|
----------------------- Page 801-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 109 THE TABULA SMARAGDINA.
STANZA V.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND RACE.
-------
§§ (18) The Sons of Yoga. (19) The Sexless Second Race. (20) The Sons of the Sons of Twilight. (21) The "Shadow," or the Astral Man, retires within, and man develops a physical body.
---------------------
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.
----------------------- Page 802-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
That which propels towards, and forces evolution, i.e., compels the growth and development of Man towards perfection, is (a) the MONAD,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 110 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 111 THE SHELLS OF SHEBA HACHALOTH.
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
----------------------- Page 803-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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, [[diagram]], 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 [greek char], Angel, called the great Teacher; and under him are the Angels of the third World, Jetzira, whose ten and seven classes are the Sephiroth,* 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," [[daigam]], or demons,** 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.
"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)***; 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Vol. 1. Part III., "Gods, Monads and Atoms." It is symbolised in the Pythagorean Triangle, the 10 dots within, and the seven points of the Triangle and the Cube.
** Whence the Kabalistic name of Shells given to the astral form, the body called Kama Rupa, left behind by the higher angels in the shape of the higher Manas, when the latter leaves for Devachan, forsaking its residue.
*** Which shows that the Essenes believed in re-birth and many reincarnations on Earth, as Jesus himself did, a fact we can prove from the New Testament itself.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 112 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
I 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
----------------------- Page 804-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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"?* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* It is corroborated, however, as we have shown, by the esotericism of Genesis. Not only are the animals created therein after the "Adam of Dust," but vegetation is shown in the Earth before "the heavens and the Earth were created." "Every plant of the field before it (the day that the heavens and the Earth were made, v. 4) was in the Earth" (v. 5). Now, unless the Occult interpretation is accepted, which shows that in this 4th Round the Globe was covered with vegetation, and the first (astral) humanity was produced before almost anything could grow and develop thereon, what can the dead letter mean? Simply that the grass was in the earth of the Globe before that Globe was created? And yet the meaning of verse 6, which says that "there went up a mist from the Earth" and watered the whole face of the Earth before it rained, and caused the trees, etc., to grow, is plain enough. It shows also in what geological period it occurred, and further what is meant by "Heaven and Earth." It meant the firmament and dry incrustated land, separated and ridden of its vapours and exhalations. Moreover, the student must bear in mind that, as Adam Kadmon, "the male and female being" of Genesis, ch. I., is no physical human being but the host of the Elohim, among which was Jehovah himself -- so the animals mentioned in that chapter as "created" before man in the dead letter text, were no animals, but the Zodiacal signs and other sidereal bodies.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 113 THE SECRET WORK OF CHIRAM.
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,
----------------------- Page 805-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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 reads "Root," as in the Secondary likewise.
Thus in Alchemy or Western Hermetism (a variant on Eastern Esotericism) we find: --
X. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X.
Sulphur . . . . . . Flamma . . . . . . Spiritus
Hydrargyum . . Natura . . . . . . . Aqua
Sal . . . . . . . . . . Mater . . . . . . . Sanguis
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 114 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,
----------------------- Page 806-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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 (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 "fireenchanter." 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: --
The four elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature represented by --
. . . St. Matthew. . Angel-Man . . Water . . (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man, Mikael)
A - . St. Mark. . . . .The Lion . . . . Fire
E - Y . .St. Luke. . . . . The Bull . . . . Earth
I - O . . St. John. . . . . The Eagle . . . Air*
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* To those who would inquire "What has Hydrogen to do with air or oxygena- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 115 SONS OF YOGA.
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
----------------------- Page 807-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] tion?" it is answered: "Study first the ABC of Occult Alchemy." In their anxiety, however, to identify Pymander, "the mouth of Mystery," with St. John the Baptist prophetically, they thus identified also the 7 Kabeiri and the Assyrian Bulls with the Cherubs of the Jews and the Apostles. Having, moreover, to draw a line of demarcation between the four and the three -- the latter being the Fallen Angels ; and furthermore to avoid connecting these with the "Seven Spirits of the Face," the Archangels, they unceremoniously threw out all they did not choose to recognise. Hence the perversion in the order of the Elements, in order to make them dovetail with the order of the Gospels, and to identify the Angel-Man with Christ. With the Chaldees, the Egyptians, from whom Moses adopted the Chroub (Cherubs in their animal form), and the Ophites; with all these, the Angels, the Planets, and the Elements, were symbolized mystically and alchemically by the Lion (Mikael); the Bull (Uriel); the Dragon (Raphael); the Eagle (Gabriel); the Bear (Thot-Sabaoth); the Dog (Erataoth); the Mule (Uriel or Thartharaoth). All these have a qualificative meaning.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 116 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
----------------------- Page 808-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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."* "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,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Laing's "Modern Science and Modern Thought, " p. 90.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 117 THE OUTGROWTH OF RACES.
