blank — (a reference to the untimely end of the Atlanteans) is
brown-black. Padmapani (Daksha) is seated on the column, and forms
the apex. In this reference compare Stanza 39. The Dhyan Chohan
is represented with four arms, another allusion to the four races.
For while two are folded, the third hand holds a lotus (Padmapani,
“the lotus-bearer”), this flower symbolizing generation, and the
fourth holds a serpent, emblem of the Wisdom in his power. On his
neck is a rosary, and on his head the sign of water
Padmapani, however, is the “lotus-bearer” symbolically only for the profane; esoterically, it means the supporter of the Kalpas, the last of which, the present Maha-Kalpa (the Varaha), is called Padma, and represents one half of the life of Brahma. Though a minor Kalpa, it is called Maha, “great,” because it comprises the age in which Brahma sprang from a lotus. Theoretically, the Kalpas are infinite, but practically they are divided and sub-divided in Space and Time, each division — down to the smallest — having its own Dhyani as patron or regent. Padmapani (Avalokiteshwara) becomes, in China, in his female aspect, Kwan-yin, “who assumes any form, at pleasure, in order to save mankind.” The knowledge of the astrological aspect of the constellations on the respective “birth-days” of these Dhyanis — Amitabha (the O-mi-to Fo, of China), included: e.g., on the 19th day of the second month, on the 17th day of the eleventh month, and on the 7th day of the third month, etc., etc. — gives the Occultist the greatest facilities for performing what are called “magic” feats. The future of an individual is seen, with all its coming events marshalled in order, in a magic mirror placed under the ray of certain constellations. But — beware of the reverse of the medal, Sorcery. STANZA VIII. EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAMMALIANS. — THE FIRST FALL.
28. From the drops of sweat (a); from the residue of the substance; matter from dead bodies and animals of the wheel before (previous, Third Round); and from cast-off dust; the first animals (of this Round) were produced. (a) The Occult doctrine maintains that, in this Round, the mammalians were a later work of evolution than man. Evolution proceeds in cycles. The great Manvantaric cycle of Seven Rounds, beginning in the First Round with mineral, vegetable, and animal, brings its evolutionary work on the descending arc to a dead stop in the middle of the Fourth Race, at the close of the first half of the Fourth Round. It is on our Earth, then, (the Fourth sphere and the lowest) and in the present Round, that this middle point has been reached. And since the Monad has passed, after its “first inmetallization” on Globe A, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds in every degree of the three states of matter, except the last degree of the third or solid state, which it reached only at the “mid-point of evolution” it is but logical and natural that at the beginning of the Fourth Round on Globe D, Man should be the first to appear; and also that his frame should be of the most tenuous matter that is compatible with objectivity. To make it still clearer: if the Monad begins its cycle of incarnations through the three objective kingdoms on the descending curved line, it has necessarily to enter on the re-ascending curved line of the sphere as a man also. On the descending arc it is the spiritual which is gradually transformed into the material. On the middle line of the base, Spirit and Matter are equilibrized in Man. On the ascending arc, Spirit is slowly re-asserting itself at the expense of the physical, or matter, so that, at the close of the seventh Race of the Seventh Round, the Monad will find itself as free from matter and all its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the experience and wisdom, the fruition of all its personal lives, without their evil and temptations. This order of evolution is found also in Genesis (ch. 1 and 2) if one reads it in its true esoteric sense, for chapter i. contains the history of the first Three Rounds, as well as that of the first Three Races of the Fourth, up to that moment when Man is called to conscious life by the Elohim of Wisdom. In the first chapter, animals, whales and fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam. [205] In the second, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only appear after him. Even the state of mental torpor and unconsciousness of the first two races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is symbolized, in the second chapter of Genesis, by the deep sleep of Adam. It was the dreamless sleep of mental inaction, the slumber of the Soul and Mind, which was meant by that “sleep,” and not at all the physiological process of differentiation of sexes, as a learned French theorist (M. Naudin) imagined. The Puranas, the Chaldean and Egyptian fragments, and also the Chinese traditions, all show an agreement with the Secret Doctrine as to the process and order of evolution. We find in them the corroboration of almost all our teaching. For instance: the statement concerning the oviparous mode of procreation of the Third Race, and even a hint at a less innocent mode of the procreation of the first mammal forms, “gigantic, transparent, dumb and monstrous they were,” says the Commentary. Study the stories of the several Rishis and their multifarious progeny; e.g., Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents and Nagas — the oviparous brood; Kasyapa was grandsire, through his wife Tamra, of the birds and of Garuda, king of the feathered tribe; while by his wife Surabhi, he was the parent of cows and buffaloes, etc., etc. In the Secret Doctrine, the first Nagas — beings wiser than Serpents — are the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” born before the complete separation of the sexes, “matured in the man-bearing eggs [206] produced by the power (Kriyasakti) of the holy sages” of the early Third Race. [207] “. . . . . In these were incarnated the Lords of the three (upper) worlds, the various classes of Rudras, who had been Tushitas, who had been Jayas, who are Adityas;” for, as explained by Parasara, “There are a hundred appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras.” Some of the descendants of the primitive Nagas, the Serpents of Wisdom, peopled America, when its continent arose during the palmy days of the great Atlantis, (America being the Patala or Antipodes of Jambu-Dwipa, not of Bharata-Varsha). Otherwise, whence the traditions and legends — the latter always more true than history, as says Augustin Thierry — and even the identity in the names of certain “medicine men” and priests, who exist to this day in Mexico? We shall have to say something of the Nargals and the Nagals and also of Nagalism, called “devil-worship” by the Missionaries. In almost all the Puranas, the story of the “Sacrifice of Daksha” is given, the oldest account of which is to be found in Vayu Purana. Allegorical as it is, there is more meaning and biological revelation in it to a Naturalist, than in all the pseudo-scientific vagaries, which are regarded as learned theories and hypotheses. Daksha, who is regarded as the Chief Progenitor, is, moreover, pointed out as the creator of physical man in the “fable,” which makes him lose his head from his body in the general strife between the gods and the Raumas. This head, being burnt in the fire, is replaced by the head of a ram (Kasi-Khanda). Now the ram’s head and horns are ever the symbol of generating power and of reproductive force, and are phallic. As we have shown, it is Daksha who establishes the era of men engendered by sexual intercourse. But this mode of procreation did not occur suddenly, as one may think, and required long ages before it became the one “natural” way. Therefore, his sacrifice to the gods is shown as interfered with by Siva, the destroying deity, evolution and progress personified, who is the regenerator at the same time; who destroys things under one form but to recall them to life under another more perfect type. Siva-Rudra creates the terrible Virabhadra (born of his breath) the “thousand-headed, thousand-armed” (etc.) monster, and commissions him to destroy the sacrifice prepared by Daksha. Then Virabhadra, “abiding in the region of the ghosts (ethereal men) . . . . created from the pores of the skin (Romakupas), powerful Raumas, [208] (or Raumyas).” Now, however mythical the allegory, the Mahabharata, which is history as much as is the Iliad, shows [209] the Raumyas and other races, as springing in the same manner from the Romakupas, hair or skin pores. This allegorical description of the “sacrifice” is full of significance to the students of the Secret Doctrine who know of the “Sweat-born.” In the Vayu Purana’s account of Daksha’s sacrifice, moreover, it is said to have taken place in the presence of creatures born from the egg, from the vapour, vegetation, pores of the skin, and, finally only, from the womb. Daksha typifies the early Third Race, holy and pure, still devoid of an individual Ego, and having merely the passive capacities. Brahma, therefore, commands him to create (in the exoteric texts); when, obeying the command, he made “inferior and superior” (avara and vara) progeny (putra), bipeds and quadrupeds; and by his will, gave birth to females . . . . to the gods, the Daityas (giants of the Fourth Race), the snake-gods, animals, cattle and the Danavas (Titans and demon Magicians) and other beings.” . . . . “From that period forward, living creatures were engendered by sexual intercourse. Before the time of Daksha, they were variously propagated — by the will, by sight, by touch, and by Yoga-power.” [210] And now comes the simply zoological teaching. 29. Animals with bones, dragons of the deep and flying sarpas (serpents) were added to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of the long necks in the water, became the progenitors of the fowls of the air (a). (a) This is a point on which the teachings and modern biological speculation are in perfect accord. The missing links representing this transition process between reptile and bird are apparent to the veriest bigot, especially in the ornithoscelidae, hesperornis, and the archaeopteryx of Vogt. 30. During the Third (Race), the boneless animals grew and changed: they became animals with bones (a), their Chhayas became solid (also). 31. The animals separated the first (into male and female) (b) . . . . (a) Vertebrates, and after that mammalians. Before that the animals were also ethereal proto-organisms, just as man was. (b) The fact of former hermaphrodite mammals and the subsequent separation of sexes is now indisputable, even from the stand-point of Biology. As Prof. Oscar Schmidt, an avowed Darwinist, shows: “Use and disuse combined with selection elucidate (?) the separation of the sexes, and the existence, totally incomprehensible, of rudimentary sexual organs. In the Vertebrata especially, each sex possesses such distinct traces of the reproductive apparatus characteristic of the other, that even antiquity assumed hermaphroditism as a natural primeval form of mankind. . . . The tenacity with which the rudiments of sexual organs are inherited is remarkable. In the class of mammals, actual hermaphroditism is unheard of, although through the whole period of their development they drag along with them these residues born by their unknown ancestry, no one can say how long ago.” [211] 31. . . . . They (the animals) began to breed. The two-fold man (then) separated also. He (man), said “Let us as they; let us unite and make creatures.” They did. . . . 32. And those which had no spark (the “narrow-brained” [212]) took huge she-animals unto them (a). They begat upon them dumb races. Dumb they were (the “narrow-brained”) themselves. But their tongues untied (b). The tongues of their progeny remained still. Monsters they bred. A race of crooked, red-hair-covered monsters, going on all fours. [213] A dumb race, to keep the shame untold. [214] (a) The animals “separated the first,” says Stanza 31. Bear in mind that at that period men were different, even physiologically, from what they are now, having passed the middle point of the Fifth Race. We are not told what the “huge she-animals” were; but they certainly were as different from any we know now, as were the men. This was the first physical “fall into matter” of some of the then existing and lower races. Bear in mind Stanza 24. The “Sons of Wisdom” had spurned the early Third Race, i.e., the non-developed, and are shown incarnating in, and thereby endowing with intellect, the later Third Race. Thus the sin of the brainless or “mindless” Races, who had no “spark” and were irresponsible, fell upon those who failed to do by them their Karmic duty. (b) See later on concerning the beginning of human speech. What may be the Objections to the Foregoing. Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater clearness, however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Book I., Stanza VI. Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that nature had built, at one time, around the human astral form an ape-like external shape, yet it is as correct that this shape was no more that of the “missing link,” than were the coverings of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms of nature. Nor was it, as shown in the proper place, on this Fourth Round planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third Rounds, when man was, in turn, “a stone, a plant, and an animal” until he became what he was in the First Root-Race of present humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, except when the latter is divorced from the dogma of “Natural Selection” and the like. Indeed, between the Monera of Haeckel and the Sarisripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jiva; for the “human” Monad, whether immetallized in the stone-atom, or invegetallized in the plant, or inanimalized in the animal, is still and ever a divine, hence also a human Monad. It ceases to be human only when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms “mineral,” “vegetable” and “animal” monad are meant to create a superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (jiva) other than divine, and consequently having been, or having to become, human. And the latter term has to remain meaningless unless the difference is well understood. The Monad is a drop out of the shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be correct, within the plane of primeval differentiation. It is divine in its higher and human in its lower condition — the adjectives “higher” and “lower” being used for lack of better words — and a monad it remains at all times, save in the Nirvanic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms. As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine Mind, and the manifested Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it, repeating an Eastern teaching, so the Monad has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that “Man becomes a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, a Spirit, and finally God. Thus accomplishing his cycle or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the heavenly Man.” But by “Man” the divine Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity, much less his physical body. While rejecting the immortal Soul, the men of Science now try to trace the latter through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak. The animals — the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded man in this Fourth Round, as well as those contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races — all are either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product (physically) of man. It is correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, i.e., during the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of nature. That he was “a stone, a plant, an animal.” But (a) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth Round; and (b) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows of the present, as the Occultists express it. And finally the forms and genera of neither man, animal, nor plant were what they became later. Thus the astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which preceded (the chhayas of) Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms or models produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D. [215] “Produced from the residue of the substance matter; from dead bodies of men and (other extinct) animals of the wheel before,” or the previous Third Round — as Stanza 24 tells us. Hence, while the nondescript “animals” that preceded the astral man at the beginning of this life-cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to man again. Moreover, the “ancestor” of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal. The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought forward by the anthropologists as a demonstration of the descent of man from the animals. The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, “The history of the embryo is an epitome of that of the race.” That “every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a series of forms, through which, in like succession, its ancestors have passed in the long course of Earth’s history. [216] The history of the embryo . . . . is a picture in little, and outline of that of the race. This conception forms the gist of our fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the fundamental law of organic development.” [217] This modern theory was known as a fact to, and far more philosophically expressed by, the Sages and Occultists from the remotest ages. A passage from “Isis Unveiled” may here be cited to furnish a few points of comparison. In Vol. I., pp. 388-9, it was asked why, with all their great learning, physiologists were unable to explain teratological phenomena? Any anatomist who has made the development and growth of the embryo “a subject of special study,” can tell, without much brain-work, what daily experience and the evidence of his own eyes show him, viz., that up to a certain period, the human embryo is a facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the spawn — a tadpole. But no physiologist or anatomist seems to have had the idea of applying to the development of the human being — from the first instant of its physical appearance as a germ to its ultimate formation and birth — the Pythagorean esoteric doctrine of metempsychosis, so erroneously interpreted by critics. The meaning of the axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man, etc.” was mentioned in another place in relation to the spiritual and physical evolution of men on this Earth. We will now add a few more words to make the matter clearer. What is the primitive shape of the future man? A grain, a corpuscle, say some physiologists; a molecule, an ovum of the ovum, say others. If it could be analysed — by the microscope or otherwise — of what ought we to expect to find it composed? Analogically, we should say, of a nucleus of inorganic matter, deposited from the circulation at the germinating point, and united with a deposit of organic matter. In other words, this infinitesimal nucleus of the future man is composed of the same elements as a stone — of the same elements as the Earth, which the man is destined to inhabit. Moses is cited by the Kabalists as authority for the remark that it required earth and water to make a living being, and thus it may be said that man first appears as a stone. At the end of three or four weeks the ovum has assumed a plant-like appearance, one extremity having become spheroidal and the other tapering like a carrot. Upon dissection it is found to be composed, like an onion, of very delicate laminae or coats, enclosing a liquid. The laminae approach each other at the lower end, and the embryo hangs from the root of the umbilicus almost like the fruit from the bough. The stone has now become changed, by “metempsychosis,” into a plant. Then the embryonic creature begins to shoot out, from the inside outward, its limbs, and develops its features. The eyes are visible as two black dots; the ears, nose, and mouth form depressions, like the points of a pineapple, before they begin to project. The embryo develops into an animal-like foetus — the shape of a tadpole — and, like an amphibious reptile, lives in water and develops from it. Its Monad has not yet become either human or immortal, for the Kabalists tell us that this only occurs at the “fourth hour.” One by one the foetus assumes the characteristics of the human being, the first flutter of the immortal breath passes through its being; it moves; and the divine essence settles in the infant frame, which it will inhabit until the moment of physical death, when man becomes a spirit. This mysterious process of a nine-months’ formation, the Kabalists call the completion of the “individual cycle of evolution.” As the foetus develops amidst the liquor amnii in the womb, so the Earths germinate in the universal ether, or astral fluid, in the womb of the Universe. These cosmic children, like their pigmy inhabitants, are at first nuclei; then ovules; then gradually mature; and becoming mothers, in their turn, develop mineral, vegetable, animal, and human forms. From centre to circumference, from the imperceptible vesicle to the uttermost conceivable bounds of the Kosmos, those glorious thinkers, the Occultists, trace cycle merging into cycle, containing and contained in an endless series. The embryo evolving in its pre-natal sphere, the individual in his family, the family in the state, the state in mankind, the Earth in our system, that system in its central universe, the universe in the Kosmos, and the Kosmos in the one cause . . . thus runs their philosophy of evolution, differing as we see, from that of Haeckel: —
These are the proofs of Occultism, and they are rejected by Science. But how is the chasm between the mind of man and animal to be bridged in this case? How, if the anthropoid and Homo primigenius had, argumenti gratia, a common ancestor (in the way modern speculation puts it), did the two groups diverge so widely from one another as regards mental capacity? True, the Occultist may be told that in every case Occultism does what Science repeats; it gives a common ancestor to ape and man, since it makes the former issue from primeval man. Ay, but that “primeval man” was man only in external form. He was mindless and soulless at the time he begot, with a female animal monster, the forefather of a series of apes. This speculation — if speculation it be — is at least logical, and fills the chasm between the mind of man and animal. Thus it accounts for and explains the hitherto unaccountable and inexplicable. The fact that, in the present stage of evolution, Science is almost certain that no issue can follow from the union of man and animal, is considered and explained elsewhere. Now what is the fundamental difference between the accepted (or nearly so) conclusions, as enunciated in “The Pedigree of Man,” viz., that man and ape have a common ancestor; and the teachings of Occultism, which deny this conclusion and accept the fact that all things and all living beings have originated from one common source? Materialistic science makes man evolve gradually to what he is now, and, starting from the first protoplasmic speck called Moneron (which we are told has, like the rest, “originated in the course of immeasurable ages from a few, or from one simple, spontaneously arising original form, that has obeyed one law of evolution”), pass through “unknown and unknowable” types up to the ape, and thence to the human being. Where the transitional shapes are discoverable we are not told; for the simple reason that no “missing links” between man and the apes have ever yet been found, though this fact in no way prevents men like Haeckel from inventing them ad libitum. Nor will they ever be met with; simply, again, because that link which unites man with his real ancestry is searched for on the objective plane and in the material world of forms, whereas it is safely hidden from the microscope and dissecting knife within the animal tabernacle of man himself. We repeat what we have said in Isis Unveiled: — “. . . . . . . All things had their origin in spirit — evolution having originally begun from above and proceeded downward, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian theory. In other words, there has been a gradual materialization of forms until a fixed ultimate of debasement is reached. This point is that at which the doctrine of modern evolution enters into the arena of speculative hypothesis. Arrived at this period we will find it easier to understand Haeckel’s Anthropogeny, which traces the pedigree of man ‘from its protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited,’ according to Professor Huxley’s exposition. We may believe the man (of the Third Round) evolved ‘by gradual modification of an (astral) mammal of ape-like organization’ still easier when we remember that (though in a more condensed and less elegant, but still as comprehensible, phraseology) the same theory was said by Berosus to have been taught many thousands of years before his time by the man-fish Oannes or Dagon, the semi-demon of Babylonia [218] (though on somewhat modified lines). “But what lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as he is concerned nothing but ‘unverifiable hypotheses.’ For, as he puts it, he views all beings ‘as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.’ [219] He does not attempt to show us who these ‘few beings’ were. But it answers our purpose quite as well, for, in the admission of their existence at all, resort to the ancients for corroboration and elaboration of the idea receives the stamp of scientific approbation. . . . ” Truly, as also said in our first work: “If we accept Darwin’s theory of the development of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the Unutterable. If our mortal language is inadequate to express what our spirit dimly foresees in the great ‘Beyond’ — while on this earth — it must realize it at some point in the timeless Eternity.” But what lies “beyond” Haeckel’s theory? Why Bathybius Haeckelii, and no more! A further answer is given in Part III. Addenda. STANZA IX. THE FINAL EVOLUTION OF MAN.
33. Seeing which (the sin committed with the animals), the Lhas (the spirits, the “Sons of Wisdom”) who had not built men (who had refused to create), wept, saying: — 34. “The Amanasa (the ‘mindless’) have defiled our future abodes (a). This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen.” They did. . . . 35. Then all became endowed with Manas (minds). They saw the sin of the mindless. But they had already separated before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on account of the sin committed, — even this race will find itself on the last day on one of the seven paths. For “the wise [220] guard the home of nature’s order, they assume excellent forms in secret.” [221] But we must see whether the “animals” tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to zoology. (a) The “Fall” occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the old records, as soon as Daksha (the reincarnated Creator of men and things in the early Third Race) disappeared to make room for that portion of mankind which had “separated.” This is how the Commentary explains the details that preceded the “Fall”: — “In the initial period of man’s Fourth evolution, the human kingdom branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles (the egg-like, external shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated) were often tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now unknown, and which belonged to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long and live, though the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the ‘Egg-Born’ Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated and mated no longer. Man created no more — he begot. But he also begot animals, as well as men in days of old. Therefore the Sages (or wise men), who speak of males who had no more will-begotten offspring, but begat various animals along with Danavas (giants) on females of other species — animals being as (or in a manner of) Sons putative to them; and they (the human males) refusing in time to be regarded as (putative) fathers of dumb creatures — spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this (state of things), the kings and Lords of the Last Races (of the Third and the Fourth) placed the seal of prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new (Karma). [222] They (the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races. [223] In another we find: — “There were blue and red-faced animal-men even in later times; not from actual intercourse (between the human and animal species), but by descent.” And still another passage mentions: — “Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers.” Perchance in these specimens, Haeckelians might recognize, not the Homo primigenius, but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi-human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters — those “failures” mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Haeckel’s Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid [224] blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition. How was the separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation; as the former hides an esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race with bones was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which were “boneless.” This is an esoteric tenet spread far and wide, as it is almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Araea, “red Earth.” Taaroa, the creative power, the chief god, “put man to sleep for long years, for several lives,” which means racial periods, and is a reference to his mental sleep, as shown elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and she became a woman. [225] Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may mean, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine Builder of man — “a Progenitor.” Do we then believe in such “supernatural” beings? We say, No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside nature. Nor are we Cosmolators or Polytheists for believing in “Heavenly Man” and divine men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and universal tradition. We reject, however, every groundless and baseless tradition, which, having outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, has found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous traditions, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following incorporeal, “Arupa,” men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in dynasties of divine beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little modern science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry. No, certainly not. We do not believe in the supernatural but only in the superhuman, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One may easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that: “The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that every one seems ashamed of — even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept even a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past.” [226] But the “supernatural” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature 5,000 years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides geology, anthropology and ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if that same theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years — the age of Methuselah — five million years ago, we would have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a megalosaurus to a common lizard. A naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. “There is no question of selection between human races,” say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument — one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man’s bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice. Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes. [227] Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. “Crossing,” as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women — i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a “soulless” [228] and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man — brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet — but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises. Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native — co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora — must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position. “It is a very curious fact,” says Jukes, [229] “that not only these marsupial animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several of the shells — as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks — much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the Oolitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain something of the Oolitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the Globe.” (! !) Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d’etre for such a “curse of retardation”? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its “virgin soil” notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding. To return, however, once more to the history of the Third Race, the “Sweat-Born,” the “Egg-bearing,” and the “Androgyne.” Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of course. The passage from the former to the latter transformation required numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third-Race-mankind is the most mysterious of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the “How” of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs, [230] and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the newly born sub-races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub-race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by the same identical process as our historical generations. This required, of course, millions of years. The reader has been made acquainted with the approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations, in Stanza II. We are approaching the turning-point of the evolution of the Races. Let us see what occult philosophy says on the origin of language. 36. The Fourth Race developed Speech. The Commentaries explain that the first Race — the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called “Self-born” — was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a “Sound-language,” to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the “Sweat-born” (the early Third Race). In its second half, when the “Sweat-born” gave birth to the “Egg-born,” (the middle Third Race); and when these, instead of “hatching out” (may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age) as androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually, an act which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of “one language and of one lip.” This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race [231] from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors, [232] and their own already awakened minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven races is divided into four ages — the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age — so is every smallest division of such races. [233] Speech then developed, according to occult teaching, in the following order: — I. Monosyllabic speech; that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the close of the Third Root-race, the “golden-coloured,” yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called “thought-transference,” though, with the exception of the Race called the “Sons of Will and Yoga” — the first in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had incarnated — thought was but very little developed in nascent physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist. [234] II. These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother-language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay and finally death, [235] so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races — that language, which is referred to as “Rakshasi Bhasa,” in old Sanskrit works — decayed and almost died out. While the “cream” of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America. III. The inflectional speech — the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called “the elder sister” of the Greek, instead of its mother — was the first language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race). At any rate, the “Semitic” languages are the bastard descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans — degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Tchandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A-bram (No Brahmin) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those Aryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan and Kabul, [236] and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and invaded Arabia. But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent. We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub-races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross-breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization, which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids. In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the “Lords of Wisdom” did not incarnate, as we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural “sexual selection”), originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later. [237] As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does. 37. The One (androgyne) became Two; also all the living and creeping things, that were still one, giant-fish, birds, and serpents with shell-heads (a). This relates evidently to the so-called age of the amphibious reptiles, during which ages science maintains that no man existed! But what could the ancients know of antediluvian prehistoric animals and monsters! Nevertheless, in Book VI. of the Commentaries is found a passage which says, freely translated: — “When the Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men-animals, these (the animals) became ferocious, and men and they mutually destructive. Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. After (the separation) the Satya (Yuga) was at an end. The eternal spring became constant change and seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing. Then man appealed to the superior Fathers (the higher gods or angels). The Nirmanakaya of the Nagas, the wise Serpents and Dragons of Light came, and the precursors of the Enlightened (Buddhas). Divine Kings descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer in the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first Races), which had turned into a white frozen corpse.” The above is suggestive. We will see what can be inferred from this brief statement. Some may incline to think that there is more in it than is apparent at first sight. Whence the idea, and the true meaning of the term “Eden”? Christians will maintain that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled. [238] It was said that: “The Garden of Eden
as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to those landmarks of
history which occasionally disclose to the student that the
Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the Hebrew
