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The archaic commentaries explain, as the reader must remember, that, of the Host of Dhyanis, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless monads — that some “obeyed” (the law of evolution) immediately when the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e ., when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent Divine purity, created by Kriyasakti the semi-Divine man, who became the seed on earth for future adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom (unfettered as it then was by the bonds of matter), said: — “We can choose... we have wisdom” (See verse 24), and incarnated far later — these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies (physiologically) inferior to their astral models, because their chhayas had belonged to progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who had “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, they produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for æons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination. (See verses 32 , 36.)

This was the “Fall of the angels,” because of their rebellion against Karmic Law. The “fall of man ” was no fall, for he was irresponsible . But “Creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the “prerogative of God alone,” the legitimate attribute patented by theology in the name of an infinite deity of their own making, this power had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as an usurpation of divine rights. Thus, the foregoing, in the light of such narrow views, must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the image of God,” a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the Occultists were already told, “makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first.” “Why did you make of your god a devil — both, moreover, created in your own image? ” is our reply. The esoteric interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches — more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.

The old doctrine about the true meaning of the “Fallen Angels,” in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabala, and explains the Bible. It is found pre-eminent in Genesis when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In Genesis (vi.) the “Sons of God” — B ’ ne Aleim — become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of Angels.”* But what is, in reality, the “Book of dozen could be cited, of the most various character as to details, and all from the pen of educated lay authors, “University graduates” of the present quarter of our century. Thus, the author of “Earth’s Earliest Ages,” J. H. Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists, Metaphysicians, Agnostics, Mystics, poets, and every contemporary author on oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the “Prince of the Air,” and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in this wise: —

“Satan is the ‘Anointed Cherub’ of old.... God created Satan, the fairest and wisest of all his creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the World, and of the Power of the Air.... He was placed in an Eden, which was both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis... and of an altogether different and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being perfect in wisdom, and beauty, His vast empire is our earth, if not the whole solar system... Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his deposition.” Then we are informed that “Satan was from the moment of his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty ” (! !): that he “awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of those whom God had appointed....” Then the Devil “passes from the royalty to his priestly dignity ” (! ! !) “Satan was also a priest of the Most High ,” etc., etc. And now — “Antichrist will be Satan incarnate” (pp. 56-59). The Pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already appeared — they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the “Perfect Way,” of “Isis Unveiled,” of the “Mystery of the Ages,” and even of the “Light of Asia”! ! The author notes the “avowed origin ” (of Theosophy) from the “descending angels ,” from the “Nephilim,” or the angels of the VIth ch. of Genesis , and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as the present Secret Doctrine Enoch” itself, from which the author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel have so profusely quoted? (e.g ., verse 8, in chapter 10, about all who have come before Jesus, being “thieves and robbers.”) Simply a Book of Initiation , giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain archaic mysteries performed in the inner temples. The author of the “Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches” very justly suggests that the so-called “Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch’s) experience at initiation, and what he learned in the mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity (!!); furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the beginning of the Christian era, when... the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude quotes in his epistle from the “Book of Enoch” (verse 14); and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the Book of Enoch from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a writer who lived after... or was even coeval with” the writers of the New Testament: unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, was also a production of the already established Church — which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the “fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself.

In Indian exotericism, these angels (Asuras ) are also denounced as “the enemies of the gods;” those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the latter. In Christian theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends about them, gathered from Pagan sources. The coluber tortuosus “the tortuous snake,” a qualification said to have originated with the Jews, had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it: — among others, a purely astronomical meaning .

The “Serpent” fallen from on high, “deorsum fluens ,” was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead,