and if the microscopic cells are looked upon by physical science as independent living beings -- just as Occultism regards the "fiery lives"* -- 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, 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?
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
----------------------- Page 809-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Book I. Part I. Stanza VII Commentary 10.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 118 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 "* 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
----------------------- Page 810-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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** . . . 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,*** 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Second Edition, p. 161.
** And why not all the progenitive first Races, human as well as animal; and why one "remote progenitor"?
*** Obviously so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the mammalia to some amphibian ancestor.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 119 THE BLASTEMA OF SCIENCE.
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
----------------------- Page 811-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 120 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
----------------------- Page 812-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 121 LEDA, CASTOR AND POLLUX.
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
----------------------- Page 813-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 122 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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*]]. 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.** 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.*** 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.**** 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***** only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric hymns.****** 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******* 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.******** In
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Odyssey," xi. 298 to 305; "Iliad, " iii., 243.
** Chants Cypriaques, Hyg. Tal., 80. Ovid, "Fasti, " etc. See Decharme's "Mythologie de la Grece Antique. "
*** See Brahma Kalahamsa in Book I. Stanza III., p. 78.
**** See Decharme's "Mythologie, " etc., p. 652.
***** Nem., x., 80 et seq. Theocras, xxiv., 131.
****** xxxiv., v. 5; Theocritus, xxii., 1.
******* Apollodorus, III. ii., 1.
----------------------- Page 814-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
******** Castor's tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias (III., 13, 1); and Plutarch says that he was called at Argos the demi-mortal or demi-hero [[mizarchagetas]]. (See Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, 23.)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 123 THE ALLEGORY OF CASTOR AND POLLUX.
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.* And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night.**
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***; 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,**** 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.*****
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Pindar. Nem. x., 60, Dissen.
** Schol. Eurip. "Orestes," 463, Dindorf. See Decharme's "Mythol., " etc., p. 654.
*** The Monad is impersonal and a god per se, albeit unconscious on this plane. For, divorced from its third (often called fifth) principle, Manas, which is the horizontal line of the first manifested triangle or trinity, it can have no consciousness or perception of things on this earthly plane. "The highest sees through the eye of the lowest" in the manifested world; Purusha (Spirit) remains blind
----------------------- Page 815-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
without the help of Prakrit (matter) in the material spheres; and so does Atma-Buddhi without Manas.
**** "Morals, " p. 484 f.
***** This strange idea and interpretation are accepted by Decharme in his "Mythologie de la Grece Antique. " "Castor and Pollux," he says, "are nothing but the Sun and
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 124 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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.*
[[Footnote continued]]-------------------------------
In the Book of Enoch we have Adam,** the first divine androgyne, Moon, conceived as twins . . . The Sun, the immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening from the horizon and descends under the Earth, as though he would make room for the fraternal orb which comes to life with night, is Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor; Castor, who, inferior to his brother, owes to him his immortality: for the Moon, says Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun." (De Ventis 17. See Decharme, p. 655.)
----------------------- Page 816-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See "Book of Enoch. "
** Adam (Kadmon) is, like Brahma and Mars, the symbol of the generative and creative power typifying Water and Earth -- an alchemical secret. "It takes Earth and Water to create a human soul," said Moses. Mars is the Hindu Mangala, the planet Mars, identical with Kartikeya, the "War-God," born of Gharma-ja (Siva's sweat) and of the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 125 JAH-HOVAH ANDROGYNOUS.
separating into man and woman, and becoming JAH-HEVA in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel* (male and female) in its other form or Race -- the double-sexed Jehovah** -- an echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahma-Vach. After which come the Third and Fourth Root-Races of mankind*** -- 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.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Earth. He is Lokita, the red, like Brahma also and Adam. The Hindu Mars is, like Adam, born from no woman and mother. With the Egyptians, Mars was the primeval generative Principle, and so are Brahma, in exoteric teaching, and Adam, in the Kabala.
