Chapter XIV: Part I: Anthropogenesis (12)

Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, the _Rig Veda_, the _Zend Avesta_, etc., but no _first_ man is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the _Bible_.(612) Everywhere the man of _our_ Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.(613) Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;(614) and Pindar echoes the statement.(615) Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah’s,(616) ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram’zimas, the “master of all,” advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.(617) As well understood by the author of _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says:

The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without
any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name
of metals, to express their ever‐decreasing value. Gold, the most
brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies
the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of
Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak
creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid
infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are
robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is
extreme. “They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze;
used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet
unknown.”(618) The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes
who fell before Thebes,(619) or under the walls of Troy.(620)

Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated in the classics. But this is all “mythology” and poetry. What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their own imagination.

40. THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH(621) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. “WE ARE THE KINGS;(622) WE ARE THE GODS” (_A_).

41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK UPON. WIVES FROM THE MINDLESS, THE NARROW‐HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE, ALSO KHADO,(623) WITH LITTLE MINDS (_B_).

42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR THE HUMAN BODY. MALE AND FEMALE THEY WORSHIPPED (_C_). THEN THE THIRD EYE ACTED NO LONGER (_D_).

(_a_) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was—pride! It is the memory of this Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, which has lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and has found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid, and at the same time distorted, legends. Anyone who has read and studied the Commentaries on the Archaic Doctrine, will easily recognize in some of these Atlanteans the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all those _tutti quanti_ of “accursed memory,” as theological literature expresses it; of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this naturally leads us to enquire into the religious ethics of these early Races, mythical as they may be.

What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, had any; for they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe _on faith_. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever‐present, as also the ever to be unknown and invisible, All, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his _inner_ God, each felt he was a Man‐God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower “principles” by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From “Sons of Light and Wisdom” they ended by becoming the “Sons of Darkness.” They fell in the battle of mortal life with Life Immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.(624)

At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root‐Race had thus no beliefs that could be called _religion_. That is to say, he was not only ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” but even of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians from the very beginning of their intellectual life, had a religion, and a most beautiful one. Had they not their bright Gods of the Elements around them, and even within themselves?(625) Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tended by, those who had given them being and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into Matter could never have been achieved, nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super‐ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner “principles” with a portion, or rather, a reflection, of that essence. The Dhyânîs of the Seven Heavens—the seven planes of Being—are the Noumena of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of Nature—the grosser effects of which we perceive in what Science is pleased to call “modes of motion,” the imponderable forces and what not—are the still higher Noumena of still higher Hierarchies.

It was the “Golden Age” in those days of old, the Age when the “Gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.” When it ceased, the Gods departed—_i.e._, became invisible—and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms—the Elements.

It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi‐divine man after his separation into sexes—hence the first‐begotten and humanly‐born mortals—who became the first “sacrificers” to the _God of Matter_. They stand, in the dim far‐away past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,(626) as the first Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter—a worship which very soon degenerated into _self‐worship_, and thence led to phallicism, which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolism of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve _became matter_, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel—the latter the life‐bearing soil, the former “the tiller of that ground or field.”

Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the Ray of which man feels within himself—or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark, cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, the “mighty men ... of renown” in those days,(627) who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim, Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.

Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal God. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon, and, so to say, blended with, astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors—the Hyperborean Continent; the Atlanteans, toward the South Pole, the “_Pit_,” cosmically and terrestrially—whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two Poles were denominated, by the Ancients, Dragons and Serpents—hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the “Sons of God”—Sons of Spirit and Matter—the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of the dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the “Fallen Angels” in its Esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man’s self‐consciousness; it is the support on which hinges his entire Life‐Cycle—the history of his evolution and growth.

On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of Esoteric Anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into various contrasted aspects.

The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so much space is devoted to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject every time it presents itself. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The “Fallen Angels,” so‐called, are _Humanity_ itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no being _before_ the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart; it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, “_Demon est Deus inversus_,” finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.

Thus it has now become self‐evident that, postulating as we do, (_a_) the appearance of Man before that of other Mammalia, and even before the Ages of the huge Reptiles; (_b_) Periodical Deluges and Glacial Periods owing to the Karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (_c_) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a “supernatural” Being, though it is only super‐_human_—our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of Mankind in the Third Race—all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara—owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings “hypostasizing” into their Fifth Principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that these Angels are identical with their “Fallen” Spirits, than the Esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.(628) The _Divine_ Man dwelt in the animal, and therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution—when also “all the animal creation was _untied_,” and males were attracted to females—_that race fell_; not because they had eaten of the Fruit of Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub‐ races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyân Chohans had incarnated.(629) “When we have ascertained the extent of the universe (and learnt to know all that there is in it) we will multiply our race,” answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated Ascetics will “multiply,” _i.e._, once more produce “mind‐born” immaculate sons—in the Seventh Root‐Race.