tou’ qanavtou ajrchv to that day, when Jesus saw it “falling like lightning from heaven” (Luke x. 17, 18), the Roman Catholic interpretation of cadebat ut fulgur to the contrary, notwithstanding; and it means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the Logos — who is WISDOM, but who, as the opponent of ignorance, is Satan or Lucifer at the same time. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and quickening the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of MAHAT, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life, humanity — if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state —was of course doomed to — moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom . On the other hand, regarded in the light of the LOGOS, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or logos, may be said to have saved those who believed in the secret teachings from “eternal death,” to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This in the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also because the logos is Christos, that principle of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego — the Higher-Self — being formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi (the sixth) and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth principle.* “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and Conscious, Self-Active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of “Heavenly man” with the “Virgin of the World” —Nature, as described in Pymander ; the result of which is their progeny — immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John’s Revelation the marriage of the lamb with his bride. (xix. 7.) That “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her linen may be fine and white outwardly (like the “whitened sepulchre”), but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not “the righteousness of Saints” (v . 8. ibid ), but rather the blood of the Saints she has “slain upon the earth” (chap . xviii. 24.) Thus the remark made by the great Initiate (in Luke x. 18) — one that referred allegorically to the ray of Enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to that old wisdom- religion then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept* — was distorted out of recognition (as was his own personality), and made to fit in with one of the most cruel as the most pernicious of all theological dogmas. (Vide at the end of Stanza XI . “SATANIC MYTHS.”)

But if Western theology alone holds the patent for, and copyright of SATAN — in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction — other nationalities and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of this tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. For they have both disfigured and hinted at the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories touching the subject. Nor have the semi-esoteric dogmas of Purânic Hinduism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen gods. The Purânas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parâsara (Vishnu Purâna ), to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras and Munis, having to be born in every age , to re-incarnate in every Manvantara. This (esoterically) is equivalent to saying that the FLAMES born of the Universal Mind (Mahat), owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and an impulse of Evolutionary Law, had, as in Pymander — without any gradual transition — landed on this Earth, having broken through the seven Circles of fire , or the seven intermediate Worlds, in short.

There is an eternal cyclic law of re-births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric dawn by those who had enjoyed their rest from re-incarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons — by the highest and the earliest Nirvanees . It was the turn of those “Gods” to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.† The Gods who had fallen into generation, whose The Gods who had fallen into generation, whose mission it was to complete divine man, are found represented later on as Demons, evil Spirits, and fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one Eternal law. But no conception of such creatures as the devils and Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahomedan religions was ever intended under those thousand and one Aryan allegories.* (See “The Fallen Angels ” and “The Mystic Dragons ” in Part II .)

The true esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by the whole philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford’s “Perfect Way.” No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length: —

“1. And on the seventh day (seventh creation of the Hindus),† there went forth from the presence of God a mighty Angel , full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere.‡

2. “Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.”§

4. “Among the Gods is none like unto him , into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds:”

5. “Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,* the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumph of Time.”

For, as is said in Hermes, “Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King ; he standeth in Solomon’s porch; he holdeth the key of the Sanctuary , that no man enter therein, save the Anointed having the arcanum of Hermes” (v. 20 and 21).

These suggestive and majestic verses had reference with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity to the creative and generative light of the Logos (Horus, Brahmâ, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., as primeval manifestations of the ever-unmanifested Principle, e.g ., Ain-Soph, Parabrahm, or Zeruana Akerne— Boundless Time — Kâla ), but the meaning is now degraded in the Kabala. The “Anointed,” who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes (Buddha , Wisdom), and who alone is entrusted with the key to the “Sanctuary,” the Womb of nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos, has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of generation” on the lunar mountain (Sinai, the mountain of the moon, “Sin ”). The “Sanctuary” has become the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphised and phallicised and dragged down into matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the Serpent of Genesis: of the conscious god who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the ceaseless pulse and current of desire” refer, the first one, to our doctrine of Karmic and cyclic rebirths, the second — to EROS, not the later god of material, physiological love, but to the divine desire in the gods, as well as in all nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one “dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, FLAME could achieve only by themselves descending into matter. Therefore, as continued in the APPENDIX:

12. “Many names hath God given him (Satan), names of mystery, secret and terrible.”

13. “The Adversary, because matter opposeth Spirit. Time accuseth even the Saints of the Lord.”

28, 29, 31. “Stand in awe of him, and sin not; speak his name with trembling.... For Satan is the magistrate of the justice of God (Karma); he beareth the balance and the sword... For to him are committed Weight and Measure and Number .”

Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabala to Prince Al-Chazari in the Book of that name, says; and it will be found that the Weight and Measure and Number are, in Sepher Jezirah , the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim , or figures, ciphers) covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” or the Logos . Thus Satan and the anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore,

33. “Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades”...