----------------------- Page 817-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
* Abel is Chebel, meaning "Pains of Birth," conception.
** See "Isis Unveiled ," Vol. II, p. 398, where Jehovah is shown to be Adam and Eve blended, and Hevah, and Abel, the feminine serpent.
*** See "Isis Unveiled, " Vol. I., 305: "The union of the two create a third Race, etc."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 126 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Yak and Jab, the letters i or j or y being interchangeable, or Jah-Hovah, i.e. male and female;* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Jod in the Kabala has for symbol the hand, the forefinger and the lingham, while numerically it is the
----------------------- Page 818-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
perfect one; but it is also the number 10, male and female, when divided.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 127 SETH OUR PROGENITOR.
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 with 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."* 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 0-- 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, "** it was explained by the writer that "Cain . . . is the son of the 'Lord' not of Adam (Genesis iv. I)" 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See "Source of Measures," p. 227.
** Vol. II., p. 264, et seq.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 128 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Genesis ch. i. 26 and Enos, Son of Man of ch. iv. v. 26, after Adam, the first androgyne, after Adam
----------------------- Page 819-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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 (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.
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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Isis Unveiled ," Vol. II., p. 462.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 129 THE JEWISH GOD-NAME.
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
----------------------- Page 820-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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. (Ieve) is the Old Testament term, and was pronounced Ya-va. Inman
suggests that it is contracted from the two words 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."* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See for comparison Hosea, xii. 6, where it is so punctuated.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 130 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 and the same as Hebe, the Grecian goddess of youth and the Olympian bride of Heracles, makes the name Jehovah appear still more clearly in its primitive double-sexed form.
Finding in Sanskrit such syllables as Jah and Yah, e.g., Jah (navi) "Ganges" and Jagan-natha, "Lord of
----------------------- Page 821-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, vol 2, pt 1, stanza 5
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 Levies, 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.
Next Section
Contents
----------------------- Page 822-----------------------
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 131 THE SWAN AND THE EGG.
STANZA VI.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE "SWEAT-BORN."
-------
§§ (22) The evolution of the three races continued. (23) The second race creates the Third and perishes.
---------------------
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
----------------------- Page 823-----------------------
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 132 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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*; 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,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See the "Timaeus."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 133 BI-SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.
"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
----------------------- Page 824-----------------------
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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Extracts from that Essay in "The Theosophist," of February, 1883.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 134 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
circular.* 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.**"
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
----------------------- Page 825-----------------------
image . . . . created they him (collective humanity, or Adam), male and female created he (collective deity) them."*** 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 **** 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:
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Compare Ezekiel's vision (chap. i) of the four divine beings who "had the likeness of a man" and yet had the appearance of a wheel, "when they went they went upon their four sides . . . . for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheel."
** See Prof. Wilder's Essay "The Primeval Race Double-Sexed."
*** Eugibinus, a Christian, and the Rabbis Samuel, Manasseh ben Israel, and Maimonides taught that "Adam had two faces and one person, and from the beginning he was both male and female -- male on one side and female on the other (like Manu's Brahma), but afterwards the parts were separated." The one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm of David recited by Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eliazar is evidence of this. "Thou hast fashioned me behind and before," not beset as in the Bible, which is absurd and meaningless, and this shows, as Prof. Wilder thinks, "that the primeval form of mankind was androgynous."
**** See the union of Chochmah, Wisdom, with Binah, Intelligence, or Jehovah, the Demiurge, called Understanding in the Proverbs of Solomon, ch. vii. Unto men Wisdom (divine occult Wisdom) crieth: "Oh, ye simple, understand Wisdom; and ye fools, be of an understanding heart. " It is spirit and matter, the nous and the psyche; of the latter of which St. James says that it is "earthly, sensual, and devilish."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 135 THE VIRGIN THIRD RACE.
"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
----------------------- Page 826-----------------------
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 136 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Astronomer.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
----------------------- Page 827-----------------------
* An hypothesis evolved in 1881 by Mr. Mattieu Williams seems to have impressed Astronomers but little. Says the author of "The Fuel of the Sun," in Knowledge, Dec. 23, 1881: "Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of Solar existence . . . I conclude that the Sun has no nucleus, either solid, liquid, or gaseous, but is composed of dissociated matter in the critical state, surrounded, first, by a flaming envelope, due to the recombination of the dissociated matter, and outside of this, by another envelope of vapours due to this combination."