“Though containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony, the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia and Assyria were in any way cognate with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people. Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people, and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the importers were Brahminical Hindus.” And now, ten years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India. “Much of the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or proto-Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship of the gods blending insensibly together.” Here, the Akkadians are called “non-Semitic,” as we had insisted they were in “Isis,” which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of historical facts, arranged from other people’s history in Jewish garb — Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle — or rather one of the chief cradles — of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim. But this “college” and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [hedone], signifying voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks, Indra’s heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris, promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything of the Jews 2,000 B.C., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited by the “Dragons of Wisdom,” the Initiates. And according to Klaproth, the hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of Fo-kone-ky, places its “Garden of Wisdom” on the plateau of Pamir between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers — Oxus, Indus, Ganges, and Silo — flowing from a common source, the “Lake of the Dragons.” But this is not the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former — Eden Illa-ah — means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good and evil: man being the Knower thereof. Renan and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves “on the most solid inductions,” think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the cradle of humanity “on the region of the Timaus.” Finally, the Asiatic Journal [239] concludes that: “All the traditions of the human race gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to be traced.” That “primitive humanity” was in its Fifth Race, when the “four-mouthed Dragon,” the lake, of which very few traces are now left, was the abode of the “Sons of Wisdom,” the first mind-born sons of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the “bower of voluptuousness” of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man occurred after the “separation.” The Eden of the Jews was copied from the Chaldean copy. That the Fall of man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the Zohar. The question is not whether Eve’s incident with the tempting reptile is allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only a Jewish but an universal idea. Now we find in the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a kind of flying camel ([[kamelomorphon]]). A “flying camel” is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless, the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was right in its description: [240] for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS. Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall “its nature and its name,” and is described as a huge serpent with a camel’s neck. “There are no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons,” asserts Salverte, [241] “. . . grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents.” There are none now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness to “flying camels.” Already, after finding simple fossils of certain saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, “if anything can justify the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus.” [242] We are unaware if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, “the Pterodactyl” (found in Germany), “78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to its reptilian body.” That fossil is described as a reptile, the little fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing. Here, then, the “flying camel” of the Zohar is vindicated. For surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific probability to build a “flying camel,” or a long-necked dragon. Prof. Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia. And now to the main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed palaeontography and paleontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas and monuments, and in the Imperial library at Pekin, many a traveller has seen and recognised perfect representations of Plesiosauri and Pterodactyls in the multiform Chinese dragons. [243] Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery serpents, [244] and Job mentions the Leviathan. [245] Now the following questions are put very directly: — I. How could the ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of the carboniferous and Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them orally and pictorially, unless they had either seen those monsters themselves or possessed descriptions of them in their traditions, which descriptions necessitate living and intelligent eye-witnesses? II. And if such eye-witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palaeolithic men be no earlier than about the middle of the tertiary period? We must bear in mind that most of the men of science will not allow man to have appeared before the Quaternary period, and thus shut him out completely from the Cenozoic times. Here we have extinct species of animals, which disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of years ago, described by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said, could hardly have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either the Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the Quaternary period, or man must be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus. It does not stand to reason, because the Occultists believe in and defend ancient wisdom and science, even though winged saurians are called “flying camels” in the translations of the Zohar, that we believe as readily in all the stories which the middle ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk of the Third Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit Christopher Scherer’s and Father Kircher’s cock-and-bull stories of their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their assertions as either dreams or fibs. [246] Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a poetical license that other story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of his heart. [247] We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea-serpent is one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it exists and lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped detection? It is a creature contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and exists no more. The reader may inquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly, because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity of the human race; and secondly, to show the difference between the zoological real meaning of the words “dragon,” “Naga,” and “Serpent,” and the metaphorical one, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the quid pro quos and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice. Sed et serpens? aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the serpent of Genesis an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic force superintelligent, a “great fallen light,” a spirit sidereal, aerial and tellurian at the same time, “whose influence circumambulates the globe (qui circumambulat terram), as a Christian fanatic of the dead-letter (de Mirville) has it, and which only manifested itself under the physical emblem, which was the most convenient “with respect to its moral and intellectual coils”: i.e. under the ophidian form. But what will Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the “divine healer,” if the serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil? The “Evil One” itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when it is traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit. For, if the followers of the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and AEsculapius, or Asclepios, who are, in truth, one, are “devils and sons of devils,” and the wand and serpent of the latter were “the devil’s wand”; how about the “brazen serpent” of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the heathen wand and the Jewish “serpent” are one and the same, namely, the Caduceus of Mercury, son of Apollo-python. It is easy to comprehend why the Jews adopted the ophidian shape for their “seducer.” With them it was purely physiological and phallic; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on the part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once that the mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read numerically. The Occultists know that the serpent, the Naga, and the dragon have each a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the astronomical and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted lights, and the two serpents of the Gnostics, the good and the evil one; they also know that, when generalised, the conclusions of both science and theology present two most ridiculous extremes. For, when the former tells us that it is sufficient to trace the legends of the serpents to their primal source, the astrological legend, and to meditate seriously on the Sun, conqueror of Python, and the celestial virgin in the Zodiac forcing back the devouring dragon, if we would have the key of all the subsequent religious dogmas; it is easy to perceive that, instead of generalising, the author simply has his eye on Christian religion and Revelation. We call this one extreme. The other we see in this: when, repeating the famous decision of the Council of Trent, theology seeks to convince the masses that “from the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the devil has full power over him, and possesses him by right (diabolum dominationem et potestatem super homines habere et jure cos possidere).” To this Occult philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the devil as an entity, and then we may believe in such congenital possession. A very small amount of observation and knowledge of human nature may be sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma. Had Satan any reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the ecclesiastical sense), it is the poor devil who would find himself chronically obsessed and even possessed by the wicked — hence by the bulk of mankind. It is humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty, unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which have begotten, given birth to, and reared in love the evil one; but this is a digression. “The whole world of thought is reproached by the Church with having adored the serpent. The whole of humanity ‘incensed and at the same time stoned it.’ The Zend Avesta speaks of it as the Kings and Vedas do, as the Edda and the Bible. . . . Everywhere the sacred serpent, the naga, and its shrine and its priest; in Rome it is the Vestal who prepares its meal with the same care as she bestows on the sacred fire. In Greece, AEsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Every one has heard of the famous Roman embassy sent by the Senate to the god of medicine and its return with the not less famous serpent, which proceeded of its own will and by itself toward its Master’s temple on one of the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it (the serpent) in her hair, not an Augur but questioned it oracularly, not a necromancer whose tomb is free from its presence! The Cainites and the Ophites call it Creator, while recognizing, as Schelling did, that the serpent is ‘evil in substance and its personification.’” [248] Yes, the author is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the prestige which the serpent enjoys to our own day, one ought to study the matter in India and learn all that is believed about, and still attributed to, the Nagas (Cobras) in that country; one should also visit the Africans of Whydah, the Voodoos of Port-au-Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of Mexico, and the Pa, or men-serpents of China, &c. But why wonder that the serpent is “adored” and at the same time cursed, since we know that from the beginning it was a symbol? [249] In every ancient language the word dragon signified what it now does in Chinese — (lang) i.e., “the being who excels in intelligence” and in Greek [[drakon]], or “he who sees and watches.” And is it to the animal of that name that any of these epithets can apply? Is it not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the primitive meaning may have led savages now, that the said qualifications were intended to apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by serpents and dragons? These “originals” — called to this day in China “the Dragons of Wisdom” — were the first disciples of the Dhyanis, who were their instructors; in short, the primitive adepts of the Third Race, and later, of the Fourth and Fifth Races. The name became universal, and no sane man before the Christian era would ever have confounded the man and the symbol. The symbol of Chnouphis, or the soul of the world, writes Champollion, “is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this reptile, the emblem of the good genius, is a veritable Agathodaemon. It is often represented bearded. . . . . That sacred animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones . . . . The serpent has various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters [[CHNOUBIS]].” 250] Agathodaemon was endowed “with the knowledge of good and evil,” i.e., with divine Wisdom, as without the former the latter is impossible. [251] Repeating Iamblichus, Champollion shows him to be “the deity called [[Eichton]] (or the fire of the celestial gods — the great [252] Thot-Hermes), to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic.” [253] The “invention of magic!” A strange term to use, as though the unveiling of the eternal and actual mysteries of nature could be invented! As well attribute, millenniums hence, the invention instead of the discovery of radiant matter to Prof. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the discoverer, for, as said in the foot-note, Thot-Hermes is a generic name, as is Enoch (Enoichion, the “inner, spiritual eye”), Nebo, the prophet and seer, etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man, but a generic title of many adepts. Their connection in symbolic allegories with the serpent is due to their enlightenment by the solar and planetary gods during the earliest intellectual Race, the Third. They are all the representative patrons of the Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son of the Sun-god Apollo — and he is Mercury; Nebo is the son of Bel-Merodach; Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son of Vivisvat — the Sun or Surya, etc., etc. And while, astronomically, the Nagas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarasas, Gramanis (or Yakshas, minor gods) Yatudhanas and Devas, are the Sun’s attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are gods and men — when incarnated in the nether world. Let the reader be reminded, in this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir Buddhist Nagas — which are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nagas ethnologically, but “wise men.” The Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, is but a series of historical records of the great struggle between white and black Magic, between the Adepts of the right path, the Prophets, and those of the left, the Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. Even the students of Occultism, though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching to rely upon, find it difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the Sodales of the Right Path and those of the Left. The great schism that arose between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of “the Sons of God,” is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two schools of Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob. And here it may be well to quote a few sentences from “Isis Unveiled.” The dying Jacob thus describes his sons: “Dan,” he says, “shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse-heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards (i.e., he will teach candidates black magic) . . . . I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord!” Of Simeon and Levi the patriarch remarks that they “. . . are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly.” [254] Now in the original, the words “their secret” really are “their Sod.” [255] And Sod was the name for the great mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all sun-gods and had serpents for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of the fiery serpents by saying that this was the name given to the tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in short, and that Moses was the chief of the Sodales. [256] It is to the mysteries that the original meaning of the “Dragon-Slayers” has to be traced, and the question is fully treated of hereafter. Meanwhile it follows that, if Moses was the chief of the Mysteries, he was the Hierophant thereof, and further, if, at the same time, we find the prophets thundering against the “abominations” of the people of Israel, that there were two schools. “Fiery serpents” was, then, simply the epithet given to the Levites of the priestly caste, after they had departed from the good law, the traditional teachings of Moses: and to all those who followed Black Magic. Isaiah, when referring to the “rebellious children” who will have to carry their riches into the land whence come “the viper and fiery flying serpent” (xxx. 6), or Chaldea and Egypt, whose Initiates had already greatly degenerated in his day (700 B.C.), meant the sorcerers of those lands. [257] But these must be carefully distinguished from the “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Sons of the Fire Mist.” In the “Great Book of the Mysteries” we are told that: “Seven Lords created Seven men; three Lords (Dhyan Chohans or Pitris) were holy and good, four less heavenly and full of passion. . . . The chhayas (phantoms) of the Fathers were as they.” This accounts for the differences in human nature, which is divided into seven gradations of good and evil. There were seven tabernacles ready to be inhabited by Monads under seven different Karmic conditions. The Commentaries explain on this basis the easy spread of evil, as soon as the human Forms had become real men. Some ancient philosophers ignored the seven in their genetical accounts and gave only four. Thus the Mexican local Genesis has “four good men” described as the four real ancestors of the human race, “who were neither begotten by the gods nor born of woman”; but whose creation was a wonder wrought by the creative Powers, and who were made only after “three attempts at manufacturing men had failed.” The Egyptians had in their theology only “four sons of God,” whereas in Pymander seven are given — thus avoiding any mention of the evil nature of man; though when Seth from a god sank into Set-Typhon, he began to be called “the seventh son.” Whence probably arose the belief that “the seventh son of the seventh son” is always a natural-born magician, though, at first, only a sorcerer was meant. Apap, the serpent symbolizing evil, is slain by Aker, Set’s serpent; [258] therefore Set-Typhon could not be that evil. In the “Book of the Dead” it is commanded (v. 13) that chapter clxiii. should be read “in the presence of a serpent on two legs,” which means a high Initiate, a Hierophant, for the discus and ram’s horns [259] that adorn his “serpent’s” head in the hieroglyphics of the title of the said chapter denote this. Over the “serpent” are represented the two mystic eyes of Ammon, [260] the hidden “mystery god.” This passage corroborates our assertion, and shows what the word “serpent” meant in antiquity. But as to the Nagals and Nargals, whence came the similarity of names between the Indian Nagas and the American Nagals? “The Nargal was the Chaldean and Assyrian chief of the Magi (Rab-Mag), and the Nagal was the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from Nergal-Serezer, the Assyrian god, and the Hindu Nagas. Both have the same faculties and the power to have an attendant daemon, with whom they identify themselves completely. The Chaldean and Assyrian Nargal kept his daemon, in the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nagal keeps his wherever he can — in the neighbouring lake, or wood, or in the house in the shape of some household animal.” [261] Such similarity cannot be attributed to coincidence. A new world is discovered, and we find that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race, it was already an old one. That Arjuna, Krishna’s companion and chela, is said to have descended into Patala, the “antipodes,” and therein married Ulupi, [262] a Naga (or Nagini rather), the daughter of the king of the Nagas, Kauravya. [263] And now it may be hoped the full meaning of the serpent emblem is proven. It is neither that of evil, nor, least of all, that of the devil; but is , indeed, the [[SEMES EILAAM ABRASAX]] (“the eternal Sun-Abrasax”), the central spiritual sun of all the Kabalists, represented in some diagrams by the circle of Tiphereth. And here, again, we may quote from our earlier volumes and enter into further explanations. “From this region of unfathomable depth (Bythos, Aditi, Shekinah, the veil of the unknown) issues forth a circle formed of spirals. This is Tiphereth; which, in the language of symbolism, means a grand cycle, composed of smaller ones. Coiled within, so as to follow the spirals, lies the serpent — emblem of Wisdom and Eternity — the dual Androgyne; the cycle representing Ennoia, or the divine mind (a power which does not create but which must assimilate), and the serpent, the Agathodaemon, the Ophis, the Shadow of the Light (non-eternal, yet the greatest divine light on our plane). Both were the Logoi of the Ophites: or the Unity as Logos manifesting itself as a double principle of Good and Evil.” Were it light alone, inactive and absolute, the human mind could not appreciate nor even realise it. Shadow is that which enables light to manifest itself, and gives it objective reality. Therefore, shadow is not evil, but is the necessary and indispensable corollary which completes Light or Good: it is its creator on Earth. According to the views of the Gnostics, these two principles are immutable Light and Shadow, Good and Evil being virtually one and having existed through all eternity, as they will ever continue to exist so long as there are manifested worlds. This symbol accounts for the adoration by this sect of the Serpent, as the Saviour, coiled either around the sacramental loaf, or a Tau, the phallic emblem. As a Unity, Ennoia and Ophis are the Logos. When separated, one is the Tree of Life (spiritual), the other, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Therefore, we find Ophis urging the first human couple — the material production of Ilda-Baoth, but which owed its spiritual principle to Sophia-Achamoth — to eat of the forbidden fruit, although Ophis represents divine Wisdom. The serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, are all symbols transplanted from the soil of India. The Arasa-Maram, the banyan tree, so sacred with the Hindus (since Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences), is called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death. The Java-Aleim of the Sacerdotal College are said, in the Chaldean tradition, to have taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh-tchou, [264] who lives in his Foh-Maeyu, or temple of Buddha, on the top of the “Kouin-long-sang,” [265] the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung-Ming-Shu, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This marvellous display takes place every three years, when an immense concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy place. Now it may become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or the “Wise Men,” for whom it is claimed that they were initiated into the mysteries of nature by the universal mind, represented by the highest angels, were named the “Serpents of Wisdom” and “Dragons;” as also how the first physiologically complete couples — after being initiated into the mystery of human creation through Ophis, the manifested Logos and the androgyne, by eating of the fruit of knowledge — gradually began to be accused by the material spirit of posterity of having committed Sin, of having disobeyed the “Lord God,” and of having been tempted by the Serpent. So little have the first Christians (who despoiled the Jews of their Bible) understood the first four chapters of Genesis in their esoteric meaning, that they never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that actually the “Serpent” was “the Lord God” himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn. [266] They never realised that the Cross was an evolution from the “tree and the serpent,” and thus became the salvation of mankind. By this it would become the very first fundamental symbol of Creative cause, applying to geometry, to numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction. According to the Kabala the curse on man came with the formation of woman. [267] The circle was separated from its diameter line. “From the possession of the double principle in one, that is the Androgyne condition, the separation of the dual principle was made, presenting two opposites, whose destiny it was, for ever after, to seek reunion into the original one condition. The curse was this, viz.: that nature, impelling the search, evaded the desired result by the production of a new being, distinct from that reunion or oneness desired, by which the natural longing to recover a lost state was and is for ever being cheated. It is by this tantalizing process of a continued curse that Nature lives.” [268] (Vide “Cross and Circle,” Part II.) The allegory of Adam being driven
away from the “Tree of Life” means, esoterically, that the newly
separated Race abused and dragged the mystery of Life down into the
region of animalism and bestiality. For, as the Zohar
shows, that Matronethah (Shekinah, the wife of Metatron
symbolically) “is the way to the great Tree of Life, the Mighty
Tree,” and Shekinah is divine grace. As explained: This Tree reaches
the heavenly vale and is hidden between three mountains (the upper
triad of principles, in man). From these three mountains, the Tree
ascends above (the adept’s knowledge aspires heavenward) and then
redescends below (into the adept’s Ego on Earth). This Tree
is revealed in the day time and is hidden during the night, i.e.,
revealed to an enlightened mind and hidden to Ignorance, which is
night. (See Zohar I., 172, a and b.) “The
Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots
of the Tree of Life.” (Comm.) But then also: “In the Kabala it is
plainly to be found that “the ‘Tree of Life’ was the ansated cross in its sexual
aspect, and that the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ was the separation
and the coming together again to fulfil the fatal condition. To
display this in numbers the values of the letters composing the word
Otz ( This is the Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from the more philosophical Eastern or Aryan views upon this subject. [270] The separation of the sexes was in the programme of nature and of natural evolution; and the creative faculty in male and female was a gift of Divine wisdom. In the truth of such traditions the whole of antiquity, from the patrician philosopher to the humblest spiritually inclined plebeian, has believed. And as we proceed, we may successfully show that the relative truth of such legends, if not their absolute exactness — vouched for by such giants of intellect as were Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, and others — begins to dawn upon more than one modern scientist. He is perplexed; he stands startled and confused before proofs that are being daily accumulated before him; he feels that there is no way of solving the many historical problems that stare him in the face, unless he begins by accepting ancient traditions. Therefore, in saying that we believe absolutely in ancient records and universal legends, we need hardly plead guilty before the impartial observer, for other and far more learned writers, among those who belong to the modern scientific school, evidently believe in much that the Occultists do: e.g., in “Dragons,” not only symbolically, but also in their actual existence at one time. “It would have indeed been a bold step for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, believed to be time-honoured fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events. Nowadays it is a less hazardous proceeding. . . . .” Thus opens the introduction to a recent (1886) and most interesting work by Mr. Charles Gould, called “Mythical Monsters.” He boldly states his belief in most of these monsters. He submits that: — “Many of the so-called mythical animals, which, throughout long ages and in all nations, have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact natural history; and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time. . . . Traditions of creatures once co-existing with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible. For me the major part of those creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature evolved out of the imagination of an Aryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew. . . . . To me the specific existence of the Unicorn seems not incredible, and in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its origin to a lunar myth [271] . . . For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from ‘the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature.’ It seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the utterance of these oft-told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognisable, than that uncultured savages should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the present day; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions are transformations than to believe them to be inventions.” [272] It is shown by the same geologist that man, “successively traced to periods variously estimated from thirty thousand to one million years . . . . . , co-existed with animals which have long since become extinct (p. 20).” These animals, “weird and terrible,” were, to give a few instances — (1) “Of the genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebrae show them to have attained a length of nearly two hundred feet . . . . . .” The remains of such monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length; (3) the Dinosaurians (in the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains), of still more gigantic proportions; (4) the Atlanto-Saurus immanis, a femur of which alone is over six feet in length, and which would be thus over one hundred feet in length! But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the discovery of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh-bone over twelve feet in length (p. 37). Then we read of the monstrous Sivatherium in the Himalayas, the four-horned stag, as large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic Megatherium: of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with crocodile jaws on a duck’s head, etc., etc. All these were co-existent with man, most probably attacked man, as man attacked them; and we are asked to believe that the said man was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that, surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a gigantic flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one great man of science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why man should not have been “contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and go back as far as the Secondary Period.” [273] “It appears,” writes the very conservative Professor Jukes, “that the flying dragons of romance had something like a real existence in former ages of the world.” [274] “Does the written history of man,” the author goes on to ask, “comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and China, shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from others which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization;” (p. 17). The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants, themselves smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons, and Hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely with every day. Even they have already had a few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in size in the same proportion as men did. For the remains of a pigmy elephant were found (E. Falconeri) in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were associated with the remains of pigmy Hippopotami, the former being “only two feet six inches high; or the still-existing Hippopotamus (Choeropsis) Liberiensis, which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height.” [275] Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that “the things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically speaking, to the things that are unknown”; [276] and thus they laugh only at their own ignorance. The “Sons of God” and the “Sacred Island.” The legend given in Isis in relation to a portion of the globe which science now concedes to have been the cradle of humanity — though it is but one of the seven cradles, in truth — ran, condensed, and now explained, as follows: —
“The last remnant” meant the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” who, with a few tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it is the Third Race which inhabited the great Lemurian continent, that preceded the veritable and complete human races — the fourth and the fifth. Therefore it was said in Isis that —
The “Island,” according to belief, exists to the present hour; now, as an oasis surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Desert, the Gobi — whose sands “no foot hath crossed in the memory of man.”
Tradition asserts, and archaeology accepts the truth of the legend that there is more than one city now flourishing in India, which is built on several other cities, making thus a subterranean city of six or seven stories high. Delhi is one of them; Allahabad another — examples of this being found even in Europe; e.g., in Florence, which is built on several defunct Etruscan and other cities. Why, then, could not Ellora, Elephanta, Karli, and Ajunta have been built on subterranean labyrinths and passages, as claimed? Of course we do not allude to the caves which are known to every European, whether de visu or through hearsay, notwithstanding their enormous antiquity, though that is so disputed by modern archaeology. But it is a fact, known to the Initiated Brahmins of India and especially to Yogis, that there is not a cave-temple in the country but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and that those underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn their caves and corridors.
we went on to ask. It did exist most assuredly, as it was fast approaching its greatest days of glory and civilization when the last of the Lemurian continents went down.
In other words, they were the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first who had a dynasty of Spirit-Kings, not of Manes, or “ghosts,” as some believe (See “Pneumatologie”), but of actual living Devas (or demi-gods or Angels, again) who had assumed bodies to rule over them, and who, in their turn, instructed them in arts and sciences. Only, as they were rupa or material Spirits, these Dhyanis were not always good. Their King Thevetata was one of the latter, and it is under the evil influence of this King-Demon that . . . . the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians.
We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and traditions. In the “Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus,” the author says: —
This last tradition corroborates the one given from the “Records of the Secret Doctrine.” The war mentioned between the yellow and the black men, relates to a struggle between the “sons of God” and the “sons of giants,” or the inhabitants and magicians of Atlantis. The final conclusion of the author, who personally visited all the islands of Polynesia, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows:
Geographically, this description clashes slightly with the facts in the Secret Records; but it shows the existence of such traditions, and this is all one cares for. For, as there is no smoke without fire, so a tradition must be based on some approximate truth. In its proper place we will show modern Science fully corroborating the above and the traditions of the Secret Doctrine with regard to the two lost continents. The Easter Island relics are, for instance, the most astounding and eloquent memorials of the primeval giants. They are as grand as they are mysterious; and one has but to examine the heads of the colossal statues, that have remained unbroken on that island, to recognise in them at a glance the features of the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race giants. They seem of one cast though different in features — that of a distinctly sensual type, such as the Atlanteans (the Daityas and “Atalantians”) are represented to have in the esoteric Hindu books. Compare these with the faces of some other colossal statues in Central Asia — those near Bamian for instance — the portrait-statues, tradition tells us, of Buddhas belonging to previous Manvantaras; of those Buddhas and heroes who are mentioned in the Buddhist and Hindu works, as men of fabulous size, [281] the good and holy brothers of their wicked co-uterine brothers generally, as Ravana, the giant King of Lanka was the brother of Kumbhakarna; all descendants of the gods through the Rishis, and thus, like “Titan and his enormous brood,” all “heaven’s first born.” These “Buddhas,” though often spoilt by the symbolical representation of the great pendent ears, show a suggestive difference, perceived at a glance, between the expression of their faces and that of the Easter Isle statues. They may be of one race — but the former are “Sons of Gods”; the latter the brood of mighty sorcerers. All these are re-incarnations, however, and apart from unavoidable exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are historical characters. [282] When did they live? How long ago lived the two races, the Third and Fourth, and how long after did the various tribes of the Fifth begin their strife, the wars between Good and Evil? We are assured by the Orientalists that chronology is both hopelessly mixed and absurdly exaggerated in the Puranas and other Hindu Scriptures. We feel quite prepared to agree with the accusation. Yet, if Aryan writers did allow their chronological pendulum to swing too far one way occasionally, beyond the legitimate limit of fact; nevertheless, when the distance of that deviation is compared with the distance of the Orientalists’ deviation in the opposite direction, moderation will be found on the Brahminical side. It is the Pundit who will in the long run be found more truthful and nearer to fact than the Sanskritist. Surely, it is not because the curtailing of the latter — even when proven to have been resorted to in order to fit a personal hobby — is regarded by Western public opinion as “a cautious acceptance of facts,” whereas the Pundit is brutally treated in print as a liar, that everyone has to see this in the same light. An impartial observer may judge it otherwise. He may either proclaim both unscrupulous historians, or justify both, each on his respective ground, and say: Hindu Aryans wrote for their Initiates, who read truth between the lines, not for the masses. If they did mix up events and confuse Ages intentionally, it was not in view of deceiving any one, but to preserve their knowledge from the prying eye of the foreigner. Otherwise, to him who can count the generations from the Manus, and the series of incarnations specified in the cases of some heroes, [283] the meaning and chronological order are very clear in the Puranas. As for the Western Orientalist, he must be excused, on account of his undeniable ignorance of the methods used by archaic Esotericism. But such existing prejudices will have to give way and disappear very soon before the light of new discoveries. Already Dr. Weber’s and Mr. Max Muller’s favourite theories — namely, that writing was not known in India, even in the days of Panini (!); that the Hindus had all their arts and sciences — even to the Zodiac and their architecture (Ferguson) — from the Macedonian Greeks; these and other such cock-and-bull hypotheses, are threatened with ruin. It is the ghost of old Chaldea that comes to the rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert lecture (1887) Professor Sayce of Oxford, speaking of newly-discovered Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, referred at length to Ea, the God of Wisdom, now identified with the Oannes, of Berosus, the half-man, half-fish, who taught the Babylonians culture and the art of writing. This Oannes, to whom, thanks only to the Biblical Deluge, an antiquity of hardly 1,500 B.C. had been hitherto allowed, is now spoken of in these terms: —
Muslin, best known now as Dacca muslin, known in Chaldea as Hindu (Sindhu), and teak wood used 4,000 years B.C.; and yet the Hindus, to whom Chaldea owes its civilization (as well proven by Colonel vans Kennedy), were ignorant of the art of writing before the Greeks taught them their alphabet — if we have to believe Orientalists! STANZA X. THE HISTORY OF THE FOURTH RACE.
