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171 ←
- 25. How did the Mânasa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They rejected the Self-born.† They are not ready. They spurned the Sweat-born.‡ They are not quite ready. They would not enter the first Egg-born.§
To a Theist or a Christian this verse would suggest a rather theological idea: that of the Fall of the Angels through Pride. In the Secret Doctrine, however, the reasons for the refusal to incarnate in half-ready physical bodies seem to be more connected with physiological than metaphysical reasons. Not all the organisms were sufficiently ready. The Incarnating Powers chose the ripest fruits and spurned the rest.
By a curious coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the
† The boneless.
‡ The first Sweat-born. This is explained in the Section which follows this series of Stanzas in the allegory from the Purânas concerning Kandu, the holy sage, and Pramlochâ, the nymph who is alleged to have hypnotized him; a suggestive allegory, scientifically, as the drops of perspiration which she exuded, are the symbols of the spores of Science.
§ This will be explained as we proceed. This unwillingness to fashion men, or create, is symbolized in the Purânas by Daksha’s dealings with his opponent Nârada, the “strife-making ascetic.”
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continent on which the first Androgynes, the Third Root-Race, separated, the writer chose, on geographical considerations, that of “Lemuria,” invented by Mr. P. L. Sclater. It was only later that, on reading Hæckel’s Pedigree of Man, it was found that the German “Animalist” had chosen the name for his late continent. He traces, properly enough, the centre of human evolution to Lemuria, but with a slight scientific variation. Speaking of it as that “cradle of mankind,” he pictures the gradual transformation of the anthropoid mammal into the primeval savage!! Vogt, again, holds that in America man sprang from a branch of the platyrrhine apes, independently of the origination of the African and Asian root-stocks from the old world catarrhinians. Anthropologists are, as usual, at loggerheads on this question, as on many others. We shall examine this claim in the light of Esoteric Philosophy in Stanza VIII. Meanwhile, let us give a few moments of attention to the various consecutive modes of procreation according to the laws of Evolution.
Let us begin by the mode of reproduction of the later sub-races of the Third Human Race, by those who found themselves endowed with the “Sacred Fire” from the Spark of higher and then independent Beings, who were the psychic and spiritual Parents of Man, as the lower Pitri Devatâs (the Pitris) were the Progenitors of his physical body. That Third and holy Race consisted of men who, at their zenith, were described as “towering giants of godly strength and beauty, and the depositories 172 ←of all the mysteries of Heaven and Earth.” Have they likewise fallen, if, then, incarnation was the “Fall”?
Of this presently. The only thing now to be noted of these is, that the chief Gods and Heroes of the Fourth and Fifth Races, as of later antiquity, are the deified images of these Men of the Third. The days of their physiological purity, and those of their so-called Fall, have equally survived in the hearts and memories of their descendants. Hence, the dual nature shown in these Gods, both virtue and sin being exalted to their highest degree, in the biographies composed by posterity. They were the Pre-Adamite and the Divine Races, with which even Theology, in whose sight they are all the “accursed Cainite races,” now begins to busy itself.
But the action of the “Spiritual Progenitors” of that Race has first to be disposed of. A very difficult and abstruse point has to be explained with regard to Shlokas 26 and 27.