Blake C.C. - The Origin of Man

It had for its objects aims which were on all-fours with theosophical investigation. Let me briefly glance over what had been done before its time. We had a classification by Cuvier that divided man into three types, white, red, and black, which the popular compilers, and they were as frequent then as now, identified with the progeny of the three sons of Noah. Sem, Cham, and Japheth played their parts in the Cuvierian system. Though by the researches of Blumenbach, we had a Mongolian, a Malay, and an American race shoved in somehow or other to complete our science, and to try to fit into some pigeon hole or other which should be discovered at some future time, the ternary classification of Cuvier, and the quinary classification of Blumenbach, were, on the whole, popular. In France the ternary was supreme. Even in the time of my old master, Milne Edwards, the “official science” made the acceptation of a ternary classification o man a compulsory article of belief for anyone who proposed to take a degree.

Broc, an obscure man far in advance of his generation, had prepared a binary classification. Virey had given the ground, whereon such a classification might rest.

In England, Dr. R. G. Latham, whose chief fault was no doubt that he rested his argument on the evidence of language alone, preferred what on the whole has been found to be a useful classification, making each race of man stand on its own bottom, and separate from other races. It was not exhaustive, but it taught men to think.

When I look back at the history of the old Anthropological Society, founded by James Hunt, I can but look with feelings of pride on old victories. True, we lost our Founder, who, true to every manly instinct, died twenty years ago, fighting against materialism. True, we see that the workers of twenty-seven years ago, whom contemporary agnosticism damned with faint praise, accepted, adopted, and allowed to become extinct, are now a scanty number of veterans. Still, a good work was done, which has revolutionized European science, and taught people that the origin of man is a subject on which, some at least, dare to think. Then we had for a few years after the death of our Founder, a stagnation which was the precursor of the εὐθανασια which appears to overshadow the Anthropological Institute. Still, those who love to record the deeds of their contemporaries, have a prolific task in modern Anthropology. The upward path of our science has been marked by gravestones. Hic cecidisse legatos; illic raptas aquilas. To those who waited with patience for an angel to move the sluggish waters of the pool, where those who were beneath its surface were drowned, and those who were 371above it, were asphyxiated, 1888 gave a relief. For we had in the Secret Doctrine, a ternary classification of man proposed which made idle all the speculations of the dreamers of the past generation, and placed our science on an accurate and solid basis. Let me briefly recall your attention to what that classification was. The annexed diagram wherein I have endeavored to draw the wood, not the trees, may enable my readers to understand the subject. It is however, practically impossible to estimate exactly the time at which the three races of man had their genesis. The Azoic rocks may unfold mysteries, like that which the Purbeck revealed in 1858. We have not yet pierced into what Bacon calls “the dead beginnings of things”, and our science shows a vague past, an uncertain present, and an improbable future.

We have first of all to consider the Lemurian species.

What was it like?

372

Where did it live?

Where is it now to be found?

Where did it occur?

We shall now see how the Secret Doctrine has shown us exactly the reverse of the Herbert Spencer and modern school of anthropology and psychology. The moderns have endeavored to illustrate the development of the case of what Hobbes has called the “nasty, brutish, savage” into all the beauties of art, the consolations of religion, and the resources of civilization. The Secret Doctrine on the other hand, has shown us what every man was like, not developed from an anthropoid ape, but springing directly from a higher source of glorified humanity. “There are, or rather still were, a few years ago, descendants of these half animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct) Australians, Andaman Islanders, &c.” ( Secret Doctrine, vol. ii, 195).