38. Thus two by two, on the seven zones, the Third (Race) gave birth to the Fourth (Race men). The gods became no-gods (Sura became a-Sura) (a). 39. The First (Race) on every zone was moon-coloured (yellow-white); the Second, yellow, like gold; the Third, red; the Fourth, brown, which became black with sin. [284] The first seven (human) shoots were all of one complexion in the beginning. The next (seven, the sub-races) began mixing their colours (b). (a) To understand this verse 38, it must be read together with the three verses of Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical than physical nature. It is only after the so-called Fall, that the races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. And, in order that he may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall, so mystic and transcendental is it in its real significance, the student must be told at once the details which preceded this event; of which event modern theology has formed a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs are made to turn. The archaic commentaries explain, as the reader must remember, that, of the Host of Dhyanis, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless monads — that some “obeyed” (the law of evolution) immediately when the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent Divine purity, created by Kriyasakti the semi-Divine man, who became the seed on earth for future adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom (unfettered as it then was by the bonds of matter), said: — “We can choose . . . we have wisdom” (See verse 24), and incarnated far later — these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies (physiologically) inferior to their astral models, because their chhayas had belonged to progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who had “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, they produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for aeons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination. (See verses 32, 36.) This was the “Fall of the angels,” because of their rebellion against Karmic Law. The “fall of man” was no fall, for he was irresponsible. But “Creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the “prerogative of God alone,” the legitimate attribute patented by theology in the name of an infinite deity of their own making, this power had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as an usurpation of divine rights. Thus, the foregoing, in the light of such narrow views, must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the image of God,” a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the Occultists were already told, “makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first.” “Why did you make of your god a devil — both, moreover, created in your own image?” is our reply. The esoteric interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches — more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists. The old doctrine about the true meaning of the “Fallen Angels,” in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabala, and explains the Bible. It is found pre-eminent in Genesis when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In Genesis (vi.) the “Sons of God” — B’ne Aleim — become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of Angels.” [285] But what is, in reality, the “Book of Enoch” itself, from which the author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel have so profusely quoted? (e.g., verse 8, in chapter 10, about all who have come before Jesus, being “thieves and robbers.”) Simply a Book of Initiation, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain archaic mysteries performed in the inner temples. The author of the “Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches” very justly suggests that the so-called “Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch’s) experience at initiation, and what he learned in the mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity (!!); furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the beginning of the Christian era, when . . . the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude quotes in his epistle from the “Book of Enoch” (verse 14); and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the Book of Enoch from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a writer who lived after . . . or was even coeval with” the writers of the New Testament: unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, was also a production of the already established Church — which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the “fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself. In Indian exotericism, these angels (Asuras) are also denounced as “the enemies of the gods;” those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the latter. In Christian theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends about them, gathered from Pagan sources. The coluber tortuosus “the tortuous snake,” a qualification said to have originated with the Jews, had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it: — among others, a purely astronomical meaning. The “Serpent” fallen from on high, “deorsum fluens,” was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead, [[tou thanatus arche]], to that day, when Jesus saw it “falling like lightning from heaven” (Luke x. 17, 18), the Roman Catholic interpretation of cadebat ut fulgur to the contrary, notwithstanding; and it means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the Logos — who is Wisdom, but who, as the opponent of ignorance, is Satan or Lucifer at the same time. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and quickening the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of Mahat, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life, humanity — if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state —was of course doomed to moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the Logos, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or logos, may be said to have saved those who believed in the secret teachings from “eternal death,” to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This in the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also because the logos is Christos, that principle of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego — the Higher-Self — being formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi (the sixth) and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth principle. [286] “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and Conscious, Self-Active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of “Heavenly man” with the “Virgin of the World” — Nature, as described in Pymander; the result of which is their progeny — immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John’s Revelation the marriage of the lamb with his bride. (xix. 7.) That “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her linen may be fine and white outwardly (like the “whitened sepulchre”), but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not “the righteousness of Saints” (v. 8. ibid), but rather the blood of the Saints she has “slain upon the earth” (chap. xviii. 24.) Thus the remark made by the great Initiate (in Luke x. 18) — one that referred allegorically to the ray of Enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to that old wisdom-religion then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept [287] — was distorted out of recognition (as was his own personality), and made to fit in with one of the most cruel as the most pernicious of all theological dogmas. (Vide at the end of Stanza XI. “Satanic Myths.”) But if Western theology alone holds the patent for, and copyright of Satan — in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction — other nationalities and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of this tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. For they have both disfigured and hinted at the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories touching the subject. Nor have the semi-esoteric dogmas of Puranic Hinduism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen gods. The Puranas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parasara (Vishnu Purana), to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumaras and Munis, having to be born in every age, to re-incarnate in every Manvantara. This (esoterically) is equivalent to saying that the flames born of the Universal Mind (Mahat), owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and an impulse of Evolutionary Law, had, as in Pymander — without any gradual transition — landed on this Earth, having broken through the seven Circles of fire, or the seven intermediate Worlds, in short. There is an eternal cyclic law of re-births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric dawn by those who had enjoyed their rest from re-incarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable AEons — by the highest and the earliest Nirvanees. It was the turn of those “Gods” to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning. [288] The Gods who had fallen into generation, whose mission it was to complete divine man, are found represented later on as Demons, evil Spirits, and fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one Eternal law. But no conception of such creatures as the devils and Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahomedan religions was ever intended under those thousand and one Aryan allegories. [289] (See “The Fallen Angels” and “The Mystic Dragons” in Part II.) The true esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by the whole philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford’s “Perfect Way.” No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length: — “1. And on the seventh day (seventh creation of the Hindus), [290] there went forth from the presence of God a mighty Angel, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere. [291] 2. “Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.” [292] 4. “Among the Gods is none like unto him, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:” 5. “Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings, [293] the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumph of Time.” For, as is said in Hermes, “Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King; he standeth in Solomon’s porch; he holdeth the key of the Sanctuary, that no man enter therein, save the Anointed having the arcanum of Hermes” (v. 20 and 21). These suggestive and majestic verses had reference with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity to the creative and generative light of the Logos (Horus, Brahma, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., as primeval manifestations of the ever-unmanifested Principle, e.g., Ain-Soph, Parabrahm, or Zeruana Akerne — Boundless Time — Kala), but the meaning is now degraded in the Kabala. The “Anointed,” who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes (Buddha, Wisdom), and who alone is entrusted with the key to the “Sanctuary,” the Womb of nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos, has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of generation” on the lunar mountain (Sinai, the mountain of the moon, “Sin”). The “Sanctuary” has become the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphised and phallicised and dragged down into matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the Serpent of Genesis: of the conscious god who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the ceaseless pulse and current of desire” refer, the first one, to our doctrine of Karmic and cyclic rebirths, the second — to Eros, not the later god of material, physiological love, but to the divine desire in the gods, as well as in all nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one “dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, Flame could achieve only by themselves descending into matter. Therefore, as continued in the Appendix: 12. “Many names hath God given him (Satan), names of mystery, secret and terrible.” 13. “The Adversary, because matter opposeth Spirit. Time accuseth even the Saints of the Lord.” 28, 29, 31. “Stand in awe of him, and sin not; speak his name with trembling . . . . For Satan is the magistrate of the justice of God (Karma); he beareth the balance and the sword . . . . For to him are committed Weight and Measure and Number.” Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabala to Prince Al-Chazari in the Book of that name, says; and it will be found that the Weight and Measure and Number are, in Sepher Jezirah, the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim, or figures, ciphers) covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” or the Logos. Thus Satan and the anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore, 33. “Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades” . . . . The seven or Saptaloka of the Earth with the Hindus; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of which theology makes a region bordering on Hell, is simply our globe, the Earth, and thus Satan is called — 33 “. . . . the angel of the manifest Worlds.” It is “Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god,” and this without any allusive metaphor to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos, “the first son, eldest of the gods,” in the order of microcosmic (divine) evolution; Saturn (Satan), astronomically, “is the seventh and last in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the kingdom of which Phoebus (the light of wisdom, also the Sun) is the centre.” The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish god “an angel of matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and he whose planet was Saturn. 34. “And God hath put a girdle about his loins (the rings of Saturn), and the name of the girdle is Death.” In anthropogony this “girdle” is the human body with its two lower principles, which three die, while the innermost man is immortal. And now we approach the “Secret of Satan.” 37, 38, 39. “ . . . Upon Satan only is the shame of generation. He hath lost his virginal estate (so hath the Kumara by incarnating): uncovering heavenly secrets, he hath entered into bondage . . . . He compasseth with bonds and limits all things. . . .” 42, 43, 44. “Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss (the manifested world) the legions of Satan. These are the unmanifest and the manifest; the free and the bound (in matter): the virginal and the fallen. And both are the Ministers of the Father, fulfilling the word Divine. . . .” Therefore — 55. “Holy is the Sabbath of god: blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of Havas” — Satan. For, “The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord”: God in the manifested world; “the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai” — that footstool being the whole Kosmos. (Vide Part II., “Is Pleroma Satan’s Lair?”) When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the cosmic reflection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in matter or in the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever-incomprehensible Wisdom, revealing itself as Light and Shadow, good and evil in nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited intellect of Man. This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the adversary in the Kabala; the same tenets and spirit being found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with it. We say “historical,” because allegory and a mythical ornamentation around the kernel of tradition, in no wise prevent that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the Kabala, repeating the time-honoured revelations of the once universal history of our globe and the evolution of its races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which have formed the Bible. Its historical foundation is now offered, in however imperfect a form, on these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus the allegorical and symbolical meaning of the Serpent of Genesis is found explained by the “Sons of Wisdom” (or angels from higher spheres, though all and each pertain to the kingdom of Satan, or Matter) revealing to men the mysteries of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so-called myths of the Hindu, Grecian, Chaldean, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The giants of Genesis are the historical Atlanteans of Lanka, and the Greek Titans. Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer a non-existing personage, while the existence of such cities as Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends? Yet Schliemann proved that Troy had really existed, and the two cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the earth. How many more cities and localities called “fabulous” are on the list of future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical [294] will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees of Fate in the astral light. As the tenets of the Eastern doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for one thing, read carefully the opening pages of the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus; and then he will see our doctrines corroborated in it, however veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the Universe, of our Earth (called “Nature” in Pymander) as of everything else, from the “Moyst Principle” — or the great Deep, Father-Mother — the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos. First the “Universal Mind,” which the hand of the Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father: then the “Heavenly Man,” [295] which is the great Total of that Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior worlds or of the men of our globe, but which fell nevertheless into matter by virtue of that same evolution, as the second logos of the “Father.” [296] Synthetically every Creative Logos, or “the Son who is one with the Father,” is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian theology makes of the seven “Angels of the Presence” the Virtues, or the personified attributes of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahma, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic theodice itself recognising, in its creative Verbum Princeps, the head of those angels — caput angelorum — and the magni consilii Angelus (the Angel of the great Counsel), thus recognizes the identity of Christ and those Angels. “The Gods became no-Gods, the Sura — A-sura,” says the text; i.e., gods became fiends — Satan, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, allegorized as Good, and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names. The Kabala teaches that Pride and Presumption — the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism — are the causes that emptied heaven of one third of its divine denizens — mystically, and of one third of the stars — astronomically; in other words, the two statements are — the first an allegory, and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, as shown, is intimately connected with humanity. In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of creation was due to, and the result of, that legendary “War in Heaven” brought on by the rebellion of the angels [297] against creative law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty by appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy — is to say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient to believers in the Pope’s infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth, although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and symbologists, showed an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither alchemist nor philosopher could, during the Mediaeval Ages, utter that [298] which in the sight of orthodox theology was a terrible blasphemy, for it would have led them directly through the “Holy” office of the Inquisition, to stake and rack. But for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected and as ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manichaeism, invented the devil, and by placing a theological extinguisher on the radiant star-god, Lucifer, the “Son of the Morning,” thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes — a black and tenebrous light — the myth has struck its roots too deep in the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas and laugh at her horned and cloven-footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi-exoterically, the “First-born” of the Almighty — Fiat Lux, — or the angels of primordial light, were commanded to create; one third of them rebelled and refused; while those who “obeyed as Fetahil did — failed” most signally. To realise the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and understand Eastern philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedantins, with regard to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the infinite and absolute deity. Esoteric philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyas, the “Central Sun” emits creative light — passively so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of creating, or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent beings — who became collectively a Being or creative God — differentiated already from the one absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned creation. [299] Now the Vatican MSS. of the Kabala — a single copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain — contains the most complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians [300] and other Gnostics; and in that parchment the Seven Suns of Life are given in the order they are found in the Saptasurya. Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions of the Kabala which are procurable in the public libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyan-Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Aryans. As is well known, the Kabala never originated with the Jews, who got their ideas from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. Thus even the now exoteric Kabalistic teachings speak of a Central Sun, and of three secondary suns in each solar system — our own included. As shown in that able though too materialistic work, “New Aspects of Life and Religion,” which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect deeply thought out and assimilated: —
This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the seven Suns with the seven systems of planes of being, of which the “Suns” are the central bodies, and you have the seven angelic planes, whose “Host” are gods thereof, collectively. (See Comm. to Stanza VII. Book I.) They are the Head-group divided into four classes from the incorporeal down to the semi-corporeal, which classes are directly connected — though in very different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions — with our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth (the first and highest), which is called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the Aryan Cosmogony; one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of nature; the other spiritualizes matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh principle reaches man through all the phases of being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes through (the Kabala teaches from) the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the second (the polar Sun), which two radiate on man his Atma. Group Three (the equatorial Sun) cement the Buddhi to Atman and the higher attributes of Manas, while group Four (the spirit of our visible sun) endows him with his Manas and its vehicle — the Kama rupa, or body of passions and desires, the two elements of Ahamkara which evolve individualized consciousness — the personal ego. Finally, it is the spirit of the Earth in its triple unity that builds the physical body, attracting to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sarira. Now, as everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything else, the order in which he is generated is described fully in the Eastern teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the Kabala. Says the Book of Dzyan with regard to primeval man when first projected by the “Boneless,” the incorporeal Creator: “First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow-Son (the Body) were ‘created.’ But where was the pivot (the middle principle, Manas)? Man is doomed. When alone, the indiscrete (undifferentiated Element) and the Vahan (Buddhi) — the cause of the causeless — break asunder from manifested life” — “unless cemented and held together by the middle principle, the vehicle of the personal consciousness of Jiva”; explains the Commentary. In other words, the two higher principles can have no individuality on Earth, cannot be man, unless there is (a) the Mind, the Manas-Ego, to cognize itself, and (b) the terrestrial false personality, or the body of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round a pivot (which it is, truly), to the physical form of man. It is the Fifth and the Fourth principles [302] — Manas and Kama rupa — that contain the dual personality: the real immortal Ego (if it assimilates itself to the two higher) and the false and transitory personality, the mayavi or astral body, so-called, or the animal-human Soul — the two having to be closely blended for purposes of a full terrestrial existence. Incarnate the Spiritual Monad of a Newton grafted on that of the greatest saint on earth — in a physical body the most perfect you can think of — i.e., in a two or even a three-principled body composed of its Sthula Sarira, prana (life principle), and linga sarira — and, if it lacks its middle and fifth principles, you will have created an idiot — at best a beautiful, soul-less, empty and unconscious appearance. “Cogito — ergo sum” — can find no room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate. There are students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning underlying the allegory — so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church — of the Fallen Angels. “The Kingdom of Spirits and spiritual action which flows from and is the product of Spirit Volition, is outside and contrasted with and in contradiction to the Kingdom of (divine) Souls and divine action.” [303] As said in the text: — “Like produces like and no more at the genesis of being, and evolution with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self-Existent [304] are called Creations, for they appear in the Spirit Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in its unborn Nature, which is beyond time and (limited or conditioned) Space. Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and creatures: they are the development (evolution) of the discrete elements.” (Com. xiv.) Again: — “The Heavenly rupa (Dhyan Chohan) creates (man) in his own form; it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal (manifested) Substance; that form is the ideal shadow of Itself: and this is the man of the first race.” To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this earth only, it was the duty of the first “differentiated Egos” — the Church calls them Archangels — to imbue primordial matter with the evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition — “the Angels were commanded to create.” After the Earth had been made ready by the lower and more material powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be “fruitful and multiply,” the higher powers, the Archangels or Dhyanis, were compelled by the evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution — man. Thus the “Self-created” and the “Self-existent” projected their pale shadows; but group the Third, the Fire-Angels, rebelled and refused to join their Fellow Devas. Hindu exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them to refuse creating, as they desired to remain eternally Kumaras, “Virgin Youths,” in order to, if possible, anticipate their fellows in progress towards Nirvana — the final liberation. But, agreeably to esoteric interpretation, it was a self-sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The “Rebels” would not create will-less irresponsible men, as the “obedient” angels did; nor could they endow human beings with only the temporary reflections of their own attributes; for even the latter, belonging to another and a so-much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of a higher progress. No spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on earth — the lowest and most material plane — for one who on that plane, at all events, is inherently perfect and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Man remaining the pale shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless perfection, the one negative and passive attribute of the real I am that I am, would have been doomed to pass through life on earth as in a heavy dreamless sleep; hence a failure on this plane. The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first (if ever) pronounced the cruel words, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live for ever . . . ” must have been indeed the Ilda-baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature, whose reflection created Ophiomorphos. In this case it is but natural — even from the dead letter standpoint — to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the “Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah, as alleged; and he who was the first to whisper: “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil” — can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “adversary” to Jehovah the “personating spirit,” he still remains in esoteric truth the ever-loving “Messenger” (the angel), the Seraphim and Cherubim who both knew well, and loved still more, and who conferred on us spiritual, instead of physical immortality — the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew.” As narrated in King’s “Gnostics,” “Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit, he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man, but this one proved a failure. It was a monster, soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda-Baoth was forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his own creature. Following the impulse of the divine light, man soared higher and higher in his aspirations; very soon he began presenting not the image of his creator Ilda-Baoth but rather that of the Supreme Being, the ‘primitive man,’ Ennoia. Then the Demiurgos was filled with rage and envy; and fixing his jealous eye on the abyss of matter, his looks envenomed with passion were suddenly reflected as in a mirror; the reflection became animate, and there arose out of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos — ‘the embodiment of envy and cunning. He is the union of all that is most base in matter, with the hate, envy, and craft of a spiritual intelligence.’ ” This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead letter text of chapter iii. of Genesis. Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of animals on earth into a potential god, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Il-da-Baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never-dying, singeing fire and flames of an extinguishable hell. Two poles, yet the same idea; the dual aspect of a refined torture: a fire producer — the personified emblem of [[Phosphoros]] of the astral fire and light in the anima mundi — (that element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne phosphor kein gedanke,” i.e., without phosphorus no thought), burning in the fierce flames of his terrestrial passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart — a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious, hence a responsible entity. [305] The curse of life is great, yet how few are those men, outside some Hindu and Sufi mystics, who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) incorporeal being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahma during his “night’s” rest. For, to quote from an able article by one [306] who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim to it: — “Satan, or Lucifer, represents the active, or, as M. Jules Baissac calls it, the ‘Centrifugal Energy of the Universe’ in a cosmic sense. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is pain, which is the Re-action of the pleasure of action, and death — which is the revolution of life — Satan, burning in his own hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum — the expansive disintegration of the nebulae which is to concentrate into new worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the eternal Inertia of the passive energy of the Kosmos — the inexorable ‘I AM’ — the flint from which the sparks are beaten out. Fitly is he . . . and his adherents . . . consigned to the ‘sea of fire,’ because it is the Sun (in one sense only in the Cosmic allegory), the fount of life in our system, where they are purified (disintegrated) and churned up to re-arrange them for another life (the resurrection); that Sun which, as the origin of the active principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan. . . .” To demonstrate furthermore the accuracy of Baissac’s general theory (in Le Diable et Satan) cold is known to have a ‘Centripetal’ effect. “Under the influence of cold everything contracts. . . . Under it life hybernates, or dies out, thought congeals, and fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-Sea — it is only in the ‘Nifl-heim’ (the cold Hell of the Scandinavian Eddas) of the ‘I AM’ that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of Immortal Existence in the Nifl-heim, and that existence must be painless and peaceful, because it is Unconscious and Inactive. In the Kingdom of Jehovah (if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him) there is no Misery, no War, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness. [307] All is absorbed in the spirit of the most Powerful. It is emphatically a kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission as that of the ‘Arch-Rebel’ is one of War and Revolution. . . . . It (the former) is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvana. But then Theosophy teaches that separation from the Primal Source having once occurred, Re-union can only be achieved by Will — Effort — which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.” It is “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil — to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyans-Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal god — that men can reach Nirvana and the haven of heavenly divine Peace. To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumaras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom Michael and Gabriel, the Archangels, both belong), the divine “Rebels” — called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived” — preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery (even if unconscious) of the beings (evolved as shadows out of their Brethren) through the semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,” [308] before he can do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogis offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity — created god-like and perfect at first — and to endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status and, descending on our globe, take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahayuga, thus exchanging their impersonal individualities for individual personalities — the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love, was construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the rebel angels hurled down from heaven into the darkness of Hell” — our Earth. Hindu philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras hurled down by Siva, are only in an intermediate state in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian theology, claiming to be based on the rock of divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour — has invented, to enforce that claim paradoxically, the dreary dogma of hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy. As to Rabbinical Wisdom — than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries — it calls these Beings, the “Evil One;” and the Kabalists — Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls, that have thrown themselves, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One, into an abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on earth. (Zohar iii., 61, C.) And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar and the Kabala in their right interpretation — for the latter is ours — but only with the gross, pseudo-esoteric explanations of the later, and especially those of the Christian Kabalists. “Our earth and man,” says the Commentary, “being the products of the three Fires” — whose three names answer, in Sanskrit, to “the electric fire, the Solar fire, and the fire produced by friction,” — these three fires, explained on the Cosmic and human planes, are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and become — according to their applications — the upadhis and the vehicles, or the noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimanim, the eldest son of Brahma, the Cosmic Logos, by Swaha, one of Daksha’s [309] daughters. In the metaphysical sense the “Fire of friction” means the Union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth, principles, which thus are united or cemented together; the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the monad; in the physical, it relates to the creative spark, or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, it is said (whose names are Pavaka, Pavamana and Suchi) were condemned by a curse of Vasishta, the great sage, “to be born over and over again.” (Bhagavata-Purana iv. 24, 4.) This is clear enough. Therefore, the FLAMES, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajapati, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumaras, [310] etc. etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric doctrine they are generally named the Asuras, or the Asu-ra Devata or Pitar-devata (gods) for, as said, they were first Gods — and the highest — before they became “no-gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of the Earth [311] — exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma. No Theologian, any more than an Orientalist, can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajapati, the Manus, and the Rishis, nor the direct connection of these — or their correlation rather — with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all the Nations originally had in common. All these gods and demi-gods are found reborn on earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause. Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as seen, absolutely necessary to show that the sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure and more so than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the churches. The “old Book” goes into various details of Astral life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It may, therefore, be left for later explanations, and the First and Second Races can now only receive bare notice. Not so for the Third Race — the Root-Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason. Men evolving pari passu with the globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred million of years before — the first human sub-race had already begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it: “the inner man (the conscious Entity) was not.” This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is, the very entire essence and esse of the high Intelligences condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this manvantara. (b) This verse (thirty-ninth) relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, esoteric philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its forefathers or “Creators” were all divine beings — though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their hierarchy — men were nevertheless born on seven different centres of the continent of that period. Though all of one common origin, yet for reasons given their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different. [312] As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purana. The Kumara — the Rudra gods, so called (see further), are described as incarnations of Siva, the destroyer (of outward forms), named also Vamadeva. The latter, as a Kumara, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin youth, springs from Brahma in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human races, as regards complexion and type — and three chief variations of these. Thus in the 29th Kalpa — in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form which Siva ever destroys and remodels periodically, down to the manvantaric great turning point about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race — in the 29th Kalpa, Siva, as Swetalohita, the root Kumara, becomes, from moon-coloured, white; in his next transformation — he is red (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric teaching); in the third — yellow; in the fourth — black. Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval races — as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and hardly an objective, though colossal form. The evolution of these races, their formation and development, went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of those zones. It names three great divisions, namely, the red-yellow, the black, and the brown-white. [313] The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock — the Fifth Root-Race — and spring from one single progenitor, called in Hindu exotericism by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu: the latter, remember, being that generic personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago — at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis [314] (See the Root and Seed Manus further on), and who is said to live even now in his mankind. (Vide at the end of this Stanza, “The Primeval Manus of Humanity.”) The light yellow is the colour of the first solid human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root Race (after its fall into generation — as just explained), bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Siva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red-yellow (the red Indians and the Mongolians being the descendants of these) and finally into Brown-white races — which now, together with the yellow Races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purana is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients. When reading of “the last transformation,” let the reader consider at this juncture, if that took place 18,000,000 years ago, how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage? And if man, in his gradual consolidation, developed pari passu with the earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race? For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state; the archaic teachings, moreover, telling us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of man, the Earth, man, and everything on the Globe was of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our dematerialization, as the spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then — aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15, or 20,000,000 years ago, does not square with Geology, which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc., etc., that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palaeozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by geology to those “oldest palaezoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves (of carbonic acid apparently, as science seems to imply) break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral, i.e., viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily mean as thin as smoke, in occult phraseology, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: How could an astral Earth have affected the other planets in this system? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one planet was suddenly removed? The objection is evidently invalid, since our system is composed of older and younger planets, some dead (like the moon), others in process of formation, for all astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our system have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis-Himalayan secret teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindu Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is eighteen million and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as physical, or approximately physical, man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root-Race. Beyond that period man, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300 million years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in “Esoteric Buddhism.” Moreover, whereas the Hindu Puranas speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one. (Vide supra). We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man. Archaic Teachings in the Puranas and Genesis. Physical Evolution. The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and Anthropogony as described actually existed, that its records are preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of ancient Scriptures. The Puranas on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, read esoterically and expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes is, that the Puranas, giving as much, and perhaps more attention to the causes than to the effects, allude to the pre-Cosmic and pre-Genetic periods rather than to those of so-called Creation, whereas the Bible, saying only a few words of the former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while nearly skipping the pre-Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race. Now, whatever the onslaught made on the Order of creation in Genesis, and its dead letter account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism, [315] he who reads the Hindu Puranas — its allegorical exaggerations notwithstanding — will find them quite in accordance with physical Science. Even what appears to be the, on the face of it, perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahma assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds in the Secret Commentaries a perfectly scientific explanation, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, and the constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our globe; for Science teaches us now that nine-tenths of the stratified formations of the earth’s crust have been gradually constructed beneath water, at the bottom of the seas. The ancient Aryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of natural history, geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand, proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the Bible, (See “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” p. 337), to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism “earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the less philosophical and more immoral religions (!!) of the ancient world.” Only, while we find in Biblical esotericism physiological sexual mysteries symbolised, and very little more (something for which very little real philosophy is requisite), in the Puranas one may find the most scientific and philosophical “dawn of creation,” which, if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy tale-like allegories, would show that modern zoology, geology, astronomy, and nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in the ancient Science, and were known to the philosophers in their general features, if not in such detail as at present! Puranic astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, was shown even by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindu astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation of nebulae, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms — far more correct than Europeans have even now — for chronological and other purposes, were known in India to perfection. If we turn to geology and zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajapati, and their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Aryans — the authors of the most perfect philosophical systems of transcendental psychology, of Codes of Ethics, and such a grammar as Panini’s, of the Sankhya and Vedanta systems, and a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Muller the most perfect on earth — such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing fairy tales; such tales as the Puranas now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the fable, the genealogy and origin of Kasyapa, with his twelve wives, by whom he had a numerous and diversified progeny of nagas (serpents), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of living things, and who was thus the father of all kinds of animals, but a veiled record of the order of evolution in this round? So far, we do not see that any Orientalist ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. “The Satapatha Brahmana,” says one, “gives a not very intelligible account of Kasyapa’s origin. . . . He was the son of Marichi, the Son of Brahma, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind. . . . Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajapati created offspring. That which he created he made akarot, hence the word kurma (tortoise). Kasyapa means tortoise; hence men say: ‘All creatures are descendants of Kasyapa,’ ” etc., etc. (Hindu Class. Dict.) He was all this; he was also the father of Garuda, the bird, the “King of the feathered tribe,” who descends from, and is of one stock with the reptiles, the nagas; and who becomes their mortal enemy subsequently — as he is also a cycle, a period of time, when in the course of evolution the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life,” — “survival of the fittest,” etc., etc., turned in preference on those they issued from, to devour them, — perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room for other and more perfect species. (Vide Part II., “Symbolism.”) In that admirable epitome of “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” a lesson in natural history is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance with it of the Bible. The author remarks that Geology, commencing with —