It is so stated in the _Vishnu_ and _Brahmâ Purânas_, in the _Mahâbhârata_(630) and in the _Harivamsha_. In one portion of the _Pushkara Mâhâtmya_, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will‐born progeny, the “Sons of passive Yoga,” will not create men, “_converts half himself into a female_ by whom he begets daughters,” the future females of the Third Race which begat the Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In the _Vishnu Purâna_ it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.(631)

Happily for the Human Race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the highest Dhyânîs (intellectually and spiritually) before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub‐races—save some of the lowest—of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, the “Seeds of the _Trinity of Wisdom_” had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same Great Personality to step _ad libitum_ from one worn‐out body into another.

(_b_) The first War that Earth knew, the first shedding of human gore, was the result of man’s eyes and senses being opened, which made him see that the daughters of his brethren were fairer than his own—and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race was born. The Titans or Giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race—that of the Giants.

For “there _were_ Giants” in the days of old, indeed.(632) The evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same proportionate size in the flora going _pari passu_ with the fauna. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the Carboniferous period.

Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works—in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity—contain references to Giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Râkshasas of Lankâ—the opponents conquered by Râma. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments’ attention.

Are Giants A Fiction?

Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill‐digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants,” in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier’s later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape‐theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray “_a tendency to revert to the original type_,” they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well‐known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were “in the earth in those days” of old, the _Bible_ alone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.

Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who, though believing too piously in the _Bible_ and Noah’s Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria,
Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type
... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for
animals, have all belonged to men of _high stature_.(633)

The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a “tall stature” to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily “Noah’s”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.

As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,(634) if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a “sarcophagus of giants” found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty‐two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus.(635) Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class _all_ these men as either fools or liars?

Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.(636) Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work, _Les Volcans de la Grèce_, that:

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants
with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones,
the erection of which in every place must have necessitated the
use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all
countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.(637)

In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in the _Bible_ and tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the “mighty ones,” the Rephaim, the spectres or the “phantoms,” the Nephilim, or the “fallen ones” (_irruentes_), are shown as if identical, though they are “all _men_,” since the _Bible_ calls them the primitive and the mighty ones—_e.g._, Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two _Phantom_ (Astral) Races, to the “Fallen” Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the “original sin.” “Ye shall be as Gods,” says the Serpent of _Genesis_ to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of _false divinities_.(638) Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of _images_, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.(639) It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical “Serpent,” as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological “Fall” of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to them _prior_ to their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that “Adam knew Eve his wife.” We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead‐letter of the Hebrew _Bible_, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.

It was only after his defection from the Neo‐Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translate _gigantes_ by _serpentes_, explaining that “serpents and giants signify _demons_.”(640)

We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the _Bible_, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found in _Genesis_. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah’s Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of the _Shoo‐King_,(641) we read:

When the Miao‐tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains
the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky
caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in
the neighbourhood of Canton),(642) _according to our ancient
documents_, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy‐Yeoo, troubled
all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang‐ty
[a King of the _Divine_ Dynasty]) cast his eyes over the people,
and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he
commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut away
every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there
has been no more _going up and down_!(643)

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.

As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and Ethereal _Divine_ Man was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man‐, or hero‐worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy _which has never died since that period_. As the _Catechism_ of the Inner Schools says:

_The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin‐men [Kumâra]_(_644_)_ four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, __“__He is dead__”__; behold, he is alive __ and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand._(645)

It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the _Linga Purâna_, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only after _getting married_ and being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the “Four” is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.

We have now to examine the nature of the “Sons of the Flame” and of “Dark Wisdom,” as well as the _pros_ and _cons_ of the Satanic assumption.

Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls “The Curse after the Fall,”(646) are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the “Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],” and pronounced his “curse,” which “the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, because _his_ man [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,” for which Hea expresses the desire that “_wisdom and knowledge_ hostilely may they injure him [man].”(647)

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly‐acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter of _Genesis_. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.

But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being upon and _in_ man—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of “creation” on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.

The early Atlanto‐Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic “Fall,” which has transformed the “First‐born” of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the “Pagans”—_i.e._, if the accounts given in the _Book of Enoch_,(648) and in _Hermes_, in _Purânas_ and _Bible_ are taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:

Sentences such as, “In his [Satan’s] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,” etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super‐human, procreation. Henceforth, “man will _beget_, not _create_.”(649) But as, by so doing, he has to use his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.

The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of
Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall
the Angels most _graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to
the disobedient child of Earth_, to furnish the protoplasts with
the means of returning to their pristine nobility and
felicity.(650)

This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter of _Genesis_—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as the _pre_‐human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—the _Pre_‐Adamite period. But even _Genesis_ begins its _real_ history (Chap. vi) by the giants of “those days” and the “sons of God” marrying and teaching their wives—the “daughters of men.”

This period is the one described in the _Purânas_; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre‐historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole _personnel_ of the _Brâhmanas_ and _Purânas_—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre‐human period. All these are the _Seed_ of Humanity, so to speak. It is around these “Sons of God,” the “mind‐born” astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the “Shiva Eye” of the ancient Seers—the “Third Eye” of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground‐work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.

