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- Lucifer, vol. 4, no. 23, July 1889, pp. 361-362
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Title for references: Blake C.C. - The First Race
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361
The thought that the highest man had an archetype or prototype and that the conception of man antedated in time the historical evidence of his body is one which links together both the Platonic and the Occult teachings. The “ideas” of the Platonists are the “astral forms” of the Occultists, the “archetypes” of Sir Richard Owen, the “Prototypes” of Rochet. The modern school of science, which is Darwinian, and consequently avoids all questions bearing on the philosophy of animal creation, ignores the anatomical teaching which pupils received from Sir Richard Owen in 1848 & 1849. But this theory is found to closely accord with the ideas Madame Blavatsky has sketched out.
If we look at the diagram of the vertebrate archetype in Owen’s book [1] side by side with those of the fish, the crocodile, the bird, the mammal, and man, we see that we have in reality the “astral man” of the race depicted. If we look at the picture of the prototype of man drawn by Rochet[2] (p. 18) the Adam Kadmon created male and female is before us. In the words of Swinburne:
“None, seeing us cloven in sunder |
And we have a type of man shown which is essentially transcendental.
But after all, what is transcendental anatomy? What is that which seeks to pierce into the real Bedeutung of things whereby the memory of the old anatomical forms is preserved?
The greatest transcendentalist is the one who, either through the memory of past re-incarnations, or from his own knowledge has remembered most of the early forms of humanity. He does not express what might be, but remembers what has been.
It must not be imagined of course, that the universal concepts which are identical with the archetypes, are the ideas in the mind of the Deity, who is limitless and indiscrete,[3] but merely in the mind of the observer. Such ultra realism as was taught by William of Champeaux is not inferred by the transcendental anatomist of the school of Oken, Owen, or Knox. We may realise the conception of anatomists, and believe in the existence of forms. We must not be content to see in community of pattern mere community of descent, which may or may not be proven. Owen has searched as a reverend student may search, by the scientific use of the imagination, for the very thought that passed through the mind of the supreme designer, whose eyes beheld the “substance” of man, being yet imperfect, and in whose account every limb was written.[4]
A reverend mind and a good anatomist dare only have attempted this task. Owen has said in his “Nature of Limbs:” (8th Vol. Lond. 1849.)
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“To what natural laws or secondary cause the orderly succession and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed to us, we as yet are ignorant.
“But, if without derogation of the Divine power, we may conceive the existence of such ministers and personify them by the term ‘Nature,’ we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the vertebrate idea under its old ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the Human form.”
Here Owen merely speaks of an “ichthyic vestment” (loc. cit. p. 86), not of a “fishy nature”; and never dreamt that his successors would so far warp his words as to affirm the descent of man from fish.
And in another passage in the same work:
“The inference as to the possibility of the vertebrate type being the basis of the organisation of some of the inhabitants of other planets will not appear so hazardous, when it is remembered that orbits or protection cavities of the eyes of the vertebrata of this planet are constructed of modified vertebræ. Our thoughts are free to soar as far as any legitimate analogy to guide them rightly in the boundless ocean of unknown truth. And if censure be merited for here indulging, even for a moment, in pure speculation it may perhaps be disarmed by reflection. Mivart[5] has said and said well, ‘If man and the Orang are diverging descendants of a creature with certain cerebral characters then that remote ancestor must also have had the wrist of the Chimpanzee, the voice of a long armed ape, the bladebone of the Gorilla, the chin of the Siamang, the skull-dome of an American ape, the ischium of a slender Loris, the whiskers and beard of a Saki, the liver and stomach of the Gibbons,’ and a number of other characters in which the various several forms of the higher and lower Primates respectively approximate to man.”
The archetype of man, as conceived by the transcendental anatomist, is united in a form which Owen has drawn. Fish-like though it may have been, it does not represent the form of any actual fish, or even such a type as we find in Amphioxus. But the teachings of Theosophy serve to help out the speculations of the comparative anatomist, resting on the book of Dzyan, which corroborates the teachings of the higher savant. The two methods of thought have been found to accord, and the “Secret Doctrine,” from whatever source it may have been derived, is found to be in perfect harmony with the rigorous teachings of comparative anatomy.
Speculation on the primitive archetype of vertebrate, the form which we find in the second race developed under circumstances detailed in the Book of Dzyan becomes less premature to the comparative anatomist of the generation of Owen and de Blainville than to those who peruse Haeckel, or the “evolutionists.” Sto super vias antiquas.
C. Carter Blake, D. Sc.
Footnotes
- ↑ Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton. 8vo. Lond. 1848.
- ↑ The Prototype of Man. 8vo. 1886, p. 18.
- ↑ R. F. Clarke, S. J. Logic. 8vo. Lond. 1888, p. 160.
- ↑ Ps. cxxxviii, 14, 15.
- ↑ Mivart. “Man and Apes,” 8vo., London, 1873, p. 176. [The scan does not show a distinct callout; the Teopedia editor has placed this original footnote at the mention of Mivart.]