The same order, plus the description of animals unknown to modern science, is found in the commentaries on the Puranas in general, and in the Book of Dzyan — especially. The only difference, a grave one, no doubt, — as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the false personality and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox psychology — is as follows. Having been in all the so-called “Seven creations,” allegorizing the seven evolutionary changes, or the sub-races, we may call them, of the First Root-race of Mankind — man was on earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three Rounds, [316] his physical frame — one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods — was ready to receive the divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, i.e., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid-point of the 3rd Root Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the two and then the three made one; for though the lower animals, from the amoeba to man, received their monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, all have to remain dormant till each reaches its human form, before which stage manas (mind) has no development in them. [317] In the animals every principle is paralysed, and in a foetus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third (the astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama, which is desire, instinct) whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy-tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it. Now the writer is certain to meet what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization — that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature, “from the primitive speck of protoplasm and the nucleated cell in which all life originates,” and “is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and last of all, of the human type.” (Laing, 335.) This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against that; for all this relates to the shell of man — his body, which in its growth is subject, of course, like every other (once called) morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization — which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic (so-called) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man — it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in nature, ever-present and as ever invisible, and unknowable, and of intra-Cosmic gods, who all were men. [318] But we would ask, what does science and its exact and now axiomatic discoveries prove against our Occult theory? Those who believe in the law of Evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell (which from a vital has become a morphological cell, until it awoke as protoplasm pure and simple) — these can surely never limit their belief to one line of evolution. The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age — we mean “primordial” matter of science — is the same in every essential particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial living matter of to-day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if the now orthodox theory of Evolution were quite correct, namely, a constant, ever-flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of that, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal being all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms, assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity in the description of palaeontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely — Man and the lower genera of being! “Certain well-marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, but persisting comparatively unaltered, while other forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed ‘persistent types’ of life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds” (Huxley, “Proceed. of Roy. Inst.,” vol. iii., p. 151). Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., etc., as off-shoots of a moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the amphibia, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms — which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to man, on every planet, in the Three preceding Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be the arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question: — “What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination of pre-mammalian organic species?” — is easily answered. One is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects, which are destined to receive the final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The fish evolved into an amphibian — a frog — in the shadows of ponds, and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the formation of the types in this one. On strict analogy, the cycle of Seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through every kingdom of Nature, are repeated on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think over and work out this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby, though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of mother-Nature before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyani, still more perfect than he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built chain of worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the astral merges into physical evolution. Of this Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey, it says. But now see the contradiction. Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club mosses, some of them generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the carboniferous epoch, for: — “The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species. . . . . Subkingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus . . . the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas. . . . The arachnida, the highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus differing only from its living congeners only in . . . the eyes,” etc., etc.; all of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter’s authoritative statement about the Foraminifera. “There is no evidence,” he says, “of any fundamental modification or advance in the Foraminiferous type from the palaeozoic period to the present time. . . . The Foraminiferous Fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous period; but there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type.” (“Introduction to the study of the Foraminifera,” p. xi.) Now, if there is no indication of change in the Foraminifera, a protozoon of the lowest type of life, mouthless and eyeless, except its greater variety now than before, man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his Palaeolithic ancestor being even found superior in some respects to his present frame. Where is, then, the claimed uniformity of law, the absolute rule for one species shading off into another, and, by insensible gradations, into higher types? We see Sir William Thomson admitting as much as 400,000,000 of years in the earth’s history, since the surface of the globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living things; [319] and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so-called “age of reptiles,” we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching its highest developments. We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period “we find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from previously existing forms . . . . Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains; and subsequently,” are notified of — “the gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval man himself may claim to have been evolved.” (“The Beginnings of Life.”) He may; but no one, except materialists, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the Quadrumanous order, than that primeval man, who has remained stationary in his human specialization ever since his fossil is found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type — has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape. That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and at last the human type,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Haeckel, in his Shopfungsgeschichte, shows a double drawing representing two embryos — that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, except the slight difference in the head, larger and wider about the brain in the man, are undistinguishable. “In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal and finally of man. If we take him up at the more advanced stage where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form . . . for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks’ growth between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy” (“Modern Science,” etc., p. 171). Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile — a Naga, instead of coupling man with the quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the other, and more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to AEsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it since prehistoric times, it is no new discovery. In “Isis,” Vol. I., 389, it is noticed and half explained. As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in itself the totality of the kingdoms of nature, and since it seems to be “a persistent type” of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern philosophies believe in evolution, which Manu and Kapila [320] give with far more clearness than any scientist does at present. No need to repeat that which was fully debated in Isis Unveiled, as the reader may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rested, in our earlier books. [321] But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, “from the structureless Amoeba to man,” are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre-Silurian epochs, in the sea or land-mud. The Occultists believe in an inherent law of progressive development. [322] Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself. On page 145 of the “Origin of Species” we find him stating that, since there can be no advantage “to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm . . . to become highly organized,” therefore, “natural selection,” not including necessarily progressive development — leaves the animalcule and the worm (the “persistent types”) quiet. There does not appear much uniform law in such behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some Super-Natural selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern Occultists would call the “Law of Retardation,” may have something to do with it. But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance to his law — as is given to it now by his atheistic followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive: (1) On account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; (2) on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and (3) because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to us — nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says himself: — “For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines.” It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride or unreasonable belief in man’s representing even here on earth — (in our period, perhaps) — the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own, for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” such as to prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by palaeontologists. Believing as we do that man has evolved from, and passed through, (during the preceding Rounds) the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the orangoutang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would forward the Occult doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man, most irresistibly. One may even enquire how it is that biologists and anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape — how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory, unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a non-precedent in nature, quite a special and unique case. And that is what all this leads physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Haeckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance, not man. The pithecoid is an accidental creation, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process. The occult doctrine, is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying law in nature, the latter having no personal, “special design,” but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole manvantaric period and deals with the land worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same evolutionary law, and both have to progress according to Karmic law. Both have started from the same neutral centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of the cycle. It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only — the middle, or the transition point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man what he is now during the first two and a half Root-races. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the secondary period, as we claim. Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult teaching, “a god on earth who had fallen into matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma; and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the actual man and his inner nature, the Fall mentioned above having left no original sin on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with. Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc — which is centrifugal for spirit and centripetal for matter — and those he prepares to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces — viz., matter will become centrifugal and spirit centripetal — that all such transformations are next in store for the anthropoid ape also, all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round — and these will all be men in the Fifth Round, as present men inhabited ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round. Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples — “blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it — of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-race during the period of what is called the “Fall into generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume (anthropogenesis), it is the speechless animal that first started sexual connection, having been the first to separate into males and females. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow the bestial example — as shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by the animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in the woman. The Ape is, indeed, as remarked in Isis Unveiled (Vol. II. 278) “a transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family — a hybrid branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter” — or man. The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the Egos of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human “Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam’s first wife, whom the Talmud describes as a charming woman, with long wavy hair, i.e. — a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael-Lilith, or man-animal united, a being called Hayo Bischat, the Beast or Evil Beast (Zohar). It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals (or men of a lower order) in the Fifth Round, while the adepts of a certain school hope that some of the Egos of the apes of a higher intelligence will reappear at the close of the Sixth Root-race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Species and genera of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown — man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root-Race likewise, as well as after every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in the latter. In the Sixth Root-Race the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms — though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches — will develop from the “cast off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were none before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the monads of the unprogressed men of our race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated baboon. (But see Part III., Addenda.) This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation” or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant ex nihilo. This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter. A Panoramic View of the Early Races. There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first “mindless” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later “Lemurians”; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period. As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are “productions of blind natural forces,” we are assured by some; “quite modern” we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by sceptic and materialist, and made subservient to the Bible in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian “deluge theory,” it is declared by the Christian clergy “the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of modern science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the scientists as a dream. Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. Only Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the Puranas, nor anywhere else. But with simply one of the esoteric keys in hand it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless “lands of the gods,” Devas and Munis described in the Puranas, in their Varshas, Dwipas, and zones. Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk. It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three races — except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the first had no history of its own. Of race the second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention only to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans before the history of our own race (the Fifth) can be attempted. What is known of other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic science is daubed with the contemptuous term “Superstition.” The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato’s “winged” and hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the gods, are quietly brought back by Haeckel to their new place in nature: our divine races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of sea slime. Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber, “the fictions of ancient poetry . . . . will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.” However one-sided the efforts of the learned author of the “Mysteries of the Kabiri,” — efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old paganism, “to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture,” — time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that “truth” by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of archaic paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri — the most mysterious gods of antiquity — was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, of these scholars had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter. “We have no reason to think,” he writes, “that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first (the fourth in esoteric teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge.” (Chap. I. p. 9). To this, Faber adds: —
In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept Biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the giants. (See “Lettres sur l’Atlantide.”) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French confrere, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah — that he “formerly inhabited the island Atlantis” (ibid). This island, whether it was the “Poseidonis” mentioned in “Esoteric Buddhism,” or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian. No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows; and if a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis? [323] Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and post diluvian nation, which, however, as he says, certainly “flourished before the foundation of the Hindu, the Egyptian, and the Phoenician empires.” In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was sunk under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of science, who will accept neither the tradition that several continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric cycle — it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindus, Egyptians, and Phoenicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses (as every Initiate would) the two continents, and assigns to the small island which sunk last all the events pertaining to the two enormous continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the first couple, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In saying so, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to “Earth,” he means “matter,” as the Atlanteans were really the first purely human and terrestrial race — those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid. Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated adept, about the history of the Third Race after its “Fall,” though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations — all of which was based upon, and followed the early Aryan calculations — to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage. [324] One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered. The third race fell — and created no longer: it begat its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “lords the gods” of the Bible, the “Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature: but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness — we must not say sin — of what they had done, only when too late: after the angelic monads from higher spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various “fires” are latent, and in others they are active. The vital fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher principles awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus non-existing. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in matter. But as said in Pymander: — “This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature [325] being mingled with Man [326] brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the essence of the Seven (Pitris, governors) and her own; the Fire and the Spirit and Nature (the noumenon of matter); which (commingling) forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes (negative and positive) according to the essences of the seven governors.” (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect. 16.) Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate, [327] “the Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that “things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.” It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir: — “All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.” In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow — Dyooknah — of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong. The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven; which became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the war between spirit and matter. This war will last till the inner and divine man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of the former will be at eternal feud with his master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was created by the Elements and was not born. The above is made clear in all the great theogonies, principally in the Grecian (see Hesiod and Theogony). The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal [328] (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves — as, later on, these men evolve their progeny — without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos, [329] time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism — matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial — terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution. This allegory is the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea — by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. — X., et seq., and also Berosus’ account of primeval creation.) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus — Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn. [330] Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense, [331] and varies from Zeus, the Great “Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly man” (Pymander); and even in the Bible he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on — by transmutation — under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely human Atlantean cycle — if Uranus and Kronos who precede him are found insufficient — may be found in Hesiod, who tells us that the Immortals have made men and created the Golden and the Silver age (First and Second Races); while Jupiter created the generations of Bronze (an admixture of two elements), of Heroes, and the men of the age of Iron. After this he sends his fatal present, by Pandora, to Epimetheus, [332] which present Hesiod calls “a fatal gift,” or the first woman. It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of divine creative fire.” Her apparition on earth is the signal of every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering — as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean Vendidad. Two deluges may also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the theogonies save the Bible. [333] Everywhere the man of our race appears after a cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time. [334] “Gods and mortals have one common origin” says Hesiod (ibid. v. 108); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah’s (see Apollod., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam. 1, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology (Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth. 1, 545), all men were drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the “master of all”) advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la Grece Antique — the four ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the races. “The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others,” he says, “without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever-decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of purity . . . . qualifies the first race. . . . . The men of the second race, those of the age of Silver, are already inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy. . . . They disappear. . . . The men of the age of Bronze are robust and violent (the third race); their strength is extreme. They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown” (Op. at D., 143-155). The fourth generation (race) is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes (see “The Seven Against Thebes,” by AEschylus), or under the walls of Troy. Thus, the four races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the classics. But this is all “Mythology” and poetry. What can modern science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of the domain of that same science, that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even if that speck be not a figment of our opponents’ imagination. 40. Then the third and fourth (races) became tall with pride. We are the kings, we are the gods (a). 41. They took wives fair to look at. Wives from the “mindless,” the narrow-headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female. Also Khado (Dakini) with little minds (b). 42. They built temples for human body. Male and Female they worshipped (c). Then the third eye acted no longer (d). (a) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was — pride! It is the Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, the memory of whom lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and which found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid and at the same time distorted legends. One who has read and studied the Commentaries on the archaic doctrine, will easily recognise in some Atlanteans, the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all these tutti quanti of “accursed memory,” as theological literature expresses it: of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this leads us naturally to inquire into the religious ethics of these early races, mythical as these may be. What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any, as they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe on faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible all, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical Self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower principles by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From “Sons of Light and Wisdom” they ended by becoming the “Sons of Darkness.” They had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans. [335] At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root Race had thus no beliefs that could be called religion. That is to say, he was equally as ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” as of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety — as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent — then even the earliest Lemurians had a religion — and a most beautiful one — from the very beginning of their intellectual life. Had they not their bright gods of the elements around them, and even within themselves? [336] Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by those who had given them life and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into matter could never have been achieved; nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super-ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner principles with a portion, or rather, a reflection of that essence. The Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the noumenoi of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of nature — the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in what Science is pleased to call the “modes of motion” — the imponderable forces and what not — are the still higher noumenoi of still higher Hierarchies. It was the “Golden Age” in those days of old, the age when the “gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.” Since then, the gods departed (i.e., became invisible), and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms — the Elements. It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into sexes — hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals — who became the first “Sacrificers” to the god of matter. They stand in the far-away dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built, [337] as the first anthropomorphists who worshipped form and matter. That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship, thence led to phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve became matter, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel — the latter the life-bearing soil, the former “the tiller of that ground or field.” Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the ray of which man feels within himself — or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark Cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, “the mighty men of renown in those days” (Gen. vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Rakshasas and Daityas with the Indian races. Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal god. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon and blended, so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean Continent); the Atlanteans, toward the Southern Pole, the pit, cosmically and terrestrially — whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two poles were denominated, by the ancients, Dragons and Serpents — hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the “Sons of God” (Sons of Spirit and Matter): the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of this dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the “Fallen Angels” in its esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man’s self-consciousness; it is the angle-iron on which hinges his entire life-cycle; — the history of his evolution and growth. On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of esoteric anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into various contrasted aspects. The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so considerable space is devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The “Fallen Angels,” so-called, are Humanity itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, has never had any being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten, nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; he, again, who has contaminated the indwelling god in himself, by linking the pure spirit with the impure demon of matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, “Demon est Deus inversus” finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested nature, its practical application is found in Mankind alone. Thus it has now become self-evident that postulating as we do (a) the appearance of man before that of other mammalia, and even before the ages of the huge reptiles; (b) periodical deluges and glacial periods owing to the karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what materialism would call a supernatural Being, though it is only super-human — it is evident that our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of the Mankind in the Third Race — all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara — owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings hypostasizing into their fifth principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that those angels are identical with their “Fallen” Spirits, than the esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious. [338] The divine man dwelt in the animal, and, therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution — when also “all the animal creation was untied,” and males were attracted to females — that race fell: not because they had eaten of the fruit of Knowledge and knew good from evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyan-Chohans had incarnated. [339] “When we have ascertained the extent of the Universe and learnt to know all that there is in it, we will multiply our race,” answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated ascetics will “multiply,” i.e., once more produce Mind-born immaculate Sons — in the Seventh Root-Race. It is so stated in the Puranas; in Adi Parvan (p. 115) and Brahma Purana, etc. In one portion of the Pushkara Mahatmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will-born progeny (the “Sons of passive Yoga”), will not create men, “converts half himself into a female by whom he begets daughters,” the future females of the Third Race which begat the giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In the Vishnu Purana it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world. Happily for the human race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races — save some lowest — of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, “the seeds of the Trinity of Wisdom” had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same great personality to step ad libitum from one worn-out body into another. (b) The first war that earth knew, the first human gore shed, was the result of man’s eyes and senses being opened; which made him see that the daughters of his Brethren were fairer than his own, and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race was born. Titans or giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race — that of the giants. For “there were giants” in the days of old, indeed [340] and the evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same in the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the carboniferous period. Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works — in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity — contain references to giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Rakshasas of Lanka — the opponents conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments of attention. Here, again, we come into collision with Science. The latter denies, so far, that man has ever been much larger than the average of the tall and powerful men one meets with occasionally now. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces such traditions as resting upon ill-digested facts. Instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward. Thus, in 1613, in a locality called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants” in the Lower Dauphine (France, four miles from St. Romans) enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobochus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier’s later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium giganteum of the family of tapirs, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than they are now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us was the Roman Emperor Maximus, we are told, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day we see every year men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 1/2 feet tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. And as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding “always betray a tendency to revert to the original type,” they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a rule in ancient days, there would be none now. All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far (which is positively denied) to prove undeniably in the opinion of science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last racial cycle. The Giants of old are all buried under the Oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a brazen, far more a human skeleton. But whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, almost nothing was known of fossil man, for archaeology complacently ignored his existence. Of Giants who were “in the earth in those days” of old, the Bible alone had spoken to the wise men of the West, the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Atlas or Orion, whose mighty shoulders are said to support the world. Nevertheless, even the “Giants” have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences — Geological, Sidereal and Scriptural (the latter in its Universal character) — may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with geology; it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. “All those bones” writes Frederic de Rougemont — who, though believing too piously in Noah’s ark and the Bible, is none the less a Scientific witness — “all those skeletons found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liege, etc., etc. . . those skulls which remind all of the negro type. . . and which by reason of that type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men of very high stature”. . . (“Histoire de la Terre,” p. 154) The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a tall stature to those who were submerged in the deluge (not necessarily “Noah’s”) and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently. As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not stop at that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage — for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity [341] and actual existence would have to be proven. But we may turn to the scientific journals of 1858, which spoke of a sarcophagus of giants found that year on the site of that same city. As to the ancient pagan writers — we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself at Sigeus. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilaus, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as well as that other one discovered by Messecrates of Stire, at Lemnos — “horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus (Heroica, p. 35). Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class all these men as either fools or liars? Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognised Orion, the son of Ephialtes (Nat. Hist., vol. VII., ch. xvi.). Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antaeus, the giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or Hillus, son of Hercules — all giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbe Pegues (cited in de Mirville’s Pneumatologie) affirms in his curious work on “The Volcanoes of Greece” that “in the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which must have necessitated everywhere the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.” (Page 48.) In the same work above cited of the Abbe Pegues, the author wonders why in Bible and tradition the Gibborim, (Giants, the mighty ones) the Rephaim, or the spectres (Phantoms), the Nephilim, or the fallen ones — (irruentes) — are shown “as if identical, though they are all men, since the Bible calls them the primitive and the mighty ones” — e.g., Nimrod. The “Doctrine” explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two Phantom (astral) races; to the fallen one — the Third; and to the race of the Atlantean Giants — the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.” Bossuet (Elevations p. 56) sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the “original sin.” “Ye shall be as gods,” says the serpent of Genesis to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of false divinities. Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of images, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is the latter that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches, the Greek and the Latin especially, are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion. [342] It is only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly gods, as pure and as divine as their progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical serpent does not, as sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, refer at all to the physiological fall of men, but to their acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, which knowledge comes to them prior to their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that “Adam knew Eve his wife” (Genesis iv.). It is not, however, by the dead-letter of the Hebrew Bible that we shall check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine; but point out, rather, the great similarities between the two in their esoteric meaning. It is only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that “Serpents and Giants signify Demons.” (Genesis, chapter v.) [343] We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the Bible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in Genesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate they belong to a more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah’s Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In Shoo-King (4th part, chap. XXVII., p. 291), anyone can read in the French translation, “When the Mao-tse” (“that antediluvian and perverted race,” explains the Annotator, “which had retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton”), [344] “according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands. . . . .” The Lord Chang-ty (a king of the divine dynasty) saw that his people had lost the last vestiges of virtue. Then he commanded Tehong and Lhy (two lower Dhyan Chohans) to cut away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there was no more going up and down!” [345] “Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two worlds. Not being in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together; especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between physical and ethereal divine man was stopped. The veil of matter between the two planes became too dense for even the inner man to penetrate. The mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their celestial teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men — in whom the spark of divine Wisdom burnt bright, and only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to bad purposes — remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kumaric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the secret teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which never died since that period: — “The inner man of the first * * * only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvana, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind. . . . .” “Out of the seven virgin-men (Kumara [346]) four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, “He is dead”; behold, he is alive and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying knowledge (Gnyana). Thou shalt never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones (Maha . . .) before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.” . . . [347] (Catechism of the inner Schools.) It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the “Linga Purana,” which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as Kumara is reborn in each Kalpa (Race in this instance), as four youths — four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Siva is pre-eminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogis and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only after getting married and being dragged by the gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Siva, a god, and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type, in the Hindu Pantheon. Higher than the “Four” is only One on Earth as in Heavens — that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Book I. We have now to examine the nature of the “Sons of the Flame” and of “Dark Wisdom,” as well as the pros and cons of the Satanic assumption. Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments on the tile, which George Smith calls “the Curse after the Fall” (see p. 81 of his “Chaldean Account of Genesis”), are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the fall of the angels in our Books. Thus, it is said in line 12 that the “Lord of the earth his name called out, the father Elu” (Elohim), and pronounced his curse, which “The God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because his man (Angelic man) had corrupted his purity (14 and 15),” for which Hea expresses the desire that “ ‘Wisdom and knowledge’ hostilely may they injure him (man).” The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldean with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn (thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)), the Elohim do the same in the third chapter of Genesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden. But this was of no avail. For the spirit of divine Wisdom being upon and in man — verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Manasic spirit, which made him learn the secret of creation on the Kriyasaktic, and of procreation on the earthly planes — led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods. The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured legend. Primarily, the angelic Fall, which has transformed the “first-born” of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman and Typhon of the “pagans” (i.e., if the accounts given in the Book of Enoch, [348] and in Hermes, in Puranas and Bible are taken literally), when read esoterically means simply this: — Sentences such as: “In his (Satan’s) ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven” etc., ought to read: “Prompted by the law of eternal evolution and Karma, the angel incarnated on earth in man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the mysteries of Heaven.” He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth, “man will beget, not create.” [349] But as, by so doing, he has to use his weak body as the means of procreation, that body will pay the penalty for this wisdom, carried from heaven down to the earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse. The mediaeval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write: “The Kabala was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity” (Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the Kabala). This shows how the event — of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the divine Secrets of Heaven to the daughters of men — allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter of Genesis was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the pre-human period, that of divine man, or as plastic Protestant theology now has it — the pre-adamite period. But even Genesis begins its real history (chap. vi.) by the giants of “those days” and the “Sons of god” marrying and teaching their wives — the daughters of man. This period is the one described in the Puranas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole personnel of the Brahmanas and Puranas — the Rishis, Prajapatis, Manus, their wives and progeny — belong to that pre-human period. All these are the Seed of Humanity, so to speak. It is around these “Sons of God,” the “Mind born” astral children of Brahma, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Puranic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other spheres, events perceived by the “Siva eye” of the ancient Seers, (the “third eye” of our Stanzas) and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for Sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy. But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look at, but in whom lower, more material, though sidereal, beings had incarnated. These beings in female forms (Lilith is the prototype of these in the Jewish traditions) are called in the esoteric accounts “Khado” (Dakini, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the chief of these Liliths, Sangye Khado, (Buddha Dakini, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of “walking in the air,” and the greatest kindness to mortals; but no mind — only animal instinct. [350] (c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body — that “miracle of miracles,” as an English author calls it — and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their Science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing Principle knew at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the matter in which the Principles had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred “monsters” — i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves. Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer describes them well in saying that: —