But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi‐divine Beings, self‐imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whom _lower, more material_, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of “walking in the air,” and the “greatest _kindness to mortals_;” but with no _mind_—only animal instinct.(651)

(_c_) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that “miracle of miracles,” as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro‐Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principle _knew_ at the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever‐growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the “principles” had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre‐natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred “monsters”—_i.e._, men of distinct varieties from themselves.

Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by
the _Sovereign Powers_, the authors of their being, with
extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. They _commanded
the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea
and the whole world, and read futurity in_ the stars.... It seems,
indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to deal _not with
men as we are_ but with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the
bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings
are marked with a character of _magic_ and _sorcery_....

And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre‐historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence of _facts_ and showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of “Notes on Aristotle’s Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,” in _Mind_:

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ...
misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century, B.C., were in many
respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism.
They were not very likely to accept _fables_ so easily.

Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those “children of Heaven and Earth,” were indeed marked with a character of _sorcery_; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so‐ called “animals,” and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross‐breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the “animals,” were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absolute _à priori_ denial of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new “Incarnate” bred, was called an “animal,” not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from the _filling_ and perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,” remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross‐breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the only _human_ family on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles as _speaking animals_ and no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is an _inferior_ race. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded as _men_ at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals “fair to look upon,” as a biped:

_Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair._

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictly _inter se_—_i.e._, in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearance _on this Earth_ of the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, “appears to be a _primâ facie_ deduction rather than an absolute law” even now. He shows that:

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in
the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in
this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal,
and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or
hare‐rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from “three distinct species of fossil‐ oxen, the _Bos primigenius_, _Bos longifrons_ and _Bos frontosus_.”(652) Yet some of those species, _as the ape family_, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the
extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the
highest of the ape series.

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

Thus Mr. Darwin’s remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—_natura non facit saltum_, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the “missing link” in our Fourth Round geological formations.

We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to be _the descendant of man_, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere‐to‐be‐found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:

_Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant‐Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man’s] sires._

Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l’Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary‐Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.

(_d_) “Then the Third Eye acted no longer,” says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?

A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

The Races With The “Third Eye.”

The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull’s‐eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.(653)

It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, _human_ side of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.

But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, that _it was not so_. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom‐like in their constitution, organism, and _shape_ even, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store‐house, so to speak, of _all the seeds of life_ for this Round, vegetable and animal alike.(654) As Ain Suph is “One, _notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him_,”(655) so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.

As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for
everything is comprised in man. He _unites in himself all
forms_.(656)

The mystery of the _earthly_ man is after the mystery of the
Heavenly Man.(657)

The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the _Divine_ Man—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of “Esoteric Studies,” the _new type_, at the beginning of every Round.

As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape
belonging to the animal kingdom _in esse_, _i.e._, he never formed
part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most
finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have
been _the_ new type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?],
as I imagine, becomes cast‐off clothes in the next; it is then
appropriated by the highest order in the servant‐kingdom
below.(658)

If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the “rings” spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching. Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the “Soul,” for the _Zohar_, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that “the _real_ man is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animal _Unit_, from which the “cast‐off clothes” determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.(659)

Thus, he “created,” for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the _Vendîdâd_ of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and _his_ Ark with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in the _Vishnu_ and other _Purânas_. Open the Mazdean _Vendîdâd_, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,” an Argha or Vehicle.

Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bring _the seeds of men and
women_, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth;
thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle,
etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind _to be
kept inexhaustible there_, so long _as those men shall stay in the
Vara_.(660)

Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply means _Man_.(661)

Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds],
and thou shalt make a door, and a window _self‐shining within_
[which is the Soul].(662)

And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:

Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter
does when kneading the potter’s clay.(663)

The Egyptian ram‐headed God makes man of clay on a potter’s wheel, and so in _Genesis_ do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.

When the “Maker of the material world,” Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light “to the Vara which Yima made,” he answers that:

There are _uncreated_ lights and _created_ lights. There [in
Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the
sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems
only as a day [and night].(664)

This is a clear reference to the “Land of the Gods” or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the “uncreated lights” which enlighten man within—his “principles.” Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda’s answer which is forthwith followed by the words:

Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite] _two are
born, a male and female_.(665)

The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:

_At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third...._

This is clear, since every “Sun” meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth’s revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?

Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah’s Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:

O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who
brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?

Ahura Mazda answered: “It was the bird Karshipta, O holy
Zarathushtra!”(666)

And the note explains:

The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the
earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var
of Yima, and recites the Avesta _in the language of birds_.(667)

This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird “an incarnation of lightning,” and say its song was “often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,” and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind‐Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the “Book of Concealed Mystery” it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:

In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (the _souls_
and the angels have their place).(668)

Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the “Bird’s Nest” was, with both, Heaven, and is God’s Bosom, in the _Zohar_. The perfect Messiah enters Eden “into that place which is called the Bird’s Nest.”(669)

“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,” and that is the Soul
from which the She’kheen‐ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move
away.(670)

_The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space_,

—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.