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§§ (33) The creators repent. (34) They atone for their neglect. (35) Men become endowed with minds. (36) The fourth race develops perfect speech. (37) Every androgynous unit is separated and becomes bisexual.
- 33. Seeing which (the sin committed with the animals), the Lhas (the spirits, the “ Sons of Wisdom ”) who had not built men (who had refused to create), wept, saying : —
- 34. “ The Amanasa (the ‘ mindless ’) have defiled our future abodes (a). This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen.” They did. . . .
- 35 Then all became endowed with Manas (minds). They saw the sin of the mindless.
But they had already separated before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on account of the sin committed, — even this race will find itself on the last day on one of the seven paths. For “ the wise * guard the home of nature’s order, they assume excellent forms in secret.” † But we must see whether the “ animals ” tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to zoology.
* This verse in the Veda (X. 5-6), “ The seven wise ones (rays of wisdom, Dhyanis) fashion seven paths (or lines as also Races in another sense). To one of these may the distressed mortal come ” — which is interpreted solely from the astronomical and cosmic aspect — is one of the most pregnant in occult meaning. The “ paths ” may mean lines (maryadah), but they are primarily beams of light falling on the paths leading to wisdom. (See Rig Veda IV. 5-13.) It means “ ways ” or paths. They are, in short, the seven Rays which fall free from the macrocosmic centre, the seven principles in the metaphysical, the seven Races in the physical sense. All depends upon the key used.
† “ Rig Veda,” X. 10, 5, 2.
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(a) The “ Fall ” occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the old records, as soon as Daksha (the reincarnated Creator of men and things in the early Third Race) disappeared to make room for that portion of mankind which had “ separated.” This is how the Commentary explains the details that preceded the “ Fall ” : —
“ In the initial period of man’s Fourth evolution, the human kingdom branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles (the egg-like, external shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated) were often tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now unknown, and which belonged to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long and live, though the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the ‘ Egg-Born ’ Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated and mated no longer. Man created no more — he begot. But he also begot animals, as well as men in days of old. Therefore the Sages (or wise men), who speak of males who had no more will-begotten offspring, but begat various animals along with Danavas (giants) on females of other species — animals being as (or in a manner of) Sons putative to them ; and they (the human males) refusing in time to be regarded as (putative) fathers of dumb creatures — spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this (state of things), the kings and Lords of the Last Races (of the Third and the Fourth) placed the seal of prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new (Karma). * They (the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races. †
In another we find : —
“ There were blue and red-faced animal-men even in later times ; not from actual intercourse (between the human and animal species), but by descent.”
And still another passage mentions : —
“ Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers.”
Perchance in these specimens, Hæckelians might recognize, not the
* It is next to impossible to translate verbally some of these old Commentaries. We are often obliged to give the meaning only, and thus retranslate the verbatim translations.
† Rudra, as a Kumâra, is Lilalohita — red and blue.
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Homo primigenius, but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi-human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters — those “ failures ” mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Hæckel’s Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them ; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid * blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.
How was the separation of sexes effected ? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve ? Even such belief is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation ; as the former hides an esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race with bones was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which were “ boneless.” This is an esoteric tenet spread far and wide, as it is almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Aræa, “ red
* This, regardless of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise : “ The primitive human form, whence as we think all human species sprang, has perished this long time.” (This we deny ; it has only decreased in size and changed in texture.) “ But many facts point to the conclusion that it was hairy and dolichocephalic.” (African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great measure, but the palæolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of a large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla’s cranium than that of any other now-living man). “ Let us, for the time being, call this hypothetical species Homo primigenius. . . . This first species, or the Ape-man, the ancestor of all the others, probably arose in the tropical regions of the old world from anthropoid apes.” Asked for proofs, the evolutionist, not the least daunted, replies : “ Of these no fossil remains are as yet known to us, but they were probably akin to the Gorilla and Orang of the present day.” And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable descendant in the first line (Pedigree of Man, p. 80).