And so they were, those (now) legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still, once really existing races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dullness and superstition, an endless series of recognized philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they saw their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old — no fewer and as great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus yielded to the evidence of facts and showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than our modern wise men are; for, as well remarked by the author of some “Notes on Aristotle’s Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought” (in Mind): —
Yet the “Lemurians” and the Atlanteans, “those children of Heaven and Earth,” were indeed marked with a character of sorcery; for the Esoteric doctrine charges them precisely with that, which, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the Anthropoid Ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called “animals,” and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as in the question of spontaneous generation — in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches — the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean giants, nor yet the “animals,” were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject — those of the physiologists included — are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute denial a priori of such a fact. A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being that the new “incarnate” bred with, was called an “animal,” not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII. and what is said in its first verse (24th): — that when the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a spark, while some of the shadows were left over from being filled and perfected, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,” remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve were supposed, with Cain and Abel, to be the only human family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Singhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles as speaking animals and no more, some British people believe firmly, in their arrogance, that every other human family — especially the dark Indians — is an inferior race. Moreover there are naturalists who have sincerely considered the problem whether some savage tribes — like the Bushmen for instance — can be regarded as men at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals “fair to look at” as a biped: — “Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.” Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps. If men existed two million years ago, they must have been — just as the animals were — quite different physically and anatomically from what they have become; and they were nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world breeds strictly inter se, i.e., in accordance with genus and species — only since the appearance on this earth of the Atlantean race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, “appears to be a prima facie deduction rather than an absolute law” even now. He shows that “different species, do, in fact, often breed together, as may be seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile. . . . but this rule is not universal, and recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.” The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as that of several other domestic animals (p. 101); “like foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rutimeyer as descended from three distinct species of fossil-oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos frontosus.” Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told, “numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series” — the gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance (see Addenda). Thus Mr. Darwin’s remark — or shall we say the remark of Linnaeus? — natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would — were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries — reconcile in more than one way, if not entirely, the modern Evolution theory with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the “missing link” in our Fourth Round geological formations. We will show elsewhere that, however unconsciously to itself, modern Science pleads our case upon its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be the descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe as he ever did that — “Man was the first and highest (mammalian) animal that appeared in this (Fourth Round) creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours.” For, “the Rakshasas (giant-demons) and Daityas (Titans) of the “White Dwipa” (continent) spoiled his (the dumb man’s) Sires.” (Commentary.) Furthermore, as we see, there are anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of modern science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary Man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene Man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l’Abbe Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age Man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brahminical exoteric books which approximate to the esoteric teaching. (d) . . . . Then, “the third eye acted no longer,” says the Stanza, because man had sunk too deep into the mire of matter. What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Verse 42, concerning the “third eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer”? A few more occult teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the third Eye has to be first explained. The Races with the “Third Eye.” The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull’s eye called esotericism on almost every inch of the occult grounds travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position. [351] It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, human side of the extinct races, in this history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. That, which finds its possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of modern science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate — and therefore denies as facts in nature — is withheld. But even such statements as these — e.g., that of all the mammalians, man was the earliest; that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the Ape; and that he was a kind of a Cyclops in days of old — will all be contested, yet, scientists will never be able to prove — except to their own satisfaction — that it was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, and shape, even to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the store-house, so to speak, of all the seeds of life for this Round, vegetable and animal alike. [352] As En-Soph is “One, notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him” (“Zohar,” i. 21a), so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm. “As soon as man appeared, everything was complete. . . . for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself all forms (Ibid., iii. 48a).” “The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man” (ii. 76a). The human form — so called, because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the divine man — is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of “Esoteric Studies,” [353] the new type, at the beginning of every Round, “as man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdom in esse.” The author proceeds, “he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have been the new type of the cycle. The human shape, in one ring (?), as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.” If the idea is what we understand it to mean — for the “rings” spoken of throw some confusion upon it — then it is the correct esoteric teaching. Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, man (the astral, or the “Soul,” for the Zohar, repeating the archaic teaching, distinctly says that “the real man is the Soul, and his material frame no part of him”) — man became the living and animal Unit, from which the “cast-off clothes” determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round. [354] Thus, he “created” for ages the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the Vendidad of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldean and the Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindu Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and his Ark with the Seven Rishis, as in that of the Rishis, each of whom is shown the father and progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters (See Vishnu and other Puranas). Open the Mazdean Vendidad, at Fargard ii., at verse 27 (73) and read the command of Ormazd to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three races, after telling him to build a vara (“an enclosure,” an argua or vehicle) . . . . “Thither (into the vara) thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle,” etc., etc.; and v. 28 (74) . . . . “all those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the vara.” Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the heavenly men or Dhyani, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For “Vara,” or the “Ark” (or again the Vehicle) simply means man. [355] Verse 30 says: . . . . “thou shalt seal up the vara (after filling it up with the seeds), and thou shalt make a door and a window self-shining within,” which is the Soul. And when Yima inquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that vara, he is answered: “Crush the earth . . . and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter’s clay” (31). The Egyptian ram-headed god makes man of clay on a potter’s wheel, and so in Genesis do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material. When the “Maker of the material world” (Ahura Mazda) is asked, furthermore, what is to give light “to the Vara which Yima made,” he is told that “There are uncreated lights and created lights” and that “there” (in Airyana Vaego, where Vara is built), “the stars, the moon, and the Sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set” and a year seems only as a day (and night) a clear reference to the “land of the Gods” or the (now) polar regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse: a distinct allusion to the “uncreated lights” which enlighten man within — his principles. Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda’s answer (V. 40), which is forthwith followed by Verse 41 saying that “Every fortieth year, to every couple (hermaphrodite) two are born, a male and female,” [356] the latter being a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says — “At the expiration of every forty (annual) Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third. . . . . .” Which is clear, since “every sun” meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one day then, as in the arctic circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar day lasted during the whole period of the earth’s revolution about the sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to astronomy as now taught and understood: but who can say that changes in the motion of the earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back? Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the moon, and even Noah’s ark, if one will so have it — this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathustra. Thus when the latter asks — V. 42. “O Maker of the Material World, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?” “Ahura Mazda answered: ‘It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathustra.’ . . . .” “The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth he would be king of birds. He brought into the var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds.” (Bund. xix and xxiv.) This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and what not. Karshipta is the human mind-soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed Mystery” it is said of the tree, which is the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “In its branches (of the tree) the birds lodge and build their nests,” or the Souls and the Angels have their place!” [357] Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldean, and has become a Hebrew synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the “Bird’s Nest” was with both Heaven, and is God’s bosom in the Zohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is called the Bird’s Nest” (Zohar, ii., 8b). “Like a bird that is flying from its nest, and that is the Soul from which the Shekeenah (divine wisdom or grace) does not move away” (Zohar, iii., 278a; Myer’s Qabbalah, 217). “The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, is boundless space,” says the Commentary, meaning Hansa, the bird of Wisdom. It is Adam Kadmon who is the (Sephirothal) tree, and it is he who becomes the “Tree of knowledge of good and evil” esoterically. And that “tree hath around it seven columns (seven pillars) of the world, or Rectores”; the same “Progenitors” or “Sephiroth” again “operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc., one of which orders begets giants (Nephilim) on Earth. It was the belief of entire antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already yielded in isolated cases groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high. [358] These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindu Puranas and the Greek Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans — men of a superhuman tremendous physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times — and of actual Cyclopes — three-eyed mortals. It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.” In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated ex nihilo so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness. [359] The evidence for the Cyclopes — a race of giants — will be pointed out in forthcoming Sections, in the Cyclopean remnants, so called to this day. An indication that, during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism — which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race — the early Fourth Race may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science. To the Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic involution proceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution; that the inner senses — innate in the first human races — atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses; to the student of Esoteric symbology, finally, this statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply a phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of this passage in the Commentaries which says: — “There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females (hermaphrodites); with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them. [360] A Kalpa later (after the separation of the sexes) men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coordinately the third eye commenced to lose its power. . . . When the Fourth (Race) arrived at its middle age, the inner vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old sages. [361] . . . The third eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified, [362] soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the inner man (during trances and spiritual visions) the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The undefiled Lanoo (disciple, chela) need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity (who is not chaste) will receive no help from the ‘deva eye.’ ” Unfortunately not. The “deva-eye” exists no more for the majority of mankind. The third eye is dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the pineal gland. As for the “four-armed” men, it is they who become the prototypes of the four-armed Hindu gods, as shown in a preceding footnote. Such is the mystery of the human eye that, in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action, some scientists have been forced to resort to occult explanations. The development of the Human eye gives more support to the occult anthropology than to that of the materialistic physiologists. “The eyes in the human embryo grow from within without” out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester, thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines, suggests the curious view that “our” earliest vertebrate ancestor was a transparent creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man “a transparent creature” once upon a time, we are taught, hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Haeckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes in the epidermis? If it started inside, the theory goes into the waste-basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester’s extraordinary suggestion — or shall we say admission? — is rendered perhaps necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses “from within without,” from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory: The third eye retreated inwards when its course was run — another point in favour of Occultism. The allegorical expression of the Hindu mystics when speaking of the “eye of Siva,” the Tri-bochana (“three-eyed”), thus receives its justification and raison d’etre — the transference of the pineal gland (once that “third eye”) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery — incomprehensible to some — of the connection between abnormal, or Spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked, “Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine qua non rule and condition of regular chelaship, or the development of psychic and occult powers?” The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the “third eye” was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality (Spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical), it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by physiologists as the spleen is — when we learn this, the connection will become clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the medulla oblongata, reacts powerfully on the pineal gland, for, owing to the number of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greater majority of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, there must be exerted a very powerful “inductive” action by the medulla on the pineal gland. All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all; then it may rest on the assumptions of materialistic science itself. It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation this time, that many of the animals — especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata — have a third eye, now atrophied, but necessarily active in its origin. [363] The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand (a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well), presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria punctata, but the chameleon, certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that it was no more than the prolongation of the brain ending with a small protuberance, called epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. It offered — as its development and anatomical structure showed — such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There were and are paleontologists who feel convinced to this day that this “third eye” has functioned in its origin, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the pineal gland in Quain’s Anatomy (Vol. II. ninth edit., pp. 830-851. “Thalamencephalon” Interbrain): —
The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres backwards, the pineal gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection to be traced between the (originally) hollow optic tracts and the eyes anteriorly, the pineal gland and its peduncles behind, and all of these with the optic thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria punctata have a very important bearing on the developmental history of the human senses, and on the occult assertions in the text. It is well known, (and also regarded as a fiction now, by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man,) that Descartes saw in the pineal gland the Seat of the Soul. Although it is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of it in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that “special” locality, he concluded that it was that little gland tied to the brain, yet having an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion “by the animal Spirits [364] which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.” Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the occult truth than is any Haeckel. For the pineal gland, as shown, is far more connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of the real processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding cyclic course of this great law, they would know instead of conjecturing; and feel as certain of the future physical transformations of the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then, would they see the fallacy and all the absurdity of their modern “blind-force” and mechanical processes of nature; realizing, in consequence of such knowledge, that the said pineal gland, for instance, could not but be disabled for physical use at this stage of our cycle. If the odd “eye” in man is now atrophied, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant form without some definite purpose and use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the cycle ran down toward that point when the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of the physical man, the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development, that median “eye” ended by atrophying along with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the soul, says popular wisdom, [365] and Vox populi Vox Dei. In the beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal, whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their coats of skin, viz., to evolve from within without the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism — the third eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes developed [366] later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrata, in our day, i.e., beneath an opaque skin. [367] Only the stages of the odd, or primeval eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the “Cyclopean” eye was, and still is, in man the organ of spiritual sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by nature for further use in AEons to come. This explains why the pineal gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is the vertebrata in which it is the most prominent and objective, and in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the anatomist. No less light is thrown thereby on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali yuga — the black age which began nearly 5,000 years ago — it was said (paraphrased into comprehensible sentences): “We (the Fifth Root-Race) in our first half (of duration) onward (on the now ascending arc of the cycle) are on the mid point of (or between) the First and the Second Races — falling downward (i.e., the races were then on the descending arc of the cycle). . . . . Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.” (Commentary xx.). Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period — namely, in the second half of the First Spiritual ethero-astral race — nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element. As it was on its descending line, and as we are parallel to it, on the ascending, we are,
therefore devoid of the Spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the manasa period of our cycle of races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter — or that equilibrium between brain intellect and Spiritual perception. One important point has, however, to be borne in mind. We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal mahat — a ray unimpeded by matter — will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of developmental evolution repeated on a smaller scale, it must be the more so in the case of a Root-Race. Our race then has, as a Root-race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the Spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again — the oldest — having crossed their crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races. It becomes comprehensible now why the “odd eye” has been gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the “Lemurians.” It is a curious fact that it is especially in human beings that the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been developed, and that the optic thalami, corpora quadrigemina, and corpora striata are the principal parts which are developed in the mammalian brain. Moreover it is asserted that the intellect of any man may to some extent be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary that if the development and increased size of the pineal gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the pineal gland at the expense of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres. It is a curious speculation which would receive a confirmation in this case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of a human being, and which is allowed by science to be the great centre for all the physiologically co-ordinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc., etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres — the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed pineal gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man. It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself. This is, then, the organ which gave rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of man with one head but two faces. These may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldean fragments. Apart from the work already cited — the Shan Hai King, compiled by King Chia from engravings on nine urns made 2,255 B.C., by the Emperor Yu, they may be found in another work, called the “Bamboo Books,” and in a third one, the “Rh Ya” — “initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, B.C., 1,122”: — says Mr. Ch. Gould in his “Mythical Monsters.” The Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 at the opening of the grave of King Seang of Wai, who died B.C. 295. Both these works mention men with two faces on one head — one in front and one behind (p. 27). Now that which the students of Occultism ought to know is that the “third eye” is indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it. The “eye of Siva” did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the eye lost its powers. But such was the law of Evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no fall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a god, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning; as the term Karma [368] would be the right one to use in this case; while the reader who would feel perplexed at the use of the term “spiritual” instead of “physical” iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the psychic, if not of the “Spiritual man.” While in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual being which sinned, the Spirit element being still the “Master” principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads. As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of the theosophical teachings. Questions with regard to Karma and re-births are constantly offered, and a great confusion seems to exist upon this subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new soul is created by God for every newly-born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether in such case the number of incarnating Monads on earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conceptions, the number of the incarnating monads — even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the aeons already passed — still, there must be a limit. It was stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, had ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress. Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Re-incarnation. It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same individuality throughout the life-cycle; the assurance that the same Monads — among whom are many Dhyan-Chohans, or the “Gods” themselves — have to pass through the “Circle of Necessity,” rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless shells, or astral figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us — nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terrible and apparent injustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues — far more deserving in every way — perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one’s ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him — that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator. [369] Of all the terrible blasphemies and accusations virtually thrown on their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably “pious” Christian assert, in connection with every evil and undeserved blow, that “such is the will of God.” Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees, who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and creator for helpless man, and of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve’s words: — “But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?” Logic and simple common sense, we answer: if we are made to believe in the “original Sin,” in one life, on this Earth only, for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire (and this whether they are good or bad, says the Predestinarian), [370] why should not every man endowed with reasoning powers condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man’s unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as —
Truly a robust “faith” is required to believe that it is “presumption” to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to “perplex” him, and to test a “faith” with which that “Power,” moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes. Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law — whether Conscious or Unconscious — predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is action itself. It is not the Wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the Ocean’s motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinise its mysteries. On the contrary, he who unveils through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal law in the World of manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists — still less as fatalists: [371] for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect in its effects in the phenomenal world. Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of re-birth, or of the re-incarnation of the same spiritual individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. The latter are like the various costumes and characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. The inner, or real man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet for the brief space of a few acts, which represent, however, on the plane of human illusion the whole life of Hamlet. And he knows that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night; but the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact. In actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real. Nevertheless, the permanent individuality is fully aware of the fact, though, through the atrophy of the “spiritual” eye in the physical body, that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false personality. The possession of a physical third eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of Third Sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame made it disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perceptions lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether before the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many “Noahs.” The student has to bear in mind that there were many such deluges as that mentioned in Genesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section devoted to the subject of pre-historic continents. To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the esoteric doctrine has much in it of the legends contained in the Hindu Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former — only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that “Vaivasvata Manu” — a generic name indeed! — was the Noah of the Aryans and his prototype, all this, which is also the belief of the Occultists, necessitates at this juncture a new explanation. (Vide Part III. “Submerged Continents.”) The Primeval Manus of Humanity. Those who are aware that the “great Flood,” which was connected with the sinking of an entire continent — save what became a few islands — could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago; and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya (or the fish) Avatar of Vishnu — may feel perplexed at this discrepancy between facts stated and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to turn to the Theosophist of July, 1883, and after studying the article therein, “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” the whole question can be explained to him. It is in this explanation, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brahmins. For the benefit of those, however, who may not have “The Theosophist” of that month and year to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:
Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu-antara, lit. “between two Manus”) 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or sidereal Flood (a mystery), or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As the several (and quite different) events are purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Puranas in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader’s mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The blinds which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student. As somebody — Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake — remarked, “the first principle in Hindu religious philosophy is Unity in diversity.” If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, this is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same Logos, the celestial, as well as the terrestrial messengers and permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of activity; conscious during the period of Cosmic evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic rest, as the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of that which “sleepeth not,” nor is it ever awake — for it is sat or Be-ness, not a Being. It is from it that issues the great unseen Logos, who evolves all the other logoi, the primeval Manu who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the manifested Logos. [378] Hence we learn in the “Commentaries” that while no Dhyan Chohan, not even the highest, can realise completely “the condition of the preceding Cosmic evolution,” “the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences of all the Cosmic evolutions throughout Eternity.” This is very plain: the first Manu is called Swayambhuva, “the Self-manifested,” the Son of the unmanifested Father. The Manus are the creators of the creators of our First Race — the Spirit of mankind — which does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first “pre-Adamic” men on Earth. Manu declares himself created by Viraj, [379] or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity), [380] which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic activity: that Logos or Universal Monad (collective Elohim) that radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity — progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated human monads of planetary chains as well as of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is “Swayambhuva,” the self-born, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system), and whose radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhuva (a generic name, mysterious and meaning far more than appears), each of these becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity. (See “The Manus and the Manvantaras Explained by a Western Mystic and Mathematician.”) As to the question of the four distinct races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in it, except the ethereal bodies of the first races; and it is a matter of legendary, nevertheless, very correct history. That legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindus have, to this day. Trying to account for the community of legends in the remote antiquity — held by Chinese, Chaldean, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks — and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of “Mythical Monsters,” remarks, that “we must not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture (as in China), the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay . . . and how much more . . . if . . . minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes.” (“Mythical Monsters,” by Ch. Gould, p. 134.) And how many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from this Stanza: “During the first seven crores of the Kalpa (70,000,000 years) the Earth and its two Kingdoms (mineral and vegetable), one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi-ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore [381] the mother (Earth) grows opaque, and in the FOURTEENTH [382] the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of nature (geological changes) last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals.” The last change took place nearly twelve crores of years ago (120,000,000). But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier. (Commentary, xxii.) Thus, if we are to believe esoteric teaching, there have been no more universal geological disturbances and changes for the last 120 millions of years, and the Earth was, even before that time, ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about eighteen millions of years ago, after the first great failure of nature to create beings alone, without the help of the divine “Fashioners,” had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three races (See above Stanzas III. et seq.). The actual duration of the first two and a-half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The History of the Races begins at the separation of the Sexes, when the preceding egg-bearing androgynous race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub-races of the Third Root-Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this “destruction” which is called allegorically the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu (or “Humanity”) remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain: — In the Symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for Chaotic unsettled matter — Chaos itself: and the Water for the feminine principle — the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it — “[[Arche]] (ark) answers to the Hebrew rasit, or Wisdom . . . . and (at the same time) to the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of nature (and of mankind) floats or broods on the great Abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane (or racial) cycle.” Ark is also the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which broods over chaos. Now Vishnu is the divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of life — the third person of the Trimurti (composed of Brahma, the Creator, Siva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver). Vishnu is shown in the allegory as guiding, under the form of a fish, the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu clean across the waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word fish. (See Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, etc.) Its theological meanings is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus is called the “Fish,” and so were Vishnu and Bacchus: [[Ies]], the “Saviour” of mankind, being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called [[Ichthus]], the fish. [383] As to the Seven Rishis in the Ark, they symbolised the seven principles, which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and no longer a divine creature. (See for further details, “The Seventh Manu.”) Nor have we many details about the submersion of the continent inhabited by the Second Root Race. But the history of the Third, “Lemuria,” is given, as is that of Atlantis, the others being only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary age (the Eocene), [384] and it is during this Deluge also — an actual geological deluge this time — that Vaivasvata Manu is again shown as saving mankind (allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is saved); so also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago, [385] after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times. It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. It is of this cataclysm that the old records (See the “Book of Enoch”) say that “the ends of the Earth got loose;” and upon which the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deukalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect saved, have been built. Tradition, taking into no account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both indifferently “deluges.” Yet there is a great difference. The cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor — the fourth continent — was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred records of the East. Hence, Modern Science denies Atlantis and its existence. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the reason for the change of climates to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are other men of Science, such as Sir H. James (Athenaeum, Aug. 25, 1860), and Sir John Lubbock (ibid), who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced — only to accept it later on whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact? How far our figures agree, or rather disagree with modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Book, where the geology and anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the same in Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned in the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which calls Atlantis “Lemuria,” however, whenever it accepts such a submerged continent. With regard to the pre-human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even up to the appearance of the “Mindless” First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. More may be said: that which Science — recognizing only physical man — has a right to regard as the prehuman period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean race, since it is only then that man became the “complete organic being he is now.” And this would make Adamic man no older than a few million of years. [386] The author of the Qabbalah remarks truly that “Man to-day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being-hood of precedent human life,” or lives, rather. “According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam (Rishoun), went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge-boor-ah, Qai-yin and Ra’hmin Seth. These three were divided into 70 species, called: the principal roots of the human race.” (p. 422.) “Said Rabbi Jehudah: ‘How many garments (of the incorporeal man) are these which are crowned’ (from the day man was ‘created’)? Said R. El’eazar: ‘The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua’h spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings . . . : and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world.” (Zohar I., 119b. col. 475; Qabbalah, 412.) This relates to the races (their “garments,” or degree of materiality) and to the three principles of man in their three vehicles. STANZA XI. THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES.