This is a novel theory to be added to other hypotheses, all scientific and orthodox. The meaning of the "critical state" is explained by Mr. M. Williams in the same journal (Dec. 9, 1881), in an article on "Solids, Liquids, and Gases." Speaking of an experiment by Dr. Andrews on carbonic acid, the scientist says that "when 88 [[degrees]] is reached, the boundary between liquid and gas vanished; liquid and gas have blended into one mysterious intermediate fluid; an indefinite fluctuating something is there filling the whole of the tube -- an etherealised liquid or a visible gas. Hold a red-
hot poker between your eye and the light; you will see an upflowing wave of movement of what appears like liquid air. The appearance of the hybrid fluid in the tube resembles this, but is sensibly denser, and evidently stands between the liquid and gaseous states of matter, as pitch or treacle stands between solid and liquid."
The temperature at which this occurs has been named by Dr. Andrews the "critical temperature"; here the gaseous and the liquid states are "continuous," and it is probable that all other substances capable of existing in both states have their own particular critical temperatures.
Speculating further upon this "critical" state, Mr. Mattieu Williams emits some quite occult theories about Jupiter and other planets. He says: "Our notions of solids, liquids, and gases are derived from our experiences of the state of matter here upon this Earth. Could we be removed to another planet, they would be curiously changed. On Mercury water would rank as one of the condensible gases; on Mars, as a fusible solid; but what on Jupiter?"
"Recent observations justify us in regarding this as a miniature sun, with an external envelope of cloudy matter, apparently of partially-condensed water, but red-hot, or probably still hotter within. His vaporous atmosphere is evidently of enormous depth, and the force of gravitation being on his visible outer surface two-and-a-half [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 137 EGYPTIAN BELIEF.
has all the weight of scientific testimony."* 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
----------------------- Page 828-----------------------
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] times greater than that on our Earth's surface, the atmospheric pressure, in descending below this visible surface, must soon reach that at which the vapour of water would be brought to its critical condition. Therefore we may infer that the oceans of Jupiter are neither of frozen, liquid, nor gaseous water, but are oceans or atmospheres of critical water. If any fish or birds swim or fly therein, they must be very critically organized."
As the whole mass of Jupiter is 300 times greater than that of the Earth, and its compressing energy towards the centre proportional to this, its materials, if similar to those of the Earth, and no hotter, would be considerably more dense, and the whole planet would have a higher specific gravity; but we know by the movement of its satellites that, instead of this, its specific gravity is less than a fourth of that of the Earth. This justifies the conclusion that it is intensely hot; for even hydrogen, if cold, would become denser than Jupiter under such pressure.
"As all elementary substances may exist as solids, liquids, or gases, or, critically, according to the conditions of temperature and pressure, I am justified in hypothetically concluding that Jupiter is neither a solid, a liquid, nor a gaseous planet, but a critical planet, or an orb composed internally of associated elements in the critical state, and surrounded by a dense atmosphere of their vapours and those of some of their compounds such as water. The same reasoning applies to Saturn and other large and rarified planets."
It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.
* "The Day After Death," p. 23.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 138 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
status of men, the Souls receive the principle of (conscious) immortality, become Spirits, then pass into the choir of gods."
----------------------- Page 829-----------------------
--------
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.* 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 per-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
*The first occurred when what is now the North Pole was separated from the later Continents.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 139 WHAT THE FLOOD MEANS.
ceivable, 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
----------------------- Page 830-----------------------
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* 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.** 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.*** But the terrestrial Deluge and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* We must remember that at the head of all the Babylonian gods were Ea, Anu, and the primeval Bel; and that Ea, the first, was the God of Wisdom, the great "God of Light" and of the DEEP, and that he was identified with Oannes, or the Biblical Dagon -- the man-fish who rose out of the Persian Gulf.