Hæckel holds fast to Lemuria, which with East Africa and South Asia also, he mentions as the possible cradle of the primitive Ape-men ; and so do many geologists. Mr. A. R. Wallace admits its reality, though in a rather modified sense, in his “ Geographical Distribution of Animals.” But let not Evolutionists speak so lightly of the comparative size of the brains of man and the ape, for this is very unscientific, especially when they pretend to see no difference between the two, or very little at any rate. For Vogt himself showed that, while the highest of the Apes, the gorilla, has a brain of only 30 to 51 cubic inches, the brain of the lowest of the Australian aborigines amounts to 99.35 cubic inches. The former is thus “ not half of the size of the brain of a new-born babe,” says Pfaff.
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Earth.” Taaroa, the creative power, the chief god, “ put man to sleep for long years, for several lives,” which means racial periods, and is a reference to his mental sleep, as shown elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and she became a woman. *
Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may mean, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine Builder of man — “ a Progenitor.” Do we then believe in such “ supernatural ” beings ? We say, No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside nature. Nor are we Cosmolators or Polytheists for believing in “ Heavenly Man ” and divine men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this ; the Wisdom of the Ancients and universal tradition. We reject, however, every groundless and baseless tradition, which, having outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, has found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous traditions, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of beings other than our own in far remote geological periods ; in races of ethereal, following incorporeal, “ Arupa,” men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies ; in dynasties of divine beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little modern science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry.
No, certainly not. We do not believe in the supernatural but only in the superhuman, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One may easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant ; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that : “ The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that every one seems ashamed of — even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept even a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past.” †
But the “ supernatural ” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants
* “ Polynesian Researches,” Ellis. Vol. II., p. 38.
Missionaries seem to have pounced upon this name Ivi and made of it Eve. But, as shown by Professor Max Müller, Eve is not the Hebrew name but an European transformation of חַוַה, chavah, “ life,” or mother of all living ; “ while the Tahitian Ivi and the Maori Wheva meant bone and bone only.” (“ False Analogies.”)
† Chaire d’Hébreu au collège de France, p. 20.
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and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature 5,000 years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides geology, anthropology and ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if that same theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years — the age of Methuselah — five million years ago, we would have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a megalosaurus to a common lizard.
A naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. “ There is no question of selection between human races,” say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument — one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes ? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man’s bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice.
Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Mono-genesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes. * Darwin notes such
* Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various
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a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. “ Crossing,” as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women — i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a “ soulless ” * and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man — brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet — but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises.
Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native — co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora — must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position.
“ It is a very curious fact,” says Jukes, † “ that not only these marsupial animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several of the shells — as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oölitic rocks — much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the Oölitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain some-
crossings with such semi-human stocks — e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc.
The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are very hairy, and the brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men — not the closest approximation to the “ pithecoid man,” as Hæckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. (Cf. “ Esoteric Buddhism,” p. 55.)
* In calling the animal “ Soulless,” it is not depriving the beast, from the humblest to the highest species, of a “ soul,” but only of a conscious surviving Ego-soul, i.e., that principle which survives after a man, and reincarnates in a like man. The animal has an astral body, that survives the physical form for a short period ; but its (animal) Monad does not re-incarnate in the same, but in a higher species, and has no “ Devachan ” of course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are latent.
† “ Manual of Geology,” p. 302.
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thing of the Oölitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the Globe.” ( ! ! )
Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere ? Where is the raison d’être for such a “ curse of retardation ” ? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter, The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its “ virgin soil ” notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.
To return, however, once more to the history of the Third Race, the “ Sweat-Born,” the “ Egg-bearing,” and the “ Androgyne.” Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous ; very gradually of course. The passage from the former to the latter transformation required numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being ; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third-Race-mankind is the most mysterious of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the “ How ” of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs, * and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the newly born sub-races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub-race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by the same identical process as our historical generations. This required, of course, millions of years. The
* The “ fables ” and “ myths ” about Leda and Jupiter, and such like, could never have sprung up in people’s fancy, had not the allegory rested on a fact in nature. Evolution, gradually transforming man into a mammal, did in his case only what it did in that of other animals. But this does not prevent man from having always stood at the head of the animal world and other organic species, and from having preceded the former.
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reader has been made acquainted with the approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations, in Stanza II.
We are approaching the turning-point of the evolution of the Races. Let us see what occult philosophy says on the origin of language.