Early Lemurian man was androgynous. He possessed both qualities of sex. And it was so with the Lemurian, during the myriads of ages that they inhabited earth. And if we glance over the records of palæontology, we see that the beings that were produced “from the drops of sweat; from the residue of the substance: matter from dead bodies and men and animals of the wheel before, and from cast off dust” ( Secret Doctrine, vol. ii, 19), do not show any trace of division into sex. The existing Amphibia or Batrachia have marks which enable us to discriminate easily between the male and female. But if we look at the enormous series of individuals, reference to the specimens found in our national collection will show that we are unable to put our finger on any individual specimen, and say that “this is a male, or that a female”. It is the same with the gigantic Ichthyosauri or Plesiosauri (I forget the new ugly name by which Mr. Lydekker has labelled this old and well-known genus); alike in the flying serpent of the Lias or chalk, as with the early Eocene mammalia. I am aware that some of the fossils from the latest tertiary may be cited against me. Optat ephippia bos, and Bos trochoceros and longifrons will need a large horse shoe to cast a glamor over the rest of palæontological science. Besides, coming as they do, nearly in our day, they throw no light whatever on the fauna contemporary with the Lemurians who had passed away before their time. We may say that there is no proof whatever of separation into sex in palæozoic or in mesozoic time. Thus, the characters of the old Lemurians are clearly impressed on their descendants. Palæontology thus applies a test whereby we may quickly infer the Lemurian origin of any individual. A careful examination of the Secondary animals will show how they repeat the characters of Lemurian man. The manner in which some of the features of lower animals must have been preserved in the old type lent a peculiar aspect to the lineaments of Lemurian man. He was circular and diaphanous. He possessed, like the Truncatella, or “looping worm”, the power of locomotion from any point, 373at any point, to any point. Otherwise their form must have resembled in great manner the first figure in Owen’s Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebral Skeleton, on which I have commented in Lucifer (July, 1889). This plan contained within itself not merely the character of the existing Lemurians, but also those of the mesozoic Reptilia which pullulated throughout æons of time, when man was unlike existing man of the present day, but still the precursor of the ancestors of now existing races. Such primitive pattern was no mere archetypal abstraction, such as William of Champeaux might have had after a supper of underdone pork. Lemurian man must have had a membranous skeleton somewhat resembling that of Chimæra monstrosa (Huxley, “Anatomy of Vertebrates, 8vo., Lond., 1864, p. 195). The hump of the dorsal region, the parial or imparial horns of the frontal, were integral parts of the Lemurian economy. And it may be said to those who accuse us of drawing an imaginary picture, that at the least we have anatomy on our side. The ideal archetype in a certain manner expressed the thoughts of the force that regulated the cosmic sequence of species. This force was a thinking, geometrising entity. The concept of a being including all attributes, such as the Lemurian, could always have occurred only to a Lord of Wisdom, which created “Sons of Will and Yoga”. Of the races which were engendered by the Third Race from inferior animals, the progeny of the mindless and sexualised man, that are described in the Book of Dzyan, as certainly resembling the anthropoid apes, we have no information. The early records do not give us knowledge what sort of beings the huge she-animals were; but we may conceive that they were the types of animals that had been derived from the Lemurians themselves. The “astral form” of the early man had produced the whole series of animal creation. It is not necessary in the present place to revert to the speculations of geologists, who have advanced theories which are at variance with the dogmas of the Secret Doctrine, as the hypothesis of evolution, like that of Darwinism, is beginning to play itself out in England, as it has long done in Germany and America. In France, thanks to the opposition of Broca on the one hand, and Quatrefages on the other, it never took deep root. There is certainly a Darwinian spirit in existence. The authorised organs lead the way. They mount up into a sort of Olympus of their own creation, and these summon the whole universe of truth before them. It matters not what the subject may be. Anthropology, Biology, the Secret Doctrine, on each and all they have their say, and pronounce judgment. Nothing is safe, however profound, however sacred. Like the harpies in Virgil, they pounce down upon the spoils, and defile the feast. A truly Satanic self-sufficiency is the appanage of the modern Darwinite. The tempter has once more coiled up under the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and offers of its fruits to the passers-by, saying, “Eat, ye shall be as Gods”. And they do eat, and they really think they are as Gods. Dressed up in the conceit of Darwinism, they look upon themselves as the prophets of a new era. They regard Linnæus, Cuvier, and Owen, the great men of 374the past, as mere children; while they themselves have risen as giants for the service of a younger day. They are preachers of a new science, masters of a new philosophy, teachers of a new scheme of education, poets of a new Iliad. They never deem it possible that they may be mistaken. They issue their own decrees and rules; and enshrine mediocrities on the present high altar of their deformed Pantheon. Tell such as these of an occult science, they laugh you to scorn. Tell them of the Book of Dzyan, they will tell you Darwin was a great man, and that their grandchildren will be greater still. Talk to them of the next world, they will talk to you of this; and extolling the age and glorifying the Zeitgeist, they extol themselves. A severe spirit of criticism will think that the doctrines of Occultism are, on the whole, just as probable as the doctrines of Darwinism. The theory which assumes the finality of purely Darwinian speculation is directly at variance with the theory that gives us the origin of the Lemurian race of man. To reject the theory of ascensive development, while affirming the opposing theory of degradation, was the object of the Secret Doctrine, that used the word evolution in a sense entirely at variance with that of modern “biologists”.

One of the popular terms of the day is “evolution”, used in the same sense that the phrase “transmutation hypothesis” was employed in the earlier editions of Lyell’s principles of Geology. What advantage was gained by using the word “evolution” in a sense exactly opposite to that of writers in the middle of the last century, and reversing the language that Haller on the one hand, and Buffon on the other hand employed, is uncertain. But the minds of people being once confused, a popular theory might be slipped in unawares. Owen, always endeavoring stare super antiquas vias, has tried to put the matter clearly.