** See Part. II. § "The Holy of Holies."
*** It is far later on that the Moon became a male god; with the Hindus it was Soma, with the Chaldeans Nannak or Nannar, and Sin, the son of Mulil, the older Bel. The "Akkadians" called him the "Lord of Ghosts"; and he was the god of Nipoor (Niffer) in northern Babylonia. It is Mulil who caused the waters of the Flood to fall from heaven on Earth, for which Xisuthrus would not allow him to approach his altar. As the modern Assyriologists have now ascertained, it is the northern Nipoor which is the centre whence Chaldean (black) magic spread; and Eridu (the Southern) which was the primitive seat of the worship of the culture god, the god of divine wisdom -- the Sun-God being the supreme deity everywhere. With the Jews, the Moon is connected with Israel's Jehovah and his seed, because Ur was the chief seat of the worship of the Moon-god, and because Abraham is said to have come from Ur, when from A-bra(h)m, he becomes Abraham.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 140 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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,* 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
----------------------- Page 831-----------------------
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** which have already lived, since Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death having inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* When Narada, the virgin-ascetic, threatened to put an end to the human race by preventing Daksha's sons from procreating it.
** This is corroborated by a learned Brahmin. In his most excellent lectures on the Bhagavad Gita (see "Theosophist," April, 1887, p. 444) the lecturer says: "There is a peculiarity to which I must call your attention. He (Krishna) speaks here of four Manus. Why does he speak of four? We are now in the seventh Manvantara, that of Vaivasvata. If he is speaking of the past Manus, he ought to speak of six, but he only mentions four. In some commentaries an attempt has been made to interpret this in a peculiar manner. The word 'Chatvaraha' is separated from the word 'Manavaha,' and is made to refer to Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatkumara, and Sanatsujata, who are also included among the mind-born sons of Prajapati. But this interpretation will lead to a most absurd conclusion, and make the sentence contradict itself. The persons alluded to in the text have a qualifying clause in the sentence. It is well known that Sanaka and the other three refused to create, though the other sons had consented to do so; therefore, in speaking of those persons from whom humanity has sprung into existence, it would be absurd to include those four also in the list. The passage must be interpreted without splitting the compound into two nouns. The number of Manus will then be four, and the statement would then contradict the Puranic account, though it would be in harmony with the occult theory. You will recollect that it is stated (in Occultism) that we are now in the Fifth Root-Race. Each Root-Race is considered as the Santhathi of a particular Manu. Now, the Fourth Race has passed, or, in other words, there have been four past Manus. . . . . "
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 141 VARIOUS DELUGES.
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.
----------------------- Page 832-----------------------
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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," xviii.; "American Journal of Science, " III., xi., 456; and Croll's "Climate and Time." Lemuria was not submerged by a flood, but was destroyed by volcanic action, and afterwards sank.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with Agruerus, the great Phoenician god (whom Faber sought to identify with Noah*); further, it is suspected that the name of "Titan" is derived from Tit-Ain -- "the fountains of the chaotic abyss"** (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.***
----------------------- Page 833-----------------------
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."**** 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.***** 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."******
Faber was led into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory concerning the Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Agruerus is Kronos, or Saturn, and the prototype of the Israelitish Jehovah. As connected with Argha, the Moon or Ark of salvation, Noah is mythologically one with Saturn. But then this cannot relate to the terrestrial flood. (But see Faber's "Kabiri," Vol. I, pp. 35, 43, and 45.)
** See ibid., Vol. II., p. 240.
*** Sanchoniathon says that the Titans were the sons of Kronos, and seven in number; and he calls them fire-worshippers, Aletae (sons of Agni?), and diluvians. Al-ait is the god of fire.
**** Of which seven, let us remark, the Aryans, and not the Semites, were the originators, while the Jews got that number from the Chaldeans.
***** Seven individual sons of God, or Pitars and Pitris; also in this case the sons of Kronos or Saturn (Kala "time") and Arkites, like the Kabiri and Titans, as their name -- "lunar ancestors" -- shows, the Moon being the Ark, or Argha, on the watery abyss of space.
****** See "Kabiri, " Vol. I., p. 131.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 143 THE ARKITE SYMBOLS.
----------------------- Page 834-----------------------
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: --
[[Koion te, Kroion te melan, Phorkun te krataion, Kai Kronon, Okeanon d, 'Huperioa te Iapeponet.]]
-- (Orph. apud Proclum. In Tim. lib. v. p. 295.