43. They (the Lemurians) built huge cities. Of rare earths and metals they built. Out of the fires (lava) vomited. Out of the white stone of the mountains (marble) and the black stone (of the subterranean fires) they cut their own images, in their size and likeness, and worshipped them (a). (a) As the History of the first two human races — the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans — proceeds, we have at this point to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively. Here reference is also made to the divine Dynasties, such as were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their human kings; they are still believed in by the modern Hindus, and are enumerated in their sacred books. But of these we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern geologists are now being driven into admitting the evident existence of submerged continents. But to confess their presence is not to accept that there were men on them during the early geological periods; [387] ay, men and civilized nations, not Palaeolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences, and knew astronomy, architecture and mathematics to perfection. This primeval civilization did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Yet, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub-race building their first rock-cities out of stone and lava. [388] One of such great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow piece of sterile ground, and was entirely destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the Lemurians of the last sub-races; and an occultist shows, therefore, no wonder on learning that the stone relics found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are “very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru,” (“The Countries of the World,” by Robert Brown, Vol. 4, p. 43); and that they are in the Cyclopean style. The first large cities, however, appeared on that region of the continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection with the former, and Karma — its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the spark dropped into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long generations of bestiality. [389] The Aryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated. [390] It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements, his brothers — more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them — built cities, and cultivated arts and sciences. Nevertheless, and civilization notwithstanding, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, they, the builders, could now obtain theirs only gradually; even these being generally used for power over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command and the guidance over his own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking. “There is no such thing as magic” philosophises “She,” the author forgetting that “magic” in her early day still meant the great science of wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought — “though there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.” (p. 152). But they have become “Secrets” only in our race, and were public property with the Third. Gradually, mankind went down in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save the hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga” — called later the “Sons of the Fire Mist.” Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub-race. But, as said in the Commentary: — The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island (the primitive Sveta-dwipa) had perished ages before. Their (Lemuria’s) elect, had taken shelter on the sacred Island (now the “fabled” Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert), while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground (“cave-men”), when the golden yellow race (the Fourth) became in its turn “black with sin.” From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Sveta-dwipa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya, east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted. . . . The demi-gods of the Third had made room for the semi-demons of the Fourth Race. Sveta-dwipa, whose northern parts of the Toyambudhi the seven Kumaras (Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatana, Sanatkumara, Jata, Vodhu, and Panchasikha) had visited, agreeably with exoteric tradition (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana; Asiat. Researches also, Vol. XI., pp. 99, 100); the White Island had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dwipa (Pushkara) and Rakshasas from the seventh climate replaced the Saddhus and the ascetics of the Third age, who “had descended to them from other and higher regions.” . . . . It is evident that, taken in their dead letter, the Puranas read as an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. But if one reads chapters I., II. and III. from Book II. (Vol. II.) of Vishnu Purana and accepts verbatim its geography, geodesy, and ethnology, in the matter of Priyavrata’s seven sons, among whom the father divides the seven Dwipas (Continental Islands); and then proceeds to study how the eldest son, the King of Jambu-dwipa, Agnidhra, apportioned Jambu-dwipa among his nine sons; and then how Nabhi his son, who had a hundred sons and apportioned all these in his turn — then the reader is likely to throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the esoteric student will understand that, in the days when the Puranas were written, the true meaning was clear only to the Initiated Brahmins, who wrote those works allegorically and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will explain to the Orientalists who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, made and still are making such a mess of it, that the first three chapters (See Wilson’s trans. of Vishnu Purana Book II. et seq.) purposely confuse the following subjects and events: — I. The series of Kalpas or Ages (also of Races) are never taken into account; e.g., events which have happened in one being allowed to stand along with those which took place in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events and calculations in saying — “Whenever any contradictions in different Puranas are observed, they are ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the like” (Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas). II. The several meanings of the words “Manvantara” and “Kalpa” or age, are withheld, and the general one only given. III. In the genealogy and geography of the Kings and their Varshas (countries) and Dwipas, they are all allowed to be regarded as terrestrial regions. Now, the truth is that, without entering into too minute details, it is easy and permissible to show that: — (a) The Seven Dwipas apportioned to Priyavrata’s septenary progeny refer to several localities: first of all to our planetary chain. Jambu-dwipa alone representing our globe, the six others are the (to us) invisible companion globes of this earth. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic descriptions. Jambu (dwipa) “is in the centre of all these (the so-called insular continents) and is surrounded” by a sea of salt water (lavana), whereas Plaksha, Salmalia, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka and Pushkara, are “surrounded severally — by great seas of sugar-cane juice, of wine, of clarified butter, of curds, of milk,” etc., etc., and such like metaphorical names. (Chap. II., Book II.) This is shown furthermore by — (b) Bhaskara Acharya, who uses expressions from the Secret Doctrine and its books, in his description of the sidereal position of all these dwipas: — “the sea of milk and the sea of curds” etc., meaning the Milky Way, and the various congeries of nebulae; the more so, since he names “the country to the south of the equator Bhur-loka, that to the north Bhuva-loka, Swar, Mahar, Jana, Tapo and Satya lokas”; and says: “Those lokas are gradually attained by increasing religious merits,” i.e., they are various paradises. (See Bibliotheca Indica. Trans. of the Goladhyaya of the Siddhanta-siromani III., 21-44). (c) That this geographical division of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas and countries, does not belong only to our Round nor even to our races (the name of Bharata Varsha (India) notwithstanding), is explained in the texts themselves by the narrator of Vishnu Purana. For he closes the first chapter by saying: “Bharata (the son of Nabhi, who gave his name to Bharata-Varsha or India) consigned the Kingdom to his son Sumati . . . . and abandoned his life at Salagrama. He was afterwards born again as a religious Brahman, in a distinguished family of ascetics . . . . under these princes (Bharata’s descendants) Bharata Varsha was divided into nine portions, and their descendants held successively possession of the country for seventy-one periods of the aggregate of the four ages,” or the reign of a Manu, representing a Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years. But having said so much, Parasara suddenly explains that “this was the creation of Swayambhuva Manu, by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varaha,” i.e., the boar incarnation, or Avatar. Now every Brahmin knows that it is only with Vaivasvata Manu that our Humanity began on this Earth (or Round). And if the Western reader turns to the sub-section on “The Primeval Manus of Humanity,” he will see that Vaivasvata is the seventh of the fourteen Manus who preside over our planetary chain during its life cycle: i.e., that representing or standing in every Round for two Manus of the same name (a Root and a Seed Manu), he is the Root Manu of the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only “an incongruity” (see his Vishnu Purana, vol. II., p. 108, footnote), and speculates that “the patriarchial genealogies are older than the chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas,” and thus “have been rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods.” It is nothing of the kind. But as Orientalists know nothing of the secret teaching, they will take everything literally, and then turn round and abuse the writers of that which they do not comprehend! These genealogies embrace a period of three and a half Rounds; they speak of pre-human periods, and explain the descent into generation of every Manu — the first manifested sparks of the One Unity — and show, furthermore, each of these human sparks dividing into, and multiplying by, first, the Pitars, the human ancestors, then by human Races. No being can become God, or Deva, unless he passes through the human cycles. Therefore the Sloka says, “Happy are those who are born, even from the (latent) condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-varsha; as that is the way to . . . final liberation.” In Jambu-dwipa, Bharata is considered the best of its divisions, because it is the land of works. In it alone “it is that the succession of four Yugas (ages), the Krita, the Treta, the Dwapara, and Kali take place”; when, therefore, Parasara, asked by Maitreya “to give him the descriptions of the Earth,” returns again to the enumeration of the same Dwipas with the same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Swayambhuva Manvantara — it is simply a blind, yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub-divisions, islands, and continents, some of which were called by the names of celestial lokas, and by those of other globes. Hence the confusion. All these are called by the Orientalists “mythical” and “fabulous” islands and lands. [391] Very true, some are not of this earth, but they still exist. The “White Island” and Atala, at all events, are no myths, since the latter was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers of the Fifth Race to the land of Sin — Atlantis, in general, not to Plato’s island alone; and since the former was (a) the Sveta-dwipa of theogony, and (b) Saka-dwipa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions) in its beginnings. This was when it yet had its “seven holy rivers that washed away all sin,” and its “seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no contention, no deviation from virtue,” as it was then inhabited by the caste of the Magas — that caste which even the Brahmins acknowledged as not inferior to their own — and which was the nursery of the first Zaratushta. The Brahmins are shown consulting with Gauramukha, on Narada’s advice, who told them to invite the Magas as priests of the Sun in the temple built by Samba (the reputed) son of Krishna, who in reality had none. In this the Puranas are historical — allegory notwithstanding — and Occultism is stating facts. The whole story is told in Bhavishya Purana. It is stated that, having been cured by Surya (the Sun) of leprosy, Samba, having built a temple dedicated to the Sun, was looking for pious Brahmins to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations made to the God. But Narada (this virgin ascetic whom one finds in every age in the Puranas) advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brahmins to receive emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Samba to Gauramukha (white face), the Purohita or family priest of Hgrasena, King of Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed Samba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Surya, to discharge the duty. Ignorant of the place they lived in, it is Surya, the Sun himself, who directs Samba to Sakadwipa beyond the salt water. Then Samba performs the journey, using Garuda (Vishnu’s and Krishna’s vehicle, the great Bird) who lands him among the Magas, etc. Now Krishna, who lived 5,000 years ago, and Narada, who is found reborn in every cycle (or race), besides Garuda — the symbol esoterically of the great cycle — show the allegory; yet the Magas are the Magi of Chaldea, and their class and worship were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Saka-dwipa, the Sinless. All the Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Saka-dwipa are the forefathers of the fire-worshipping Parsis. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their dwarfing hundreds of thousands to a few centuries this time: they carry the event — Narada and Samba notwithstanding — to the days of the flight of the Parsis to Gujerat, which is simply absurd, as that was in the VIIIth cent. of our era. Though the Magas in the Bhavishya Purana are credited with still living in Saka-dwipa in the day of Krishna’s Son, yet the last of it — Plato’s “Atlantis” — had perished 6000 years before. They were Mag “late of” Saka-Dwipa, and lived in those days in Chaldea. This is an intentional confusion, again. The earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet the human Asuras and the Rakshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the future continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the Ocean floors. “Lemuria,” as we have called the continent of the Third Race, was then a gigantic land. [392] It covered the whole area of space from the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean, not only beyond Rapa-nui (Teapy, or Easter Island) which now lies in latitude 26 S., and longitude 110 W. (See Addenda to this Book II., Section, “Proofs of the Submerged Continents.”) This statement seems corroborated by Science, — even if only partially; as, when discussing continental trends, and showing the infra-Arctic masses trending generally with the Meridian, several ancient continents are generally mentioned, though inferentially. Among such the “Mascarene continent,” which included Madagascar, stretching north and south, is spoken of, and the existence of another ancient continent running “from Spitzbergen to the Straits of Dover, while most of the other parts of Europe were sea bottom,” is taught. [393] The latter corroborates, then, the Occult teaching which shows the (now) polar regions as the earliest of the seven cradles of Humanity, and as the tomb of the bulk of the mankind of that region during the Third Race, when the gigantic continent of Lemuria began separating into smaller continents. This is due, according to the explanation in the Commentary, to a decrease of velocity in the earth’s rotation: — “When the Wheel runs at the usual rate, its extremities (the poles) agree with its middle circle (equator), when it runs slower and tilts in every direction, there is a great disturbance on the face of the Earth. The waters flow toward the two ends, and new lands arise in the middle belt (equatorial lands), while those at the ends are subject to pralayas by submersion. . . .” And again: — . . . “Thus the wheel (the Earth) is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon, for the breath of its waters (tides). Toward the close of the age (Kalpa) of a great (root) race, the regents of the moon (the Pitar fathers, or Pitris) begin drawing harder, and thus flatten the wheel about its belt, when it goes down in some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the extremities (poles) new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in.” We have but to read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very clearly. Scientists (modern Specialists) have ascertained the influence of the tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planets, and the shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs periodically. [394] Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations backward to the periods of the earth’s first incrustation. (See “American Naturalist,” XVIII., 15 et seq.); therefore it seems easy for Science to verify the Esoteric statements. We propose to treat of this at greater length in the Addenda. (Vide § § V. and VI.) It is asked by some Theosophists: “What will Atlantis be like when raised?” they understanding from a few words in “Esoteric Buddhism” that “old continents” that have been submerged will reappear. Here, again, there is a slight misconception. Were the same identical lands of Atlantis that were submerged to be raised again, then they would, indeed, be barren for ages. Because the Atlantic sea-bottom is covered with some 5,000 feet of chalk at present, and more is forming — a new “cretaceous formation” of strata, in fact — is no reason why, when the time for a new continent to appear arrives, a geological convulsion and upraising of the sea bottom should not dispose of these 5,000 feet of chalk for the formation of some mountains and 5,000 more come to the surface. The racial cataclysms are not a Noah’s deluge of forty days — a kind of Bombay monsoon. That the periodical sinking and re-appearance of the mighty continents, now called Atlantis and Lemuria by the modern writers, is no fiction, will be demonstrated in the Section in which all the proofs of the same have been collated together. The most archaic Sanskrit and Tamil works teem with references to both Continents. The seven sacred Islands (Dwipas) are mentioned in the Surya Siddhanta, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of Asura Maya, the Atlantean astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out re-incarnated in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these “sacred islands” Atlantean — as done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by Priyavrata, the Son of Swayambhuva Manu, to his seven sons — was not Atlantis, even though one or two of these islands survived the subsidence of their fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose continent had been submerged in its turn. When originally mentioned by Parasara (Vishnu Purana) the seven refer to an esoteric doctrine which is explained further on. Of all the seven islands, Jambu-dwipa is the only one that is terrestrial, for it is our globe. In the Puranas every reference to the North of Meru is connected with that primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region; which, when the magnolia blossomed there where now we see an unexplored endless desert of ice, was then a continent again. Science speaks of an ancient continent which stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a horse-shoe-like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring Straits as an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower curve of the semi-circle. This continent was raised simultaneously with the submersion of the equatorial portions of Lemuria. Ages later, some of the Lemurian remains re-appeared again on the face of the Oceans. Therefore, though it can be said without departing from truth that Atlantis is included in the Seven great insular continents, since the Fourth Race Atlanteans got some of the Lemurian relics, and, settling on the islands, included them among their lands and continents, yet a difference should be made and an explanation given, once that a fuller and more accurate account is attempted, as in the present work. Easter Island was also taken possession of in this manner by some Atlanteans; who, having escaped from the cataclysm which befell their own land, settled on that remnant of Lemuria only to perish thereon, when destroyed in one day by its volcanic fires and lava. This may be regarded as fiction by certain geographers and geologists; to the Occultists it is history. What does Science know to the contrary? “Until the appearance of a map, published at Basle in 1522, wherein the name of America appears for the first time, the latter was believed to be part of India . . . . . Science also refuses to sanction the wild hypothesis that there was a time when the Indian peninsula at one end of the line, and South America at the other, were connected by a belt of islands and continents. The India of the pre-historic ages . . . . was doubly connected with the two Americas. The lands of the ancestors of those whom Ammianus Marcellinus calls the ‘Brahmans of Upper India’ stretched from Kashmir far into the (now) deserts of Schamo. A pedestrian from the north might then have reached — hardly wetting his feet — the Alaskan peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe, and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America.” (But see “Five years of Theosophy,” art. “Leaflets from Esoteric History,” pp. 338 and 340.) This was written from the words of a Master — a rather doubtful authority for the materialists and the sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the same feather — Ernest Haeckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates the statement almost verbatim: . . . . “It would seem that the region on the earth’s surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the closely related catarrhine apes (!!) took place, must be sought either in Southern Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the Third Race flourished — H.P.B.] or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, which, lying to the South of the Asia of to-day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to upper India and Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa.” (See supra and compare “The Pedigree of Man,” p. 80-81.) In the epoch we are treating of, the Continent of “Lemuria,” had already broken asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. There was, nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe in those days, all these slumbering yet on the Ocean floors. Nor was there much of present Asia; for the cis-Himalayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond this stretched the “lotus leaves” of Sveta-dwipa, the countries now called Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc., etc. The immense Continent, which had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Isle, for instance, belongs to the earliest civilisation of the Third Race. Submerged with the rest, a volcanic and sudden uplifting of the Ocean floor, raised the small relic of the Archaic ages untouched, with its volcano and statues, during the Champlain epoch of northern polar submersion, as a standing witness to the existence of Lemuria. It is said that some of the Australian tribes are the last remnants of the last descendants of the Third Race. In this we are again corroborated to a degree by materialistic Science. Haeckel, when speaking of Blumenbach’s brown or Malay race and the Australians and Papuans, remarks: — “There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of Polynesia, that Australian island-world, that seems to have been once on a time a gigantic and continuous continent.” (“Pedigree of Man,” p. 82. But see footnote supra and the Addenda.) It certainly was, since it stretched, during the Third Race, east and west, as far as where the two Americas now lie, and since the present Australia is but a portion of it, as are also a few surviving islands sown hither and thither on the face of the Pacific and a large bit of California, which belonged to it. Funnily enough, Haeckel, in his fantastic “Pedigree of Man,” considers “the Australians of to-day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged (? !), of that second branch of the primitive human race. . . that spread northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man’s infancy, and seems to have been the parent of all the other straight-haired races of men. . . . The one, woolly-haired, migrated in part, westwards” . . . (i.e., to Africa and northwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no existence as yet) . . . “the other, straight-haired, was evolved farther to the north in Asia . . . . and peopled Australia . . .” (p. 81). “Behold,” writes a master, “the relics of that once great nation (Lemuria of the Third Race) in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia” (“Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 65). But they belong to the last remnants of the Seventh Sub-race of the Third. Prof. Haeckel must also have dreamt a dream and seen for once a true vision! It is to this period that we have to look for the first appearance of the Ancestors of those, who are termed by us the most ancient peoples of the world — now called respectively the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phoenicians on the other. These were governed by the divine dynasties, i.e., kings and rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from spheres higher and more celestial than our own sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is useless of course to attempt to force their existence on sceptics. Their greatest pride consists in proving their patronymic denomination as catarrhinides; which fact they try to demonstrate on the alleged authority of the Coccyx appended to their os sacrum, that rudimentary tail which, if they only had it long enough, they would wag in joy and for ever, in honour of its eminent discoverer. These will remain as faithful to their ape-ancestors as Christians will to tailless Adam. The Secret Doctrine, however, sets right on this point theosophists and students of Occult Sciences. If we regard the Second portion of the Third Race as the first representatives of the really human race with solid bones, then Haeckel’s surmise that “the evolution of the primitive men took place . . . . in either Southern Asia or . . . . Lemuria” — Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of question — is correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, in the same way that the evolution of the First Race (from the bodies of the pitars) took place on seven distinctly separated regions of the (then) only Earth at the arctic pole — so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur: it began in those northern regions, which have just been described a few pages back as including Behring’s Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic regions and most adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when: — “The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over the heads of that portion of the Sweat Born; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish remained as half-grown babes [395] in size and intellect. This was the third pralaya of the races. [396] Which means again, that our globe is subject to seven periodical entire changes which go pari passu with the races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial pralayas, three occasioned by the change in the inclination of the earth’s axis. It is a law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic law. In Occultism this inexorable law is referred to as “the great adjuster.” Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and such changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes; nor does it seem so sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared rather to deny the axial phenomena altogether, than admit the intelligent Karmic hand and law which alone could reasonably explain such sudden changes and their results. It has tried to account for them by various more or less fantastic speculations; one of which would be the sudden, and as imaginary, collision of our earth with a comet (De Boucheporn’s hypothesis), as the cause of all the geological revolutions. But we prefer holding to our esoteric explanation, since Fohat is as good as any comet, having, in addition, universal intelligence to guide him. Thus, since Vaivasvata Manu’s Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four such axial disturbances; when the old continents — save the first one — were sucked in by the oceans, other lands appeared, and huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the survival of the fittest nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones — the failures — were disposed of by being swept off the earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order. The Sub-races are subject to the same cleansing process, as also the side-branchlets (the family-Races). Let one, well-acquainted with astronomy and mathematics, throw a retrospective glance into the twilight and shadows of the Past. Let him observe, take notes of what he knows of the history of peoples and nations, and collate their respective rises and falls with what is known of astronomical cycles — especially with the Sidereal year, equal to 25,868 of our solar years. [397] If the observer is gifted with the faintest intuition, then will he find how the weal and woe of nations is intimately connected with the beginning and close of this sidereal cycle. True, the non-occultist has the disadvantage that he has no such far distant times to rely upon. He knows nothing, through exact Science, of what took place nearly 10,000 years ago; yet he may find consolation in the knowledge or — if he so prefers — speculation on the fate of every one of the modern nations he knows of — about 16,000 years hence. Our meaning is very clear. Every sidereal year the tropics recede from the pole four degrees in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator rounds through the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every astronomer knows, at present the tropic is only twenty-three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from the equator. Hence it has still 2 1/2 degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal year; which gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a reprieve of about 16,000 years. [398] After the Great Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) — “Men decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished. Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and Pigmies (the dwarfed races of the Poles). . . Many acquired divine, more — unlawful knowledge, and followed willingly the LEFT PATH.” (Commentary xxxiii.) Thus were the Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods it took to accomplish this fourth destruction? Who can tell. . . . But we are told that — (44.) They (the Atlanteans) built great images, nine yatis high (27 feet) — the size of their bodies (a). Lunar fires had destroyed the land of their fathers (the Lemurians). Water threatened the Fourth (Race) (b). (a) It is well worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a portion of an undeniably submerged continent — as also those found on the outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages — are all between 20 and 30 feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all twenty-seven feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders. (See § “Stones, Witnesses to Giants,” at the end of this Stanza.) The writer is well aware that the modern archaeologists have decided now that “these statues are not very old,” as declared by one of the high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is one of those arbitrary decisions of modern science which does not carry much weight. We are told that it is after the destruction of “Lemuria” by subterranean fires that men went on steadily decreasing in stature — a process already commenced after their physical Fall — and that finally, some millions of years after, they reached between six and seven feet, and are now dwindling down (as the older Asiatic races) to nearer five than six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub-race of the Fourth Root Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family (Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders) are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo-Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub-races, the others to the very last and transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow. (b) Now, how could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac is denied to the Hindus by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Aryan Hindus knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled-for slander was so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, and what is more, by the clear evidence of facts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptians have on their Zodiacs (See Denon’s “Voyage en Egypte” Vol. II.) irrefutable proofs of records having embraced more than three-and-a-half sidereal years — or about 87,000 years — the Hindu calculations cover nearly thirty-three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad, “These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the (last local) Flood (in Asia), or Age of Horror,” in the latitude of India. And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Aryan historical memory — that which submerged the last portions of Atlantis, 850,000 years ago. The floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical. The sinking and transformation of Lemuria beginning nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), the Third Race ended its career in Lanka, or rather on that which became Lanka with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lanka, while the enormous island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic continent described a few pages back. As a Master says (See “Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 65): — “Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them . . . . there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to re-appear again and bear their new groups of mankind and civilisations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?” Not the same identical continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern “Lemuria.” The prolongation of that great continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden — which every geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river — is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary Age. The former reality of this river is a fact of science — will its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, which their data demand? Professor Berthold Seeman not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent — thus corroborating the whole “horse-shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south-easterly line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d’Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean. (Cf. chart adapted from the “Challenger” and “Dolphin” soundings in Mr. Donnelly’s, “Atlantis, the Antediluvian World,” p. 47.) The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis. The latter, indeed, must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria, than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race-evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and became ultimately the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest “occult” authority, that “Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America.” (“Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 58.) The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded by it as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. Discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claims of the Asiatic philosophers, who maintain that Sciences — Geology, Ethnology, and History included —were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived an untold number of ages ago. Future finds will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Aryans of India, Chaldeans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations during “myriads of centuries”; [399] and the latter points to the fact that, “Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.” [400] To this Professor R. Owen adds that, “Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes”; and Winchell (“Pre-Adamites,” p. 120), that “at the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books.” This is quite natural if we have to believe the statements of Herodotus, who records in Euterpe (cxlii.), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years compared with the millions of years elapsed since the Lemurian period? The latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, its tremendous antiquity, notwithstanding. The complete records of the growth, development, social, and even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the secret annals. Unfortunately, few are those who can read them; and those who could would still be unable to understand the language, unless acquainted with all the seven keys of its symbolism. For the comprehension of the Occult Doctrine is based on that of the seven sciences; which sciences find their expression in the seven different applications of the secret records to the exoteric texts. Thus we have to deal with modes of thought on seven entirely different planes of Ideality. Every text relates to, and has to be rendered from, one of the following standpoints —
The other planes too far transcend the average consciousness, especially of the materialistic mind, to admit of their being even symbolized in terms of ordinary phraseology. There is no purely mythical element in any of the ancient religious texts; but the mode of thought in which they were originally written has to be found out and closely adhered to during the process of interpretation. For, it is either symbolical (archaic mode of thought), emblematical (a later though very ancient mode of thought), parabolical (allegory), hieroglyphical, or again logo-grammical — the most difficult method of all, as every letter, as in the Chinese language, represents a whole word. Thus, almost every proper name, whether in the Vedas, the “Book of the Dead,” or the Bible (to a degree), is composed of such logograms. No one who is not initiated into the mystery of the occult religious logography can presume to know what a name in any ancient fragment means, before he has mastered the meaning of every letter that composes it. How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say — i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of Solar-myth and sexual-worship — shall penetrate into the arcana behind the veil. One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern mythologists. Thus, Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah, etc., etc. — all the head-figures of the world-deluges, universal and partial, astronomical or geological — all furnish in their very names the records of the causes and effects which led to the event, if one can but read them fully. All such deluges are based on events that took place in nature, and stand as historical records, therefore, whether they were sidereal, geological, or even simply allegorical, of a moral event on other and higher planes of being. This we believe has now been sufficiently demonstrated during the long explanation necessitated by the allegorical Stanzas. To speak of a race nine yatis, or 27 feet high, in a work claiming a more scientific character than “Jack the Giant-Killer,” is a somewhat unusual proceeding. “Where are your proofs?” the writer will be asked. In History and tradition, is the answer. Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal; they exist in oral and written lore. India had her Danavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim (Numbers xiii. 33). Moses speaks of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide (Deut. iii. 11), and Goliath was “six cubits and a span in height” (or 10 ft. 7 in.). The only difference found between the “revealed Scripture” and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., etc., is this: While the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that geology and archaeology should believe, that several countries were inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants have to be given up. (But see Part III., Addenda, the closing chapter.) Of still standing witnesses to the submerged continents, and the colossal men that inhabited them, there are still a few. Archaeology claims several such on this globe, though beyond wondering “what these may be” — it never made any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Besides the Easter Island statues mentioned already, to what epoch do the colossal statues, still erect and intact near Bamian, belong? Archaeology assigns them to the first centuries of Christianity (as usual), and errs in this as it does in many other speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of them to orthodox Science. In “The Countries of the World,” by Robert Brown, in Vol. IV., page 43, it is stated that —
“There is no reason to believe that any of the statues have been built up, bit by bit, by scaffolding erected around them” — adds the journal very suggestively — without explaining how they could be built otherwise, unless made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. One of the best of these colossal images is now in the British Museum. The images at Ronororaka — the only ones now found erect — are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like the head of a man asleep. Their types, though all are long-headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths and chins differ greatly in form, their head-dress, moreover — a kind of flat cap with a back piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head —showing that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked — “Who made them?” — but it is not archaeology nor yet geology that is likely to answer, though the latter recognizes in the Island a portion of a submerged continent. But who cut the Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world, for Bartholdi’s “Statue of Liberty” (now at New York) is a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain “all honeycombed with gigantic cells,” with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from Shoo-King) the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had “troubled the earth”; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old. “Masses of enormous human bones” were found “in America, near Misorte,” a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot which local tradition points out as the landing spot of those giants who overran America when it had hardly arisen from the waters (See “De La Vega,” Vol. ix., ch. ix.). [401] Central Asian traditions say the same of the Bamian statues. What are they, and what is the place where they have stood for countless ages, defying the cataclysms around them, and even the hand of man, as in the instance of the hordes of Timoor and the Vandal-warriors of Nadir-Shah? Bamian is a small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Kobhibaba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian (or Hindu-Kush) chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. In days of old, Bamian was a portion of the ancient city of Djooljool, ruined and destroyed to the last stone by Tchengis-Khan in the XIIIth century. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their viharas. Such viharas are to be met with in profusion, to this day, in the rock-cut temples of India and the valleys of Jellalabad. It is at the entrance of some of these that five enormous statues, of what is regarded as Buddha, have been discovered or rather rediscovered in our century, as the famous Chinese traveller, Hiouen-Thsang, speaks of, and saw them, when he visited Bamian in the VIIth century. When it is maintained that no larger statues exist on the whole globe, the fact is easily proven on the evidence of all the travellers who have examined them and taken their measurements. Thus, the largest is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the “Statue of Liberty” now at New York, as the latter is only 105 feet or 34 metres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is only 120 feet (15 feet taller than the said “Liberty”). [402] The third statue is only 60 feet high — the two others still smaller, the last one being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga; M. de Nadeylac thinks (See infra) that the general appearance of the figure, the lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, point out undeniably that Buddha was meant to be represented. But the above proves nothing. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of Buddha, represented in the posture of Samadhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. “The merciful Lord, our Master, hears the cry of agony of the smallest of the small, beyond vale and mountain, and hastens to its deliverance”: —says a Stanza. Gautama Buddha was an Aryan Hindu, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort them artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore Hiouen Thsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that “the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue” in his day “dazzled one’s eyes,” but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The very drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, cut out in the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. Whom does it represent in such case, it may be asked? Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments — which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting — are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, like some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent, in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races. The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second — 120 feet high — represents the sweat-born; and the third — measuring 60 feet — immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter. (See the following sub-section on “Cyclopean Ruins, and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants.”) These are, then, the “Giants” of antiquity, the ante- and post-diluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as “grasshoppers” in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene, or at any rate in the Miocene age, and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years. In everything that pertains to prehistoric times the reader ought to bear the wise words of Montaigne in his mind. Saith the great French philosopher: —