In the middle of the last century physiologists were divided as to the methods governing the plan of development. Haller, who was the leader of the evolutionists, contended that the new being pre-existed in a complete state of formation, needing only to be vivified by impregnation in order to commence the series of expansions and disencasings, culminating in the independent individuals. On the other hand, Buffon, the coryphæus of the epigenesists, held that both the germ and its subsequent organs were built up of juxtaposed molecules, according to the operation of a developmental force or nisus formativus. Hunter, who thought he could see both principles at work together with a third may, for other reasons, be classed with the advocates of epigenesis. Owen, who in 1866 was in the middle of the whirlpool of discussions on the theory of evolution, says: “At the present day the question may seem hardly worth the paper on which it is referred to. Nevertheless, pre-existence of germs and evolutions are logically inseparable from the idea of the origin of species by primary miraculously created individuals.”

Now, after this very clear statement, it can be scarcely imagined that a generation of writers should have arisen who put the words “evolution” 375and “miracle” as flags of opposite camps. Others there be who sometimes employ the word evolution as equivalent to derivation, sometimes as equivalent to the, or a, transmutation hypothesis, and sometimes as the equivalent of the Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection. We have a right, therefore, to ask every person who insists on the use of the word “evolution” to define his meaning.

Probably, many persons who are directly opposed to the Darwinian theories are still evolutionists in one sense of the word, and nevertheless may be firmly opposed to the theory of miraculously-originated life. A belief in the invariable sequence of law, that the world shows no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end, that the Deity should be excluded from the creation, and the vision of Jean Paul Richter fulfilled, may be perfectly consonant with the opposition that was shown to the theory of Buffon and the French encyclopædists. Faith in the principle of evolution may be concomitant with the belief in the mechanical school of theology that was in vogue at the time of the Bridgewater treatises. I hope that enough has been said by Owen to induce every person who has ever used the word “evolution” to reconsider his mode of expression. The old master never employs vague words such as “biology” to darken counsel by words without knowledge. As Baden Powell well pointed out, the word βιος is never used to apply to an abstract conception of life in general, but merely to a concrete idea, governed by periodicity and other conditions of time, of the life-history of the individual. The word “biography” is found on a sound model; “biology” is not. This error permeates much of our popular teaching; and in the common sense of 1890 the words “biology” and “evolution” may both go to what Owen calls the “limbo of all hasty blunders”.

I cannot give the history of a race which was the first known man on this planet. Cosmogonies of various dates and qualities have given various theories by which the αὐτοχθονες of any given country are easily converted into the Sons of God. The Cynetæ who lived before the Celtæ in Western Europe have been identified with a “Turanian” or “Allophylian” people, but are more probably Atlanteans. The early surface of history is too much rubbed away to permit us to speculate whether they may not have contained Lemurian elements. The descendants of the Lemurian race are now only found in Australia, and only in the flat-headed “tapeinocephalic”^[1] races of Australia. The Hottentots of South Africa, probably of Lemuro-Atlantean descent, are widely separated from the surrounding Negroes and Kaffirs. They must have broken off from the Lemurian stock at a very early period of the earth’s history. But it is to the north that we have an indication: Scandinavia had formed part of ancient Lemuria, whose extent had stretched from the Indian Ocean to Australia. The mountain tops are 376now buried beneath the Pacific. Mr. Wallace extends the Australia of tertiary periods to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and perhaps to Figi, and from its Marsupial types he infers a connexion with the Northern Continent during the Secondary period. In Lucifer (June, 1889), I have speculated on the possibility that the earlier known race of man, the Canstadt race, may have been a Lemurian, but quien sabe? The “river-bed skulls” also showed a certain resemblance to the flat-headed races of Australia, and indicated that a Lemurian population existed in England at a period of time contemporary with early man. But the Lemurian race has now almost passed away. 700,000 years before the commencement of the Tertiary period, Lemuria, as a Continent, had been destroyed. A few hybrid races existed in the Tertiary, fewer still in the present age. Still, the few which still survive are so widely separated from each other that the old Lemurian type is only now preserved to us in species of men that are now rapidly passing away. A little more missionary enterprise, rum, and disease will send the last Lemurian where the last of the Tasmanian has gone to fulfil the Karma of past ages. “Gigantes autem super terram in diebus illis” (Genes. vi, 4).

C. Carter Blake, Doct. Sci., F.T.S.
(Late Secretary to the Anthropological Society.)

Footnotes

↑ I think this word was coined by my late friend, Professor Busk. I use it as one may smell at a rose, without diminishing its owner’s glory.

[v6-p375-n1-1] I think this word was coined by my late friend, Professor Busk. I use it as one may smell at a rose, without diminishing its owner’s glory.

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