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, I, 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,* and worshipped with the Earth; and this
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
*Aretia is the female form of Artes (Egyptian Mars). Thence the Chaldean (and now Hebrew) word (Aretz) "Earth." The author of "Beitrage zur Kenntniss" (Art. under "Artes" Mars) quotes: "Addit Cedrenus (Salem I., 3): Stella Martis ab [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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).
----------------------- Page 835-----------------------
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:
"From its deep-rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stern Neptune shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Its impious inhabitants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."
-- Dionysius lib xviii. p. 319).
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Egyptiis vocatur Ertosi (plantare, generare). Significat autem hoc omnis generis procreationem et vivificationem, omnisque substantiae et materiae naturam et vim ordinantem atque procreantem." It is Earth as "source of being"; or, as explained by the author of "The Source of Measures," Arts is the same in Hebrew and Egyptian, and both combine the primeval idea of Earth as source; precisely as in the Hebrew itself, under another form, Adam and Madim, (Mars) are the same, and combine the idea of Earth with Adam under the form of H-Adam-H.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 145 THE JEWISH NOAH AND THE CHALDEAN NUAH.
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,* if the
----------------------- Page 836-----------------------
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Chap. lxiv., Sect. xi.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 146 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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."*
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
----------------------- Page 837-----------------------
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:** (a) as the "Root-
Manu"
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* All such expressions are explained in the "Anthropogenesis " of this Book, and elsewhere.
** One has to remember that, in the Hindu philosophy, every differentiated unit is such only through the cycles of Maya, being one in its essence with the Supreme or One Spirit. Hence arises the seeming confusion and contradiction in the various Puranas, and at times in the same Purana, about the same individual. Vishnu -- as the many-formed Brahma, and as Brahma (neuter) -- is one, and yet he is said to be all the 28 Vyasas ( Vishnu Purana). "In every Dvapara (third) age, Vishnu, in the person of Vyasa, divides the Veda, which is one, into four and many portions. Twenty-eight times have the Vedas been arranged by the great Rishis in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, in the Dvapara Yuga . . . and, consequently, twenty-eight Vyasas have passed away . . . they who were all in the form of Veda-
Vyasas, who were the Vyasas of their respective eras. . . . " (Book III., Ch . III.) "This world is Brahma in Brahma, from Brahma . . . nothing further to be known." Then, again . . . "There were in the First Manvantara seven celebrated sons of Vasishta, who in the Third Manvantara, were sons of Brahma (i.e., Rishis), the illustrious progeny of Urja." This is plain: the Humanity of the First Manvantara is that of the seventh and of all the intermediate ones. The mankind of the First Root-Race is the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. To the last it forms a cyclic and constant reincarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyan Chohans of our Planetary chain.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 147 AGREEMENT OF DATES.
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,* 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
----------------------- Page 838-----------------------
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The Dvapara Yuga differs for each Race. All races have their own cycles, which fact causes a great difference. For instance, the Fourth Sub-Race of the Atlanteans was in its Kali-Yug, when destroyed, whereas the Fifth was in its Satya or Krita Yuga. The Aryan Race is now in its Kali Yuga, and will continue to be in it for 427,000 years longer, while various "family Races," called the Semitic, Hamitic, etc., are in their own special cycles. The forthcoming 6th Sub Race -- which may begin very soon -- will be in its Satya (golden) age while we reap the fruit of our iniquity in our Kali Yuga.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 148 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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: --
----------------------- Page 839-----------------------
"From Manu all creation, gods, Asuras, man must be produced, By him the world must be created, that which moves and moveth not. . . . ."
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 149 HOW OLD IS HUMANITY?
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,* 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.** 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
----------------------- Page 840-----------------------
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.***
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Posthumous Humanity " -- translated by H. S. Olcott, London, 1887.
** Professor Newcomb says: "The heat evolved by contraction would last only 18,000,000 years" ("Popular Astronomy, " p. 500); but "a temperature permitting the existence of water could not be reached earlier than 10,000,000 years ago" ( Winchell's "World-Life," p. 356). But Sir W. Thomson says that the whole age of the incrustation of the Earth is 18,000,000 years, though, this year, he has again altered his opinion and allows only 15,000,000 years as the age of the Sun. As will be shown in the Addenda, the divergence of scientific opinions is so great that no reliance can ever be placed upon scientific speculation.