A fair-minded scholar should, before denying the possibility of our history and records, search modern History, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races. Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is found scattered about and buried even in the British Museum alone. The reader is asked to throw one more glance at the subject-matter treated of in the chapter which follows: — Cyclopean Ruins and Colossal Stones as Witnesses to Giants. In his enormous works — Memoires addressees a l’Academie des Sciences — de Mirville, carrying out the task of proving the reality of the devil and showing his abode in every ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of “historical evidence” that in the days of miracle — Pagan and Biblical — the stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sung. That finally, “Christ-stone,” or Christ-Rock, “the spiritual Rock” that followed “Israel” (1 Corinth. x. 4) “became a Jupiter lapis,” swallowed by his father Saturn, “under the shape of a stone.” [403] We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and materialization of Biblical metaphors, simply for the sake of proving the Satanism of idols, though a good deal might be said [404] on this subject. But without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence on hand, to show that (a) had there been no giants to move about such colossal rocks, there could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany) and other such Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as magic, there could never have been so many witnesses to oracular and speaking stones. In the Achaica (p. 81) we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid “for worshipping stones.” But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of thinking.” Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same — a crime Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans with, as they do likewise — one may be allowed to believe in what so many great philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniases. The reader is referred to Volume VI. of the Academie des Inscriptions (Memoires, p. 518, et seq.) if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of Magic and psychic powers. In a poem on Stones attributed to Orpheus, those stones are divided into ophites and siderites, “serpent-stones” and “star-stones.” “The ‘Ophite’is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has the gift of speech; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound similar to the cry of a child. It is by means of this stone that Helanos foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland . . ” etc. (Falconnet.) Sanchoniathon and Philo Byblios, in referring to these betyles, call them “Animated Stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. The latter (Eusebius) never parted with his ophites, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from them, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling. [405] Arnobius (a holy man who, “from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church,” Christians tell their readers) confesses he could never meet on his passage with one of such stones without putting it questions, “which is answered occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice.” Where is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan ophites, we ask? It is also known that the famous stone at Westminster was called liafail — “the speaking stone,” — which raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry (Monuments Celtiques) says he saw it when it still bore the inscription: — [406]
Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heraclius, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.” (See Dictionnaire des Religions par l’abbe Bertrand; art. on words Heraclius and Betyles.) De Mirville — who seeks to justify the Bible — inquires very pertinently, why the monstrous stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior-gaur (from Cor, “dance,” whence chorea, and gaur, a giant), or the dance of giants? And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop of St. Gildas. But the authors of the Voyage dans le Comte de Cornouailles, sur les traces des geants, and of various learned works on the ruins of Stonehenge, [407] Carnac and West Hoadley, give far better and more reliable information upon this particular subject. In those regions — true forests of rocks — immense monoliths are found, “some weighing over 500,000 kilograms” (Cambry). These “hinging stones” of Salisbury Plain are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were historical men and not Cyclopes, nor giants. Who then, if not giants, could ever raise such masses (especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley), range them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the ground, are set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, and would yet resist the efforts of twenty men who should attempt to displace them. We say, that most of these stones are the relics of the last Atlanteans. We shall be answered that all the geologists claim them to be of a natural origin. That, a rock when “weathering,” i.e., losing flake after flake of its substance under influence of weather, assumes this form. That, the “tors” in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this cause. That, finally, as all scientists consider the “rocking stones to be of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in layers” — our statement will be justly denied, especially as “we see this process of rock-modification in progress around us to-day.” Let us examine the case. But read what Geology has to say, and you will learn that often these gigantic masses do not even belong to the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those regions and to be found only far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke (French trans., Sepulture des Tartares. Arch. VII., p. 222), speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that there, where they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have been brought over “from immense distances and with prodigious efforts.” Charton (Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes, Vol. I., p. 230) speaks of a specimen of such rock “from Ireland,” which had been submitted to the analysis of an eminent English geologist, who assigned to it a foreign origin, “most probably African.” This is a strange coincidence, as Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular stones to a Sorcerer who brought them from Africa. De Mirville sees in that sorcerer “an accursed Hamite.” [408] We see in him a dark Atlantean, or perhaps even some earlier Lemurian, who had survived till the birth of the British Islands — Giants in every and any case. [409] “Men,” says Cambry, naively, “have nothing to do with it . . . for never could human power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has accomplished it all (!!) and Science will demonstrate it some day” (!!) (p. 88). Nevertheless, it is a human, though gigantic power, which has accomplished it, and no more “nature” alone than god or devil. “Science,” having undertaken to demonstrate that even the mind and Spirit of man are simply the production of blind forces, is quite capable of accepting the task. It may come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that nature alone has marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds flying from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland! It is true that Cambry recanted later on. “I had believed for a long time,” he says, “that Nature alone could produce those wonders . . . . but I recant . . . . chance is unable to create such marvellous combinations . . . . and those who placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau. . . . .” Dr. John Watson, quoted by the same author “Antiquites Celtiques,” p. 99, says, when speaking of the moving rocks, or Rocking-Stones situated on the slope of Golcar (the “Enchanter”): “The astonishing movement of those masses poised in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to gods.” . . . . In “Stonehenge” (Flinders Petrie) it is said that “Stonehenge is built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or ‘sarsen’ stone, locally called ‘grey wethers.’ But some of the stones, especially those which are said to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance, probably the North of Ireland.” To close, the reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in 1850 in the Revue Archeologique (p. 473), are worthy of being quoted. Says the paper, concerning the rocking stones: —
For once we agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such prodigies of statics and equilibrium, applied to masses weighing millions of pounds, can be the work of Palaeolithic savages, of cave-men, taller than the average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is no use for our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking-stones. Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis, who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place, every effort made to keep it elsewhere notwithstanding. At the time of the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far bigger one and had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its accustomed place. . . The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in 1554. . . And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytanea “whence it ran away several times, which forced them to lead it” (Nat. Hist., XXXVI., p. 592) . . . Here we have immense stones stated by all antiquity to be “living, moving, speaking and self-perambulating.” They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they have been called routers (“to put to flight,” to rout) and Des Mousseaux shows them all to be prophetic stones and called mad stones (see his, “Dieu et les Dieux” p. 587). “The rocking-stone is accepted in Science. Why did it rock, why was it made to do so? One must be blind not to see that this motion was one more means of divination, and that they were called for this very reason ‘the stones of truth.’ ” (de Mirville, “Fetichisme”) [411] This is history, the Past of prehistoric times, warranting the same in later ages. The Dracontia, sacred to the moon and the serpent, were the more ancient “Rocks of Destiny” of older nations, whose motion, or rocking, was a code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this ancient reading. Vormius and Olaus Magnus show that it was according to the orders of the oracle, “whose voice spoke through the immense rocks raised by the colossal powers of ancient giants,” that the kings of Scandinavia were elected. “In India and Persia,” says Pliny, “it is she (the Persian Oitzoe) whom the magi had to consult for the election of their sovereigns” (Nat. Hist., lxxxvii., chap. LIV.); and he describes (in chap. XXXVIII., l. ii.) a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a manner that “a single finger can move it, while the weight of the whole body makes it resist.” Why then should not the rocking stones of Ireland, or those of Brinham, in Yorkshire, have served for the same mode of divination or oracular communications? The hugest of them are evidently the relics of the Atlanteans; the smaller ones, such as Brinham Rocks, with some revolving stones on their summit, are copies from the more ancient lithoi. Had not the bishops of the middle ages destroyed all the plans of the Dracontia they could lay their hands on, Science would know more of these. [412] As it is, we know that they were universally used during long prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and magic. E. Biot, a member of the Institute of France, published in his Antiquites de France, Vol. ix., an article showing the Chatam peramba (the Field of Death, or ancient burial ground in Malabar), to be identical with the old tombs at Carnac — “a prominence and a central tomb.”. . . “Bones are found in them (the tombs),” he says, “and Mr. Hillwell tells us that some of these are enormous, the natives (of Malabar) calling the tombs the dwellings of Rakshasas (giants).” Several stone circles, “considered the work of the Panch Pandava (five Pandus), as all such monuments are in India, so numerous in that country,” when opened by the direction of Rajah Vasariddi, “were found to contain human bones of a very large size.” (T. A. Wise, in “History of Paganism in Caledonia,” p. 36). Again, de Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his conclusions. As the long cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to “great natural geological commotions” (Charlton), and “are the work of Nature” (Cambry) is now exploded, his remarks are very just. “Before the impossibility of such a theory is asserted, we advise Science to reflect . . . . and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends: for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking stones will oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to see clearer and realise once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity” (“Fetichisme,” p. 288). It is just what we can never repeat too often, though the voices of both Occultists and Roman Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as was ancient and mediaeval theology in its interpretations of the so-called Revelation. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape — a transformation requiring millions of years — and yet fears to make mankind older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of species, natural selection and evolution from the lowest form to the highest; from mollusc to fish, from reptile to bird and mammalian. Yet it refuses to man, who physiologically is only a higher mammal and animal, such transformation of his external form. But if the monstrous iguanodon of the Wealden may have been the ancestor of the diminutive iguana of to-day, why could not the monstrous man of the Secret Doctrine have become the modern man — the link between Animal and Angel? Is there anything more unscientific in this “theory,” than in that of refusing to man any spiritual immortal Ego, making of him an automaton, and ranking him, at the same time, as a distinct genus in the system of Nature? Occult Sciences may be less scientific than the present exact Sciences, they are withal more logical and consistent in their teachings. Physical forces, and natural affinities of atoms may be sufficient as factors to transform a plant into an animal; but it requires more than a mere interplay between certain material aggregates and their environment, to call to life a fully conscious man; even though he were no more indeed than a ramification between two “poor cousins” of the Quadrumanous order. Occult Sciences admit with Haeckel that (objective) life on our globe “is a logical postulate of Scientific natural history,” but add that the rejection of a like Spiritual involution, from within without, of invisible subjective Spirit-life — eternal and a Principle in Nature — is more illogical, if possible, than to say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by blind forces inherent in matter, without any external help. Suppose an Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come originally into being in the following manner. First, there was a progressive and gradual elaboration in Space of an organizable material, which resulted in the production of a state of matter named organic protein. Then, under the influence of incident forces, those states having been thrown into a phase of unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into and resulted in new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of leather and ivory, wind-pipes and bellows. After which, having adapted all its parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed forth Mozart’s Requiem. This was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad infinitum; its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes by its own inherent force and fancy. . . . . What would Science say to such a theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its spiritual crown. Whatever may have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the subject of the gradual transformation of species, what he says in it applies to our doctrine. “Construed in terms of evolution, every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations on a pre-existing kind of being.” (“Essays on Physiology,” Subj. p. 144.) Then why, in this case, should not historical man be the product of a modification on a pre-existent and pre-historical kind of man, even supposing for argument’s sake that there is nothing within him to last longer than, or live independently of, his physical structure? But this is not so! For, when we are told that “organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call artificial evolution” (Appendix to “Principles of Biology,” p. 482), we answer the distinguished English philosopher, that Alchemists and great adepts have done as much, and, indeed, far more, before the chemists ever attempted to “build out of dissociated elements complex combinations.” The Homunculi of Paracelsus are a fact in Alchemy, and will become one in Chemistry very likely, and then Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein will have to be regarded as a prophecy. But no chemist, or Alchemist either, will ever endow such a “Frankenstein’s Monster” with more than animal instinct, unless indeed he does that which the “Progenitors” are credited with, namely, if he leaves his own physical body, and incarnates in the “empty form.” But even this would be an artificial, not a natural man, for our “Progenitors” had, in the course of eternal evolution, to become gods before they became men. The above digression, if one, is an attempt at justification before the few thinking men of the coming century who may read this. But this accounts also for the reason why the best and most spiritual men of our present day can no longer be satisfied with either Science or theology; and why they prefer any such “psychic craze” to the dogmatic assertions of both, neither of the two having anything better to offer than blind faith in their respective infallibility. Universal tradition is indeed the far safer guide in life. And universal tradition shows primitive man living for ages together with his Creators and first instructors — the Elohim — in the World’s “Garden of Eden,” or “Delight.” We shall treat of the Divine Instructors in Stanza XII. 45. The first great waters came. They swallowed the seven great islands (a). 46. All holy saved, the unholy destroyed. With them most of the huge animals produced from the sweat of the earth (b). (a) As this subject — the fourth great deluge on our globe in this Round — is fully treated in the chapters that follow the last Stanza, to say anything more at present would be mere repetition. The seven great islands (Dwipas) belonged to the continent of Atlantis. The secret teachings show that the “Deluge” overtook the Fourth, giant Race, not on account of their depravity, or because they had become “black with sin,” but simply because such is the fate of every continent, which — like everything else under our Sun — is born, lives, becomes decrepit, and dies. This was when the Fifth Race was in its infancy. (b) Thus the giants perished — the magicians and the sorcerers, adds the fancy of popular tradition, but “all holy saved,” and alone the “unholy were destroyed.” This was due, however, as much to the prevision of the “holy” ones, who had not lost the use of their “third eye,” as to Karma and natural law. Speaking of the subsequent race (our Fifth Humanity), the commentary says: — “Alone the handful of those Elect, whose divine instructors had gone to inhabit that Sacred Island — ‘from whence the last Saviour will come’ — now kept mankind from becoming one-half the exterminator of the other [as mankind does now — H.P.B.]. It (mankind) became divided. Two-thirds of it were ruled by Dynasties of lower, material Spirits of the earth, who took possession of the easily accessible bodies; one-third remained faithful, and joined with the nascent Fifth Race — the divine Incarnates. When the Poles moved (for the fourth time) this did not affect those who were protected, and who had separated from the Fourth Race. Like the Lemurians — alone the ungodly Atlanteans perished, and ‘were seen no more.’. . . .” STANZA XII. THE FIFTH RACE AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
47. Few (men) remained. Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red, remained. The moon-coloured (of the primitive Divine Stock) were gone for ever (a) . . . . 48. The Fifth Race produced from the Holy Stock (remained). It was ruled by Her First Divine Kings. 49. The “Serpents” who re-descended; who made peace with the Fifth (Race), who taught and instructed it (b) . . . . (a) This verse (47) relates to the Fifth Race. History does not begin with it, but living and ever-recurring tradition does. History — or what is called history — does not go further back than the fantastic origins of our fifth sub-race, a “few thousands” of years. It is the sub-divisions of this first sub-race of the Fifth Root-Race which are referred to in the sentence, “Some yellow, some brown and black, and some red, remained.” The “moon coloured” (i.e., the First and the Second Races) were gone for ever — ay, without leaving any traces whatever; and that, so far back as the third “Deluge” of the Third Lemurian race, that “Great Dragon,” whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. And this is the true meaning of the Verse in the Commentary which says: “The Great Dragon has respect but for the ‘Serpents’ of Wisdom, the Serpents whose holes are now under the triangular stones,” i.e., “the Pyramids, at the four corners of the world.” (b) This tells us clearly that which is mentioned more than once elsewhere in the Commentaries; namely, that the Adepts or “Wise” men of the three Races (the Third, Fourth and the Fifth) dwelt in subterranean habitats, generally under some kind of pyramidal structure, if not actually under a pyramid. For such “pyramids” existed in the four corners of the world and were never the monopoly of the land of the Pharaohs, though until found scattered all over the two Americas, under and over ground, beneath and amidst virgin forests, as in plain and vale, they were supposed to be the exclusive property of Egypt. If the true geometrically correct pyramids are no longer found in European regions, many of the supposed early neolithic caves, of the colossal triangular, pyramidal and conical menhirs in the Morbihan, and Brittany generally; many of the Danish tumuli and even of the “giant tombs” of Sardinia with their inseparable companions, the nuraghi, are so many more or less clumsy copies of the pyramids. Most of these are the works of the first settlers on the newly-born continent and isles of Europe, the — “some yellow, some brown and black, and some red” — races that remained after the submersion of the last Atlantean continents and islands (850,000 years ago), with the exception of Plato’s Atlantean island, and before the arrival of the great Aryan races; while others were built by the earliest immigrants from the East. Those who can hardly accept the antiquity of the human race so far back as the 57,000 years assigned by Dr. Dowler to the skeleton found by him at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi, will, of course, reject these facts. But they may find themselves mistaken some day. It is the foolish self-glorification of the Arcadians who styled themselves [[proselenoi]] — older than the moon — and of the people of Attica, who claimed that they had existed before the sun appeared in heaven, that we may disparage, not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the mammoth and mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic salamander, have been mistaken for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the mammalians, man is the only one whom science will not allow to have dwarfed down, like all other animal frames, from the giant homo diluvii to the creature between 5 and 6 feet that he is now. But the “Serpents of Wisdom” have preserved their records well, and the history of the human evolution is traced in heaven as it is traced on underground walls. Humanity and the stars are bound together indissolubly, because of the intelligences that rule the latter. Modern symbologists may scoff at this and call it “fancy,” but “it is unquestionable that the Deluge has (ever) been associated in the legends of some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the constellations,” writes Mr. Staniland Wake (“The Great Pyramid”).The “Old Dragon” is identical with the “great Flood,” says Mr. Proctor (in “Knowledge,” Vol. I., p. 243): “We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole, or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples . . . the Dragon would be the uppermost or ruling constellation . . . it is singular how closely the constellations . . . correspond in sequence and in range of right ascension with the events recorded respecting the (Biblical) Flood.” The reasons for this singularity have been made clear in this work. But it shows only that there were several Deluges mixed up in the memories and traditions of the sub-races of the Fifth Race. The first great “Flood” was astronomical and cosmical, while several others were terrestrial. Yet, this did not prevent our very learned friend Mr. Gerald Massey — an Initiate truly in the mysteries of the British Museum, still only a Self-initiate — from declaring and insisting that the Atlantean submersion and Deluge were only the anthropomorphized fancies of ignorant people; and that Atlantis was no better than an astronomical allegory. Nevertheless, the great Zodiacal allegory is based upon historical events, and one can hardly interfere with the other; and it stands also to reason that every student of Occultism knows what that astronomical and zodiacal allegory means. Smith shows in the Nimrod Epic of the Assyrian tablets the real meaning of it. Its “twelve cantos” refer to the “annual course of the Sun through the twelve months of the year. Each tablet answers to a special month, and contains a distinct reference to the animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac”; the eleventh canto being “consecrated to Rimmon, the God of storms and of rain, and harmonizes with the eleventh sign of the Zodiac — Aquarius, or the Waterman” (Nineteenth Century, 1882, p. 236). But even this is preceded in the old records by the pre-astronomical Cosmic flood, which became allegorized and symbolized in the above Zodiacal or Noah’s Flood. But this has nothing to do with Atlantis. The Pyramids are closely connected with the ideas of both the Great Dragon (the constellation), the “Dragons of Wisdom,” or the great Initiates of the Third and Fourth Races, and the Floods of the Nile, regarded as a divine reminder of the great Atlantic Flood. The astronomical records of Universal History, however, are said to have had their beginnings with the Third Sub-race of the Fourth Root-race or the Atlanteans. When was it? Occult data show that even since the time of the regular establishment of the Zodiacal calculations in Egypt, the poles have been thrice inverted. We will presently return once more to this statement. Such symbols as are represented by the Signs of the Zodiac — a fact which offers a handle to materialists upon which to hang their one-sided theories and opinions — have too profound a signification, and their bearing upon our Humanity is too important to suffer dismissal in a few words. Meanwhile, we have to consider the meaning of that other statement which mentions (verse 48) the first divine Kings, who are said to have “redescended,” guided and instructed our Fifth Race after the last deluge! We shall consider this last claim historically in the sections that follow, but must end with a few more details on the subject of “Serpents.” The rough commentaries on the Archaic Stanzas have to end here. Further elucidation requires proofs obtained from ancient, mediaeval, and modern works that have treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in, collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of the weird symbol — so often referred to and suggestive of the “tempter of man” in the orthodox light of the church — can never be too strongly insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every available proof at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans and Kabirs have been invariably made out by our theologians and some pious symbologists as indissolubly connected with the grotesque personage called devil, and every proof to the contrary has been hitherto as invariably rejected and ignored; therefore, the occultist must neglect nothing which may tend to defeat this conspiracy of slander. It is proposed to divide the subjects involved in these three last verses into several groups, and examine them in this final chapter as carefully and as fully as space permits. A few more details may thus be added to the general evidences of antiquity, on the most disputed tenets of Occultism and the Esoteric Doctrine — the bulk of which will be found in Part II. on Symbology. Serpents and Dragons under different Symbolisms. The name of the Dragon in Chaldea was not written phonetically, but was represented by two monograms, probably meaning, according to the Orientalists, “the scaly one.” “This description,” very pertinently remarks G. Smith, “of course might apply either to a fabulous dragon, a serpent, or a fish,” and we may add: “It applies in one case to Makara, the tenth Zodiacal sign, meaning in Sanskrit a non-descript amphibious animal, generally called Crocodile, and really signifying something else. (Vide Part II., “The Mysteries of the Hebdomad.”) This, then, is a virtual admission that the Assyriologists, at all events, know nothing certain as to the status of the “Dragon” in ancient Chaldea, whence the Hebrews got their symbolism, only to be afterwards robbed of it by the Christians, who made of the “Scaly one” a living entity and a maleficent power. A specimen of Dragons, “winged and scaled,” may be seen in the British Museum. Representing the events of the Fall according to the same authority, there are also two figures sitting on each side of a tree, and holding out their hands to the “apple,” while at the back of the “Tree” is the Dragon-Serpent. Esoterically, the two figures are two “Chaldees” ready for initiation, the Serpent symbolising the “Initiator”; while the jealous gods, who curse the three, are the exoteric profane clergy. Not much of the literal “Biblical event” there, as any occultist can see. “The Great Dragon has respect but for the Serpents of Wisdom,” says the Stanza; thus proving the correctness of our explanation of the two figures and the “Serpent.” “The Serpents who redescended . . . . who taught and instructed” the Fifth Race. What sane man is capable of believing in our day that real serpents are hereby meant? Hence the rough guess, now become almost an axiom with the men of science, that those who wrote in antiquity upon various sacred Dragons and Serpents either were superstitious and credulous people, or were bent upon deceiving those more ignorant than themselves. Yet, from Homer downwards, the term implied something hidden from the profane. “Terrible are the gods when they manifest themselves” — those gods whom men call Dragons. And AElianus, treating in his “De Natura Animalium” of these Ophidean symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he understood well the nature of this most ancient of symbols. Thus he most pertinently explains with regard to the above Homeric verse — “For the Dragon, while sacred and to be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of which it is better (for others?) to remain in ignorance” (Book xi., ch. 17). This “Dragon” having a septenary meaning, the highest and the lowest may be given. The former is identical with the “Self-born,” the Logos (the Hindu Aja). He was the second person of the Trinity, the Son, with the Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent-Worshippers. His symbol was the constellation of the Dragon. [413] Its seven “stars” are the seven stars held in the hand of the “Alpha and Omega” in Revelation. In its most terrestrial meaning, the term “Dragon” was applied to the Wise men. This portion of the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the Christian ear that it can hardly escape, all civilization notwithstanding, being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished Christian dogmas, the subject of which required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton, whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma. Did the allegory of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in Heaven originate with St. John, and in his Revelation? Emphatically we answer — No. His “Dragon” is Neptune, the symbol of Atlantean magic. To demonstrate the negation the reader is asked to examine the symbolism of the Serpent or the Dragon under its several aspects. The Sidereal and Cosmic Glyphs. Every astronomer — besides Occultists and Astrologers — knows that, figuratively, the astral light, the milky way, and also the path of the Sun to the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, as well as the circles of the Sidereal or Tropical year, were always called “Serpents” in the allegorical and mystic phraseology of the adepts. This, cosmically, as well as metaphorically. Poseidon is a “Dragon”: “Chozzar, called by the profane Neptune” (Peratae Gnostics); the “Good and Perfect Serpent,” the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol in Heaven is Draco. But one ought to discriminate between the characters of this symbol. For instance: Zoroastrian Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine; and when, as an example, we read in the Vendidad complaints uttered against the “Serpent,” whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring of Airyana-Vaego, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, at the same time as mental and psychic consumption, every occultist knows that the Serpent alluded to is the north pole, as also the pole of the heavens. [414] The latter produces the seasons according to the angle at which it penetrates the centre of the earth. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal spring of Airyana Vaego by the good river Daitya had disappeared, and “the Aryan Magi had to emigrate to Sagdiani” — say the exoteric accounts. But the esoteric teaching states that the pole had passed through the equator, and that the “land of bliss” of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures. The Neo-Aryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognise the mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood, and conversed with the pure “Yazathas” (celestial Spirits of the Elements), whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein (Revue Archeologique, 8th year, 1885), “the Vendidad seems to point out a great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the Kara-Korum chain.” The Egyptians, according to Eusebius, who for once (and for a wonder) wrote the truth, symbolised Kosmos by a large fiery circle, representing a serpent with a hawk’s head lying across its diameter. “Here we have the pole of the earth within the plane of the ecliptic, attended with all the fiery consequences that must arise from such a state of the heavens: when the whole Zodiac in 25,000 (odd) years, must have reddened with the solar blaze, and each sign must have been vertical to the polar region.” (See Mackey’s “Sphinxiad.”) Meru — the abode of the gods — was placed, as before explained, in the North Pole, while Patala, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Patala have one significance and represent localities; while astronomically, they have another, and mean “the two poles,” which meanings ended by their being often rendered in exoteric sectarianism — the “Mountain” and the “Pit,” or Heaven and Hell. If we hold at present only to the astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the ancients knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than any of our modern astronomers; they had reasons, and good ones for naming one the “Mountain” and the other the “Pit.” As the author just quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same: “Heli-on is the Sun in the highest” (Helios, Heli-on, the “most high”); “and Acheron is 32 deg. above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32 degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which surrounded the southern pole, being therefore called the Pit, while observing, toward the Northern pole that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared above the horizon — they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of the Gods, these were said to ascend and descend periodically; by which (astronomically) the Zodiacal gods were meant, the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the heaven.” “In that age,” adds the author of that curious work, the “Sphinxiad” and of “Urania’s Key to the Revelations” — “at noon, the ecliptic would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from the North Pole to the north horizon; crossing the eight coils of the Serpent (eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years), which would seem like an imaginary ladder with eight staves reaching from the earth up to the pole, i.e., the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, i.e., the signs of the Zodiac, ascended and descended. (Jacob’s ladder and the angels) . . . . It is more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder.” . . . . This is an ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from occult heresy. Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific and especially theological character. As just said, the Christian trinity was purely astronomical from its beginning, which made Rutilius say — of those who euhemerized it — “Judaea gens, radix stultorum.” But the profane, and especially the Christian fanatics, ever in search of scientific corroboration for their dead-letter texts, will persist in seeing in the celestial pole the true Serpent of Genesis, Satan, the Enemy of mankind, instead of what it is — a cosmic metaphor. When the gods are said to forsake the earth, it does not only mean the gods, protectors and instructors, but also the minor gods — the regents of the Zodiacal signs. Yet, the former, as actual and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed mankind in its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as much as in the Hindu Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura-Mazda, the “Lord of Wisdom,” is the synthesis of the Amshaspends (or Amesha-Spenta — “Immortal Benefactors”), [415] the “Word,” however, or the Logos and its six highest aspects in Mazdyanism. These “Immortal Benefactors” are described in Zamyad yasht as the “Amesha-Spentas, the shining, having efficacious eyes, great, helpful . . . . imperishable and pure which are all seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike . . . . which are the creators and destroyers of the creatures of Ahura-Mazda, their creators and overseers, their protectors and rulers . . . .” These few lines alone indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspends, our Dhyan-Chohans or the “Serpents of Wisdom.” They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura-Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians — the Star-yazatas of the Zoroastrians — or again the seven planets (including the sun) of every religion. [416] The epithet — “the shining having efficacious eyes” — proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the divine powers of Ahura-Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the “Builders,” the “watchers,” the Pitar (fathers), and the first Preceptors of mankind. When mortals shall have become sufficiently spiritualised, there will be no more need of forcing them into a correct comprehension of ancient Wisdom. Men will know then, that there never yet was a great World-reformer, whose name has passed into our generation, who (a) was not a direct emanation of the Logos (under whatever name known to us), i.e., an essential incarnation of one of “the seven,” of the “divine Spirit who is sevenfold”; and (b) who had not appeared before, during the past Cycles. They will recognise, then, the cause which produces in history and chronology certain riddles of the ages; the reason why, for instance, it is impossible for them to assign any reliable date to Zoroaster, who is found multiplied by twelve and fourteen in the Dabistan; why the Rishis and Manus are so mixed up in their numbers and individualities; why Krishna and Buddha speak of themselves as re-incarnations, i.e., Krishna is identified with the Rishi Narayana, and Gautama gives a series of his previous births; and why the former, especially, being “the very supreme Brahma,” is yet called Amsamsavatara — “a part of a part” only of the Supreme on Earth. Finally, why Osiris is a great God, and at the same time a “prince on Earth,” who reappears in Thoth-Hermes, and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) of Nazareth is recognised, cabalistically, in Joshua, the Son of Nun, as well as in other personages. The esoteric doctrine explains it by saying that each of these (as many others) had first appeared on earth as one of the seven powers of the Logos, individualized as a God or “Angel” (messenger); then, mixed with matter, they had re-appeared in turn as great sages and instructors who “taught the Fifth Race,” after having instructed the two preceding races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of mankind, and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last incarnations they had become truly only “the parts of a part” on earth, though de facto the One Supreme in Nature. This is the metaphysics of Theogony. And, as every “Power” among the seven has (once individualized) in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules over it, [417] hence the many meanings in every symbol, which, unless interpreted according to the esoteric methods, generally lead to an inextricable confusion. Does the Western Kabalist — generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist — require a proof? Let him open Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la Magie,” p. 53, and carefully examine his “Grand Symbole Kabalistique” of the Zohar. He will find, on the engraving given, a white man standing erect and a black woman upside down, i.e., standing on her head, her legs passing under the extended arms of the male figure, and protruding behind his shoulders, while their hands join at an angle on each side. Eliphas Levi makes of it, God and Nature; or God, “light,” mirrored inversely in “Nature and Matter,” darkness. Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as emblematical cosmogony goes. Nor has he invented the symbol any more than the Kabalists have: the two figures in white and black stone have existed in the temples of Egypt from time immemorial — agreeably to tradition; and historically — ever since the day of King Cambyses, who personally saw them. Therefore the symbol must have been in existence since nearly 2,500 years ago. This, at the very least, for that Persian sovereign, who was a son of Cyrus the Great, succeeded his father in the year 529 B.C. These figures were the two Kabiri personifying the opposite poles. Herodotus (Thalia, No. 77) tells posterity that when Cambyses entered the temple of the Kabirim, he went into an inextinguishable fit of laughter, on perceiving what he thought a man erect and a woman standing on the top of her head before him. These were the poles, however, whose symbol was intended to commemorate “the passing of the original North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the Heaven,” as perceived by Mackey. [418] But they represented also the poles inverted, in consequence of the great inclination of the axis, bringing each time as a result the displacement of the Oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and vice versa. These Kabirim were the “Deluge” gods. This may help us to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of names and titles given to one and the same gods, and classes of gods. Faber showed already, at the beginning of this century, the identity of the Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei Dactyli, Lares, Penates, Manes, [419] Titans, and Aletae with the Kabiri. And we have shown that the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis and our Dhyan Chohans, who incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony the Kabiri-Titans were seven great gods: cosmically and astronomically the Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were connected (a) with At-al-as “the divine Sun,” and (b) with tit “the deluge.” But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious, awe-inspiring great gods — the Dioscuri, [420] the deities surrounded with the darkness of occult nature — become the Idei (or Idaeic finger) with the adept-healer by metals. The true etymology of the name lares (now signifying “ghosts”) must be sought in the Etruscan word “lars,” “conductor,” “leader.” Sanchoniathon translates the word Aletae as fire worshippers, and Tabor believes it derived from Al-Orit, “the god of fire.” Both are right, as in both cases it is a reference to the Sun (the highest God), toward whom the planetary gods “gravitate” (astronomically and allegorically) and whom they worship. As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber’s etymology, who says that “lar” is a contraction of “El-Ar,” the solar deity, is not very correct. They are the “lares,” the conductors and leaders of men. As Aletae, they were the seven planets — astronomically; and as Lares, the regents of the same, our protectors and rulers — mystically. For purposes of exoteric or phallic worship, as also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, their attributes being recognised in these two capacities by the name of the temples to which they respectively belonged, and those of their priests. They all belonged, however, to the Septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyan Chohans. The Sabeans, who worshipped the “regents of the Seven planets” as the Hindus do their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes (Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the planetary gods. Seth and Enos were borrowed from the Sabeans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but the truth can still be traced about them even in Genesis. [421] Seth is the “progenitor” of those early men of the Third Race in whom the “Planetary” angels had incarnated — a Dhyan Chohan himself, who belonged to the informing gods; and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch) or Hermes, was said to be his son — because it was a generic name for all the early Seers (“Enoichion”). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabeanism; and therefore that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idris (Hermes or Enoch), (See Vyse, “Operations,” Vol. II., p. 358); that thither Sabeans proceeded on pilgrimage, and chanted prayers seven times a day, turning to the North (the Mount Meru, Kaph, Olympus, etc., etc.) (See Palgrave, Vol. II., p. 264). Abd Allatif says curious things about the Sabeans and their books. So does Eddin Ahmed Ben Yahya, who wrote 200 years later. While the latter maintains “that each pyramid was consecrated to a star” (a star regent rather), Abd Allatif assures us “that he had read in Sabean books that one pyramid was the tomb of Agathodaemon and the other of Hermes” (Vyse, Vol. II., p. 342). “Agathodaemon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers, Hermes was his son,” adds Mr. Staniland Wake in “The Great Pyramid,” p. 57. Thus, while in Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples they were the great Cosmic Gods (the seven and the forty-nine Sacred Fires), in the Grecian fanes their rites became mostly phallic, therefore to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were 3 and 4, or 7 — the male and female principles — (the crux ansata); this division showing why some classical writers held that they were only three, while others named four. And these were — the Kabiri — Axieros (in his female aspect, Demeter); Axio-Kersa (Persephone) [422]; Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and Kadmos or Kadmilos (Hermes — not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus (II. 51) but “he of the sacred legend,” explained only during the Samothracian mysteries). This identification, due, according to the Scholiast Apollon (Rh. I. 217), to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is none at all, as names alone do not reveal much. There were still others again who maintained, being as right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were, esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter and Bacchus. The two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the terrestrial, and the pole of the heavens — astronomically, as also the physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth of Bacchus, the Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to be read esoterically to understand the allegory. The parts played in the event by the fire, water, earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how “the father of the gods” and the “merry God of the wine” were also made to personify the two terrestrial Poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic character of the diluvian tragedy. In astronomy, the poles are indeed the “heavenly measure” (vide note supra); and so are the Kabiri Dioscuri, as will be shown, and the Kabiri-Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the invention of fire [423] and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias shows that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus. (I. ix. p. 751.) But the fact that, astronomically, the Titans-Kabirim were also the generators and regulators of the seasons, and cosmically the great Volcanic Energies, the gods presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works, does not prevent them from being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason. They are pre-eminently in every theogony — especially in the Hindu — the sacred divine fires, 3, 7, or 49, according as the allegory demands it. Their very names prove it, as they are the Agni-putra (Sons of the Fire) in India, and the genii of the fire under numerous names in Greece and elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name Kabeiron meaning “the powerful through fire,” from the Greek word [[kaio]] “to burn.” The Semitic Kabirim, “the powerful, the mighty, and the great,” answering to the Greek [[megaloi dunatoi]], are later epithets. They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phoenicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt, Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with fire; their temples ever built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to Chthonian divinities. Therefore Christianity has made of them infernal gods. They are truly “the great, beneficent and powerful Gods,” as Cassius Hermone calls them (See Macrob. Sat. I., iii., c. 4, p. 376). At Thebes, Kore and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary (Pausan. IX. 22; 5), and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to enter their holy precincts (Herodotus I. ii., c. 37). But we must not lose sight, at the same time, of the fact that the title of Kabiri was a generic one; that the Kabiri (the mighty gods as well as mortals), were of both sexes, as also terrestrial, celestial and kosmic. That, while in their later capacity of the Rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological phenomenon (as it is now regarded) was symbolized in the persons of those rulers, they were also, in the beginning of times, the rulers of mankind. When incarnated as Kings of the “divine Dynasties,” they gave the first impulse to civilizations, and directed the mind with which they had endued men to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To them — the Kabiri or Titans — is ascribed the invention of letters (the Devanagari, or the alphabet and language of the gods), of laws and legislature; of architecture, as of the various modes of magic, so-called; and of the medical use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those demi-gods and heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men, and in whom Bryant, Faber, Bishop Cumberland, and so many other Christian writers — too zealous for plain truth —would force posterity to see only pagan copies of one and sole prototype, named Noah — are all generic names. It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed, by producing corn or wheat, the great boon of agriculture. What Isis-Osiris, the once living Kabiria, has done in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class. That the Serpents were ever the emblems of wisdom and prudence is again shown by the caduceus of Mercury, one with Thot, the god of wisdom, with Hermes, and so on. The two serpents, entwined around the rod, are phallic symbols of Jupiter and other gods who transformed themselves into snakes for purposes of seducing goddesses — but only in the unclean fancies of profane symbologists. The serpent has ever been the symbol of the adept, and of his powers of immortality and divine knowledge. Mercury in his psychopompic character, conducting and guiding with the caduceus the souls of the dead to Hades and even raising the dead to life with it, is simply a very transparent allegory. It shows the dual power of the Secret Wisdom: the black and the white magic. It shows this personified Wisdom guiding the Soul after death, and its power to call to life that which is dead — a very deep metaphor if one thinks over its meaning. Every people of antiquity reverenced this symbol, with the exception of Christians, who chose to forget the brazen Serpent of Moses, and even the implied acknowledgment of the great wisdom and prudence of the Serpent by Jesus himself, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” The Chinese, one of the oldest nations of our Fifth Race, made of it the emblem of their Emperors, who are thus the degenerate successors of the “Serpents” or Initiates, who ruled the early races of the Fifth Humanity. The Emperor’s throne is the “Dragon’s Seat,” and his dresses of State are embroidered with the likeness of the Dragon. The aphorisms in the oldest books of China, moreover, say plainly that the “Dragon” is a human, albeit divine, Being. Speaking of the “Yellow Dragon,” the chief of the others, the Twan-ying-t’u, says: “His wisdom and virtue are unfathomable . . . he does not go in company and does not live in herds (he is an ascetic). He wanders in the wilds beyond the heavens. He goes and comes, fulfilling the decree (Karma); at the proper seasons if there is perfection he comes forth, if not he remains (invisible).”. . . And Kon-fu-tyu is made to say by Lu-lan, “The Dragon feeds in the pure water of Wisdom and sports in the clear waters of Life.” Our Divine Instructors. Now Atlantis and the Phlegyan isle are not the only record that is left of the deluge. China has also her tradition and the story of an island or continent, which it calls Ma-li-ga-si-ma, and which Kaempfer and Faber spell “Maurigosima,” for some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kaempfer, in his “Japan” (Appendix, p. 13), gives the tradition: The island, owing to the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiru-un, the king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the divine dynasties of Kings as much as those of any other nations. At the same time there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even multigeneric evolution — spiritual, psychic, intellectual and physical — of human beings, just as given in the present work. A few of these claims have now to be considered. Our races — they all show — have sprung from divine races, by whatever name they are called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese Chim-nang and Tchan-gy — their “divine man” and demi-gods; with the Akkadian Dingir and Mul-lil — the creative god and the “Gods of the ghost-world”; with the Egyptian Isis-Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew Elohim, or again with Manco Capac and his Peruvian progeny — the story varies nowhere. Every nation has either the seven and ten Ki-y; or ten and seven Amshaspends [424] (six exoterically), ten and seven Chaldean Anedots, ten and seven Sephiroth, etc., etc. One and all have been derived from the primitive Dhyan-Chohans of the Esoteric doctrine, or the “Builders” of the Stanzas (Book I.). From Manu, Thot-Hermes, Oannes-Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato and Panadores, all tell us of seven divine Dynasties, of seven Lemurian, and seven Atlantean divisions of the Earth; of the seven primitive and dual gods who descend from their celestial abode [425] and reign on Earth, teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as “gods” and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as “divine-Kings and Rulers.” But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Bosuage shows, the Egyptians themselves confessed that science flourished in their country only since Isis-Osiris, whom they continue to adore as gods, “though they had become Princes in human form.” And he adds of Osiris-Isis (the divine androgyne: — “It is said that this Prince (Isis-Osiris) built cities in Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry.” When Abul-Feda says in his “Historia Anteislamitica” (Fleisher, p. 16) that the Sabean language was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch) — he means by “Sabean language” astronomy. In the “Melelwa Nohil” (MS. 47 in Nic. Cat.) Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodaemon. And in another account (See Col. Vyse’s 2nd Vol. of the “Pyramids of Ghizeh,” p. 364, MS. 785, Uri’s Cat.) Agathodaemon is mentioned as a “King of Egypt.” Celepas Geraldinus gives curious traditions about Henoch. He calls him the “divine giant.” In the “Book of the various names of the Nile,” the same author (the historian Ahmed-Ben-Yusouf Eltiphas) tells us of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth (become later the Egyptian Typhon, Set), had been one of the seven angels (or Patriarchs in the Bible): then he became a mortal and Adam’s son, after which he communicated the gift of prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch. But Henoch (Idris) “the author of thirty books, was Sabaean by origin” (i.e., belonging to the Saba, “a Host”); “having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed 140 cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King.” Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes — or rather one, who appeared — as some Manus and Rishis did — in several different characters. In the Burham-i-Kati he is mentioned as “Hormig,” a name of the planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednesday was sacred both to Hermes and Thot. The Hermes of Oriental tradition, worshipped at Phineata and said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, civilized it under the name of Thoth. But under whichever of these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the sciences from latent to active potency, i.e., with having been the first to teach magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna Graecia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes. Not only Herodotus — the “father of History” — tells us of the marvellous dynasties of gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the dynasties of demi-gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole series of classics support him; Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., etc., repeat the same, and never vary the order given. “It is, indeed,” as Creuzer shows: — “From the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres.” “In the system of the ancient priests (Hierophants and Adepts) all things without exception, gods, the genii, manes (souls), the whole world, are conjointly developed in Space and duration. The pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of Spirits. . . .” [426] There were more efforts made by the modern historians (French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly) to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never be more unwilling than was Eratosthenes 260 years B.C. to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to recognise its truth. For this, the great astronomer is treated with great contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho became with them “a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying priests of Heliopolis” (Freret). “All those historians and priests,” justly remarks the demonologist, de Mirville, “so veracious when repeating stories of human kings and men, suddenly become extremely suspicious no sooner do they go back to their gods.” . . . But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (Manetho’s above all), and that of Ptolemy. In the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of all, in the words of the Egyptologist, de Rouge: — “ . . . Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the whole truth. . . . It was the remains of a list of dynasties embracing the furthest mythoic times, or the reign of the gods and heroes. . . . At the very outset of this curious papyrus we have to arrive at the conviction that so far back already as the period of Ramses, those mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of Egypt, the gods Seb, Osiris, Horus, Thoth-Hermes, and the goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign of each of these.” (Ann. de Philologie Chretienne, Vol. XXXII., p. 442). The synchronistic tables of Manetho, besides the fact that they were disfigured by Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology of the divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and was kept secret from the profane multitudes. Africa, as a continent, it is said, appeared before Europe did; nevertheless it appeared later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. That the whole region of what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea, was known firstly through Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and all the Greeks; and, secondly, through geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island; and the Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with their gods from the North-east. When was it? History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, which records the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between the Lion and Libra, has found its OEdipus, who understood the riddle of these signs, and justified the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus that: — (a) The poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided; and (b) That even since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three times within the plane of the Ecliptic, as the Initiates taught. Bailly had not sufficient words at his command to express his surprise at the sameness of all such traditions about the divine races. “What are finally,” he exclaims, “all those reigns of Indian Devas and Persian Peris? . . . . Or, those reigns and dynasties of the Chinese legends; those Tien-hoang or the Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti-hoang, the Kings on Earth, and the Gin-hoang the King’s men, a distinction which is in perfect accord with that other one made by the Greeks and the Egyptians, in enumerating their dynasties of Gods, of demi-gods, and of mortals.” [426] “Now,” says Panadoras, “it is before that time (Menes), that the reign of the seven gods who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those benefactors of humanity descended on Earth and taught men to calculate the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic.” Nearly five hundred years before the actual era, Herodotus was shown by the priests of Egypt the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs-piromis (the archi-prophets or Maha-Chohans of the temples), born one from the other (without the intervention of woman) who had reigned before Menes, their first human King. These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and forty-five in number, each of which had his name, his history and his annals. And they assured Herodotus [428] (unless the most truthful of historians, the “Father of History,” is now accused of fibbing, just in this instance) that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the three dynasties that preceded the human — namely, the dynasties of the gods, that of demi-gods, and of the Heroes, or giants. These “three dynasties” are the three Races. [429] Translated into the language of the Esoteric doctrine, these three dynasties would also be those of the Devas, of Kimpurushas, and of Danavas and Daityas — otherwise gods, celestial spirits, and giants or Titans. “Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-Varsha!” exclaim the incarnated gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bharata is India, but in this case it symbolized the chosen land in those days, and was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu-dwipa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence; the land of initiation and of divine knowledge. Can one fail to recognise in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, being almost unacquainted with the Aryan Hindu philosophies, little known in his day, he wrote: —
It is such a conception only that can lead man to form a correct conclusion about his origin and the genesis of everything in the universe — of Heaven and Earth, between which he is a living link. Without such a psychological link, and the feeling of its presence, no science can ever progress, and the realm of knowledge must be limited to the analysis of physical matter only. Occultists believe in “spirits,” because they feel (and some see) themselves surrounded on every side by them. [430] Materialists do not. They live on this earth, just as, in the world of insects and even of fishes, some creatures live surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without seeing, or so much as sensing them. [431] Plato is the first sage among the classics who speaks at length of the divine Dynasties, and locates them on a vast continent which he calls Atlantis. Bailly was not the first nor last to believe the same, and he had been preceded and anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher. This learned Jesuit writes in “OEdipus AEgyptiacus” (Vol. I., p. 70): — “I confess, for a long time I had regarded all this (dynasties and the Atlantis) as pure fables (meras nugas) to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all those legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth. . . . .” As de Rougemont shows, Theopompus, in his Meropis, made the priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor speak exactly as the priests of Sais did when they revealed to Solon the history and fate of Atlantis. According to Theopompus, it was a unique continent of an indefinite size, and containing two countries inhabited by two races — a fighting, warrior race, and a pious, meditative race, [432] which Theopompus symbolizes by two cities. [433] The pious “city” was continually visited by the gods; the belligerent “city” was inhabited by various beings invulnerable to iron, liable to be mortally wounded only by stone and wood.” [434] De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of Theopompus (“Peuple Primitif,” vol. iii. 157) and even sees a fraud (supercherie) in the assertion of the Saitic priests. This was denounced by the “Demonologists” as illogical. In the words of De Mirville: — “A supercherie which was based on a belief, the product of faith of the whole antiquity; a supposition which yet gave its name to a whole mountain chain (the Atlas); which specified with the greatest precision a topographical region (by placing some of its lands at a small distance from Cadiz and the strait of Calpetus), which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, the great trans-oceanic land situated beyond that Atlantis and which “is reached” it said — “by the islands not of the blessed, but of the good spirits [[eudaimonia]] (our ‘Iles Fortunees’) — such a supposition can never be an universal chimera.” (A word on “Atlantis,” p. 29.) It is certain that, whether “chimera” or reality, the priests of the whole world had it from one and the same source: the universal tradition about the third great continent which perished some 850,000 years ago. [435] A continent inhabited by two distinct races; distinct physically and especially morally; both deeply versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets of nature; mutually antagonistic in their struggle, during the course and progress of their double evolution. Whence even the Chinese teachings upon the subject, if it is but a fiction? Have they not recorded the existence once upon a time of a holy island beyond the sun (Tcheou), and beyond which were situated the lands of the immortal men? (See de Rougemont, ibid.) Do they not still believe that the remnants of those immortal men — who survived when the holy island had become black with sin and perished — have found refuge in the great desert of Gobi, where they still reside invisible to all, and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits? “If one has to lend ear to traditions,” writes the very unbelieving Boulanger, (“Regne des Dieux,” Introduction) . . . “the latter place before the reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and demi-gods; and still earlier and beyond they place the marvellous reign of the gods and all the fables of the golden age. . . . One feels surprised that annals so interesting should have been rejected by almost all our historians. And yet the ideas communicated by them were once universally admitted and revered by all the peoples; not a few revere them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such considerations seem to necessitate a less hurried judgment. . . . The ancients, from whom we hold these traditions, which we accept no longer because we do not understand them now, must have had motives for believing in them furnished by their greater proximity to the first ages, and which the distance that separates us from them refuses to us . . . . Plato in his fourth book of Laws, says that, long before the construction of the first cities, Saturn had established on earth a certain form of government under which man was very happy. As it is the golden age he refers to, or to that reign of gods so celebrated in ancient fables . . . . let us see the ideas he had of that happy age, and what was the occasion he had to introduce this fable into a treatise on politics. According to Plato, in order to obtain clear and precise ideas on royalty, its origin and power, one has to turn back to the first principles of history and tradition. Great changes, he says, have occurred in days of old, in heaven and on earth, and the present state of things is one of the results (Karma). Our traditions tell us of many marvels, of changes that have taken place in the course of the Sun, of Saturn’s reign, and of a thousand other matters that remained scattered about in human memory; but one never hears anything of the EVIL which has produced those revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them. Yet . . . . that Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able to treat of royalty and the origin of power. . . .” That evil, Plato seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the natures of the rulers and the ruled, for he says that long before man built his cities, in the golden age, there was naught but happiness on earth, for there were no needs. Why? Because Saturn, knowing that man could not rule man, without injustice filling forthwith the universe through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal to obtain power over his fellow creatures. To do this the god used the same means we use ourselves with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or a ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd, i.e., a being of a species quite different from their own and of a superior nature. It is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and placed to rule over it no mortal King or prince but — “Spirits and genii ([[daimones]]) of a divine nature more excellent than that of man.” It was god, the Logos (the synthesis of the Host) who thus presiding over the genii, became the first shepherd and leader of men. [436] When the world had ceased to be so governed and the gods retired, “ferocious beasts devoured a portion of mankind.” “Left to their own resources and industry, inventors then appeared among them successively and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public gratitude deified them . . . .” (“De Legibus” 1, iv.; in Crit. and in Politic). And mankind was right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of nature, the first and chief property of matter that was revealed to man. “Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the ‘Lords of Wisdom’ for the benefit of those they ruled — from other lokas (spheres). . .” say the Commentaries. Now: “The earliest inventions (?) of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made. . . The first use of fire, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses (?) — these are all discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare. They are all unknown to history — all lost in the light of an effulgent dawn.” (“Unity of Nature,” Argyll.) This will be doubted and denied in our proud generation. But if it is asserted that there are no grains and fruits unknown to earth, then we may remind the reader that wheat has never been found in the wild state: it is not a product of the earth. All the other cereals have been traced to their primogenital forms in various species of wild grasses, but wheat has hitherto defied the efforts of botanists to trace it to its origin. And let us bear in mind, in this connection, how sacred was that cereal with the Egyptian priests; wheat being placed even with their mummies, and found thousands of years later in their coffins. Remember: — “The servants of Horus glean the wheat in the field of Aanroo, . . . wheat seven cubits high.” (“Book of the Dead,” chap. xcix., 33; and clvi., 4.) [437] The reader is referred to Stanza VII.,Verse 3, Book I., wherein this verse is explained in another of its meanings, and also to the “Book of the Dead,” chap. cix., v. 4 and 5. “I am the Queen of these regions,” says the Egyptian Isis; “I was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. . . . I am she who rises in the constellation of the dog . . . (Dog-star) . . . . Rejoice, O Egypt! thou who wert my nurse.” (Book I., chap. XIV.) [438] Sirius was called the dog-star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha, called the great instructor of mankind, before other Buddhas. The book of the Chinese Y-King, attributes the discovery of agriculture to “the instruction given to men by celestial genii.” “Woe, woe to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. . . . They are all blind [439] since they remain ignorant how much the world is full of various and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places” (Zohar, Part I., col. 177.) The “Sons of God” have existed and do exist. From the Hindu Brahmaputras and Manasaputras (Sons of Brahma and Mind-born sons) down to the B’ne-aleim of the Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and universal tradition force reason to yield to such evidence. Of what value is independent criticism so called, or “internal evidence” (based usually on the respective hobbies of the critics), in the face of the universal testimony, which never varied throughout the historical cycles? Read esoterically the sixth chapter of Genesis, which repeats the statements of the Secret Doctrine, only changing slightly its form, and drawing a different conclusion which clashes even with the Zohar. “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that when ‘the Sons of God’ (b’ne-aleim) “came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” (or giants). [440] What does this sentence “and also after that” signify unless it means when explained: “There were giants in the earth before, i.e., before the sinless sons of the Third Race; and also after that when other sons of God, lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on earth (as Daksha did, when he saw that his Manasaputras would not people the earth)”? And then comes a long break in this chapter vi. of Genesis, between verses 4 and 5. For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the “mighty men” . . . . men of renown, among whom is placed Nimrod the “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that “god saw that the wickedness of man was great,” nor in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes. And if we are taken to task by theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse was ever a dilemma, not alone for the men of science and Biblical scholars, but also for priests. For, as the Rev. Father Peronne puts it: — “Either they (the B’ne-aleim) were good angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they were bad (angels) and in this case could not be called b’ne-aleim, the “sons of God.” (Praelectiones theol. ch. ii.) This Biblical riddle — “the real sense of which no author has ever understood,” as candidly confessed by Fourmont [441] — can only be explained by the Occult doctrine, through the Zohar to the Western, and the Book of Dzyan to the Eastern. What the former says we have seen; what the Zohar tells us is this: B’ne-aleim was a name common to the Malachim (the good Messengers) and to the Ischin (“the lower angels”) (Rabbi Parcha). We may add for the benefit of the demonologists that their Satan, “the adversary,” is included in Job among the sons of God or b’ne-aleim who visit their father.” (Chapter i.) But of this later on. Now the Zohar says that the Ischin, the beautiful B’ne-aleim, were not guilty, but mixed themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so. (Book of Ruth and Schadash; fol. 63, col. 3; Amsterdam edition). Elsewhere the same volume shows these b’ne-aleim belonging to the tenth sub-division of the “Thrones” (Zohar, part iii., col. 113. But see also 1st vol. 184). It also explains that the Ischin, “men-spirits,” viri spirituales, now that men can see them no longer, help magicians to produce, through their science, homunculi which are not small men but “men smaller (in the sense of inferiority) than men.” Both show themselves under the form that the Ischin had then, i.e., gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel. But Azazel, whom the Church dogma will associate with Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a mystery, as explained elsewhere, and it is so expressed in Maimonides, “In More Nevochim” (chapter xxvi., p. 8). “There is an impenetrable mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel.” And so there is, as Lanci, a librarian to the Vatican and one who ought to know, says — we have quoted him before — that “this venerable divine name (nome divino e venerabile) has become through the pen of Biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a mountain, and a he-goat” (Sagra Scrittura). Therefore it seems foolish to derive the name as Spencer does, from Ajal (separated) and El (god), hence “one separated from God,” the Devil. In the Zohar, Azazel is rather the Sacrificial victim than the “formal adversary of Jehovah,” as Spencer would have it (II., pp. 14, 29). The amount of malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on that “Host” by various fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his “host” are simply the Hebrew “Prometheus,” and ought to be viewed from the same standpoint. The Zohar shows the Ischin chained on the mountain in the desert, allegorically; thus simply alluding to those “spirits” as being chained to the earth during the cycle of incarnation. Azazel (or Azaziel) is one of the chiefs of the “transgressing” angels in Enoch, who descending upon Ardis, the top of Mount Armon, bound themselves by swearing loyalty to each other. It is said that Azaziel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, to fabricate mirrors (?) to make one see what is behind him (viz., “magic mirrors”). Amazarak taught all the sorcerers and dividers of roots; Amers taught the solution of magic; Barkayal, astrology; Akibeel, the meaning of portents and signs; Tamial, astronomy; and Asaradel taught the motion of the moon. “These seven were the first instructors of the Fourth man” (i.e., of the Fourth Race). But why should allegory be always understood as meaning all that its dead-letter expresses? It is the symbolical representation of the great struggle between divine wisdom, nous, and its earthly reflection, Psuche, or between Spirit and Soul, in Heaven and on Earth. In Heaven —because the divine Monad had voluntarily exiled itself therefrom, to descend, for incarnating purposes, to a lower plane and thus transform the animal of clay into an immortal god. For, as Eliphas Levi tells us, “the angels aspire to become men; for the perfect man, the man-god, is above even angels.” On Earth — because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was strangled in the coils of matter. Strange to say, the Occult teaching reverses the characters; it is the anthropomorphous archangel with the Christians, and the man-like God with the Hindus, which represent matter in this case; and the Dragon, or Serpent, Spirit. Occult symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery; theological symbolics conceal it still more. For the former explains many a saying in the Bible and even in the New Testament which have hitherto remained incomprehensible; while the latter, owing to its dogma of Satan and his rebellion, has belittled the character and nature of its would-be infinite, absolutely perfect god, and created the greatest evil and curse on earth — belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is opened with the key to its metaphysical symbolism now restored; while that of theological interpretation shows the gods and the archangels standing as symbols for the dead letter or dogmatic religions, and as arrayed against the pure truths of Spirit, naked and unadorned with fancy. Many were the hints thrown out in this direction in “Isis Unveiled,” and a still greater number of references to this mystery may be found scattered throughout these volumes. To make the point clear once for all: that which the clergy of every dogmatic religion — pre-eminently the Christian — points out as Satan, the enemy of God, is in reality, the highest divine Spirit — (occult Wisdom on Earth) — in its naturally antagonistic character to every worldly, evanescent illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions included. Thus, the Latin Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who do not choose to be its slaves; the Church which calls itself the bride of Christ, and the trustee at the same time of Peter, to whom the rebuke of the Master “get thee behind me Satan” was justly addressed; and again the Protestant Church which, while calling itself Christian, paradoxically replaces the New Dispensation by the old “Law of Moses” which Christ openly repudiated: both these Churches are fighting against divine Truth, when repudiating and slandering the Dragon of esoteric (because divine) Wisdom. Whenever anathematizing the Gnostic Solar Chnouphis — t |
).” [12]
is all
that and much more. All antiquity, ever since the birth of Astronomy
— imparted to the Fourth Race by one of its divine kings of the
Divine Dynasty — and also of Astrology, represented Venus
in its astronomical tables as a Globe poised over a Cross,
and the Earth, as a Globe under a Cross. The esoteric
meaning of this is: “Earth fallen into generation, or into the
production of its species through sexual union.” But the later
Western nations did not fail to give quite a different
interpretation. They explained this sign through their mystics —
guided by the light of the Latin Church — as meaning that our Earth
and all on it were redeemed by the Cross, while Venus
(otherwise Lucifer or Satan) was trampling upon it. Venus
is the most occult, powerful, and mysterious of all the planets; the
one whose influence upon, and relation to the Earth is most
prominent. In exoteric Brahmanism, Venus or Sukra — a male
deity [13] — is the son of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapati and a Vedic
sage, and is Daitya-Guru, or the priest-instructor of the primeval
giants. The whole history of “Sukra” in the Puranas, refers to the
Third and to the Fourth Races.
(the circle and
diameter) during the Third (Race) and of
during the Fourth.
; after which it
becomes 
, which is only
another form of Venus (Isis) 
,
and meant, esoterically, that mankind and all animal life had
stepped out of the divine spiritual circle and fallen into physical
male and female generation. This sign, from the end of the Third
Race, has the same phallic significance as the “tree of life” in Eden Anouki, a
form of Isis, is the goddess of life; and Ank was taken by
the Hebrews from the Egyptians and introduced by Moses, one learned
in the Wisdom of the priests of Egypt, with many other mystical
words. The word Ank in Hebrew, with the personal suffix,
means “my life,” my being, which “is the personal pronoun Anochi,”
from the name of the Egyptian goddess
Anouki. [15]
10, born out of the two
invisible male and female seeds, making up the 12, or the
Dodecahedron of the Universe. The mystic system contains the
, the central point; the 3 or
; the five,
, and the seven or
, or again
; the triangle in the square
and the synthesizing point in the interlaced double triangles. This
for the world of the archetypes. The phenomenal world receives its
culmination and the reflex of all in 
three crossways (the
female) and four vertically; and this is man, the
culmination of the deity on Earth, whose body is the cross of flesh,
on, through, and in which he is ever
crucifying and putting to death the divine Logos or his
or
, or the sacred Ten (numbers
or Sephiroth), or Jod — and these numbers were ‘the
Light.’ Just as in the Gospel of St. John, God (Alhim, 31415 to
one) was that light (20612 to 6561) by which (Light) all things were
made.”
. And the Rabbi in
commenting upon them says: “It teaches the Alhim-ness
(31415) and One-ness (the diameter to Alhim) through Words (
(Book of
Al-Chazari), that is the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves the
jod, or i, out of one of the words, whereas afterwards he
restores it again. If we take the values of those subordinate words,
we find them to be 340, 340, 346; together these are 1026, and the
division of the general word into these has been to produce these
numbers, which by Temurah may be changed in various ways for various
purposes.” (Kabala.)
a
water hieroglyph. It is the universal matrix or the “Great Deep.”
Venus, the great Mother-Virgin, issues forth from the Sea-wave, and
Cupid or Eros is her son. But Venus is the later
mythological variant of Gaia (or Gaea), the Earth,
which, in its higher aspect is Nature (Prakriti), and
metaphysically Aditi, and even Mulaprakriti, the root of Prakriti or
its noumenon.
(Jehovah), and St. Paul
enjoins: “Let no man judge you for your observance of the seventh
day, and the day of the new moon, which are a shadow of
things to come; but the body (or substance) is of Christ” or
Jehovah, that function of this power that “made the barren woman . .
. a mother . . . for they are the gift of Jehovah” . . . which is a
key to the objection which her husband made to the Shunamite, as to
her going to the man of God — “for it is neither the seventh day nor
the day of the new moon. . . . (2 Kings, iv., 23.)
The living spiritual powers of the constellations had mighty wars,
marked by the movements and positions of the stars and planets, and
especially as the result of the conjunction of the moon, earth, and
sun. Bentley comments on the Hindu “War between the gods and the
giants,” as marked by the eclipse of the Sun at the ascending node
of the Moon, 945 B.C. (! !), at which time was born [77] or produced
from the sea, 
, whose numbers re-read 235, or
in exact measure, the very number of lunar months to equal nineteen
tropical years to complete this cycle. . . . Mount Sinai being, in
the esoteric language of the wisdom, the monument of the exact time
of the lunar years and months, by which this
spiritual vitalizing cycle could be computed — and which mountain,
indeed, was called (see Fuerst), “the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). So
also Sarai (SRI), the wife of Abram, could have no child until her
name was changed to Sarah, 
,
giving to her the property of this lunar influence.” [80]
(Yod) in the 
(Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And, therefore, it
is called Binah, Understanding. It means BeN YaH, i.e.,
Son of YaH. This is the completeness of the whole.” [87]
and 
were excavated in great
abundance, their presence being one more proof that the ancient
Trojans and their ancestors were pure Aryans.
, and
matter, is the residence of the “Prince of Darkness.” This is as
clearly stated as can be; for Metatron, the Angel of the
second or Briatic World, means Messenger
,
Angel, called the great Teacher; and under him are the Angels of the
third World, Jetzira, whose ten and seven classes are the
Sephiroth, [107] of whom it is said that “they inhabit and
vivify this world as Essential Entities and
Intelligences, whose correlatives and contraries
inhabit the third or Asiatic World.” These “Contraries” are
called “the Shells,”
, or
demons, [108] who inhabit the seven habitations called Sheba
Hachaloth, which are simply the seven zones of our globe. Their
prince is called in the Kabala Samael, the Angel of Death, who is
also the seducing serpent Satan; but that Satan is also Lucifer, the
bright angel of Light, the Light and Life-bringer,
the “Soul” alienated from the Holy Ones, the other angels,
and for a period, anticipating the time when they would
have descended on Earth to incarnate in their turn.
reads “Root,” as in the
Secondary likewise.
(aza), means to
illuminate, and 
(asha)
is fire. In Occultism, “to kindle a fire” is synonymous to evoking
one of the three great fire-powers, or “to call on God.” In Sanskrit
Osch or Asch is fire or heat; and the Egyptian
word Osiris is compounded (as shown by Schelling) of the two
primitives aish and asr, or a “fire-enchanter.”
Aesar in the old Etruscan meant a God (being perhaps
derived from Asura of the Vedas). Aeswar and
Eswara are analogous terms, as Dr. Kenealy thought. In the
Bhagavad Gita we read, “Iswara resides in every mortal being
and puts in motion, by his supernatural power, all things which
mount on the Wheel of Time.” It is the creator and the destroyer,
truly. “The primitive fire was supposed to have an insatiable
appetite for devouring. Maximus of Tyre relates that the ancient
Persians threw into the fire combustible matter crying: ‘Devour, oh
Lord!’ In the Irish language Easam, or Asam, means
‘to create,’ and Aesar was the name of an ancient Irish
god, meaning ‘to light a fire’ ” (Kenealy). The Christian
Kabalists and symbologists who disfigured Pymander — prominent among
them the Bishop of Ayre, Francois de Tours, in the 16th century —
divide the elements in this way: —
. St. Mark. . . . .The
Lion . . . . Fire
within the cell.
This spindle approaches the surface of the cell, and one half of it
is extruded in the form of what are called the “polar
cells.” These polar cells now die, and the embryo
develops from the growth and segmentation of the remaining part of
the nucleus which is nourished by the substance of the
cell. Then why could not beings have lived thus, and been created in
this way — at the very beginning of human and mammalian
evolution?
(Ain, nothing, or
the “Ain-Soph” of the Kabalists), and again, the “Spirit” (of God)
that moves upon the face of the waters, in Genesis. All
these are identical. Moreover, in Genesis, ch. i.,
v. 2, is placed as verse 1 in the secret Kabalistic texts,
where it is followed by the Elohim “creating the Heaven and
the Earth.” This deliberate shifting of the order of the verses was
necessary for monotheistic and Kabalistic purposes.
Jeremiah’s curse against those Elohim (gods) who have not
created the Heavens and the Earth, ch. x., v. 11,
shows that there were other Elohim who had.
Yaho-Iah,
Jaho-Jah, or Jaho is Jah. Punctuated it is
which is, however, a
Rabbinical caprice to associate it with the name Adoni or
, which has the same points.
It is curious, and indeed hardly conceivable, that the Jews
anciently read the name 
(Adoni),
when they had so many names of which Jeho and Jah
and Iah constituted a part. But so it was; and Philo Byblus,
who gives us the so-called fragment of Sanchoniathon, spelt it in
Greek letters [[IEUO]], Javo or Jevo.
Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced Yahva, and
the Jews Yaho. Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests its
punctuation thus: 
(Ye-hou-vih);
and he cut the Gordian knot of its true occult meaning. For in this
last form, as a Hebrew verb, it means “he will — be.” [139] It was also
derived from the Chaldaic verb
or
eue (eva)
or eua (Eva) “to be.” And so it was, since from
Enosh, the “Son of Man,” only, were the truly human races
to begin and “to be,” as males and females. This statement receives
further corroboration, inasmuch as Parkhurst makes the verb
to mean: (1) “To fall down” (i.e. into
generation or matter); and (2) “To be, to continue”
— as a race. The aspirate of the word eua (Eva)
“to be” being 
Heve (Eve),
which is the feminine of 
— matter, deluge — while on
his brow rests the third eye (Siva’s eye, that of spiritual
insight). His name is “Protector” (of Tibet), “Saviour of Humanity.”
On other occasions when he has only two arms, he is Chenresi, the
Dhyani and Bhodisatva, Chakna-padmakarpo, “he who holds a
lotus.” His other name is Chantong, “he of the 1,000 eyes,” when he
is endowed with a thousand arms and hands, on the palm of each of
which is represented an eye of Wisdom, these arms radiating from his
body like a forest of rays. Another of his names is Lokapati and
Lokanatha (Sanskrit) “Lord of the World”; and Jigtengonpo (Tibetan),
“Protector and Saviour against evil” of any kind.
Gan-Eden, meaning the park
or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country watered by
the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the
Erythraean sea.” (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of
Babylonia.) In the Chaldean “Book of Numbers,” the location
is designated in numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript,
left by Count St. Germain, it is fully described. In the Assyrian
Tablets it is rendered Gan-duniyas. “Behold,” says
the 
(Elohim) of
Genesis, “the man is become as one of us.” The Elohim may
be accepted in one sense for gods or powers, and in another
for Aleim, or priests — the hierophants initiated into the
good and evil of this world; for there was a college of priests
called the Aleim, while the head of their caste, or the
chief of the hierophants was known as Java-Aleim. Instead
of becoming a neophyte, and gradually obtaining his esoteric
knowledge through a regular initiation, an Adam, or Man,
uses his intuitional faculties and, prompted by the serpent (Woman
and matter), tastes of the Tree of Knowledge — the esoteric or
Secret Doctrine — unlawfully. The priests of Hercules, or Mel-karth,
the “Lord of the Eden,” all wore “coats of skin.” The text says:
“And Java-Aleim made for Adam and his wife
‘Chitonuth our.’ ” The first
Hebrew word, “chiton,” is the Greek [[Chiton]],
Chiton. It became a Slavonic word by adoption from the
Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
), tree, are 7 and 9,
the seven being the holy feminine number and the nine the number of
the phallic or male energy. This ansated cross is the symbol of the
Egyptian female-male, Isis-Osiris, the germinal principle
in all forms, based on the primal manifestation applicable in all
directions and in all senses.” [269]