*** The essay on "The Plurality of Worlds" (1853) -- an anonymous work, yet well known to have been the production of Dr. Whewell -- is a good proof of this. No Christian ought to believe in either the plurality of worlds or the geological age of the globe, argues the Author; because, if it is asserted that this world is only one among the many of its kind, which are all the work of God, as it is itself; that all are the seat [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 150 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
----------------------- Page 841-----------------------
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of life, all the realm and dwelling of intelligent creatures endowed with will, subject to law and capable of free-will; then, it would become extravagant to think that our world should have been the subject of God's favours and His special interference, of His communications and His personal visit . . . . . . . Can the Earth presume to be considered the centre of the moral and religious Universe, he asks, if it has not the slightest distinction to rely upon in the physical Universe? Is it not as absurd to uphold such an assertion (of the plurality of inhabited worlds), as it would be to-day to uphold the old hypothesis of Ptolemy, who placed Earth in the centre of our system? . . . The above is quoted from memory, yet almost textually. The author fails to see that he is bursting his own soap-bubble with such a defence.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 151 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"
----------------------- Page 842-----------------------
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 152 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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."
----------------------- Page 843-----------------------
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
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 153 ARISTOTLE DENIED HELIOCENTRICISM.
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 Caelo, 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* of the moneron, then passes from its protistic state** 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Or what is more generally known as Protoplasm. This substance received its name of "Sarcode" from Prof. Dujardin Beaumetz far earlier.
** The Monera are indeed Protista. They are neither animals "nor plants," writes Haeckel; " . . . the whole body of the Moneron represents nothing more than a single thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition." ("Journal of Microscopical Science, " Jan., 1869, p . 28.)
----------------------- Page 844-----------------------
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 154 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
regions, and the universally common lizard* -- 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 [[degrees]] 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).**
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."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Behold the Iguanodon of the Mesozoic ages -- the monster 100 feet long -- now transformed into the small Iguana lizard of South America. Popular traditions about giants in days of old, and their mention in every mythology, including the Bible, may some day be shown to be founded on fact. In nature, the logic of analogy alone ought to make us accept these traditions as scientific verities.
** "Force and Matter "; by L. Buchner, edited by J. F. Collingwood, F.R.S.L., p. 61.
----------------------- Page 845-----------------------
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 155 THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN THE PURANAS.
(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 IL, 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.* 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,** how many more millions would be required to cover
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Introduction a l'Etude des Races Humaines ."
** "Modern Science and Modern Thought ," by S. Laing, p. 32.
----------------------- Page 846-----------------------
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 156 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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?*
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!"**
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Esoteric Buddhism, " p. 70.
** The same fate is in store for spiritualistic phenomena and all the other psychological manifestations of the inner Man. Since the days of Hume, whose researches culminated in a nihilistic idealism, Psychology has gradually shifted its position to one of crass materialism. Hume is regarded as a psychologist, and yet he denied a priori the possibility of phenomena in which millions now believe, including many men of science. The Hylo-idealists of to-day are rank Annihilationists. The schools of Spencer and Bain are respectively positivist and materialist, and not metaphysical at all. It is psychism and not psychology; it reminds one as little of the Vedantic teaching as the pessimism of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann recalls the esoteric philosophy, the heart and soul of true Buddhism.
----------------------- Page 847-----------------------
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 157 THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND OF SCIENCE.
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,* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* It must be noted that, though the astral and physical planes of matter ran parallel with one another even in the earliest geological ages, yet they were not in the same phases of manifestation in which they are now. The Earth did not reach its present grade of density till 18,000,000 years ago. Since then both the physical and astral planes have become grosser.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 158 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There was a time when even the Haeckelian Moneron -- that simple globule of Protoplasm -- had not
----------------------- Page 848-----------------------
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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The conception and definition of the Absolute by Cardinal Cusa may satisfy only the Western mind, prisoned, so unconsciously to itself, and entirely degenerated by long centuries of scholastic and theological sophistry. But this "Recent philosophy of the Absolute," traced by Sir W. Hamilton to Cusa, would never satisfy the more acutely metaphysical mind of the Hindu Vedantin.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 159 OCEANS OF CARBONIC ACID?
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]].
----------------------- Page 849-----------------------
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."*
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
*Cudworth's "Intellectual System, " I. p. 328.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 160 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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
----------------------- Page 850-----------------------
|