The seven or Saptaloka of the Earth with the Hindus; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of which theology makes a region bordering on Hell, is simply our globe, the Earth , and thus Satan is called —

33 “... the angel of the manifest Worlds .”

It is “Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god,” and this without any allusive metaphor to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos, “the first son, eldest of the gods ,” in the order of microcosmic (divine) evolution; Saturn (Satan), astronomically, “is the seventh and last in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the kingdom of which Phœbus (the light of wisdom, also the Sun) is the centre.” The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish god “an angel of matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and he whose planet was Saturn.

34. “And God hath put a girdle about his loins (the rings of Saturn), and the name of the girdle is Death.”

In anthropogony this “girdle” is the human body with its two lower principles, which three die, while the innermost man is immortal. And now we approach the “Secret of Satan.”

37, 38, 39. “...Upon Satan only is the shame of generation. He hath lost his virginal estate (so hath the Kumâra by incarnating): uncovering heavenly secrets , he hath entered into bondage.... He compasseth with bonds and limits all things...”

42, 43, 44. “Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss (the manifested world) the legions of Satan. These are the unmanifest and the manifest; the free and the bound (in matter): the virginal and the fallen. And both are the Ministers of the Father, fulfilling the word Divine...” Therefore —

55. “Holy is the Sabbath of god: blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of Havas ” —SATAN.

For, “The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord”: God in the manifested world; “the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai” — that footstool being the whole Kosmos. (Vide Part II., “Is Pleroma Satan ’ s Lair? ”)

When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the cosmic reflection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in matter or in the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever- incomprehensible WISDOM, revealing itself as Light and Shadow, good and evil in nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited intellect of MAN.

This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the adversary in the Kabala; the same tenets and spirit being found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with it. We say “historical,” because allegory and a mythical ornamentation around the kernel of tradition, in no wise prevent that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the Kabala, repeating the time- honoured revelations of the once universal history of our globe and the evolution of its races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which have formed the Bible. Its historical foundation is now offered, in however imperfect a form, on these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus the allegorical and symbolical meaning of the Serpent of Genesis is found explained by the “Sons of Wisdom” (or angels from higher spheres, though all and each pertain to the kingdom of Satan, or Matter) revealing to men the mysteries of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so-called myths of the Hindu, Grecian, Chaldean, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The giants of Genesis are the historical Atlanteans of Lanka, and the Greek Titans.

Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer a non-existing personage, while the existence of such cities as Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends? Yet Schliemann proved that Troy had really existed, and the two cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the earth. How many more cities and localities called “fabulous” are on the list of future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical* will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees of Fate in the astral light.

As the tenets of the Eastern doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for one thing, read carefully the opening pages of the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus; and then he will see our doctrines corroborated in it, however veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the Universe, of our Earth (called “Nature” in Pymander) as of everything else, from the “Moyst Principle” — or the great Deep, FATHER-MOTHER — the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos. First the “Universal Mind,” which the hand of the Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father: then the “Heavenly Man,”† which is the great Total of that Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior worlds or of the men of our globe, but which fell nevertheless into matter by virtue of that same evolution, as the second logos of the “Father.”*

Synthetically every Creative Logos, or “the Son who is one with the Father,” is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian theology makes of the seven “Angels of the Presence” the Virtues, or the personified attributes of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahmâ, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic theodice itself recognising, in its creative Verbum Princeps , the head of those angels— caput angelorum —and the magni consilii Angelus (the Angel of the great Counsel), thus recognizes the identity of Christ and those Angels.

“The Gods became no-Gods, the Sura — A -sura,” says the text; i.e ., gods became fiends — SATAN, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, allegorized as Good, and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names.

The Kabala teaches that Pride and Presumption — the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism — are the causes that emptied heaven of one third of its divine denizens — mystically, and of one third of the stars — astronomically; in other words, the two statements are — the first an allegory, and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, as shown, is intimately connected with humanity.

In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of creation was due to, and the result of, that legendary “War in Heaven” brought on by the rebellion of the angels † against creative law , or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty by appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy — is to say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient to believers in the Pope’s infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth, although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and symbologists, showed an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither alchemist nor philosopher could, during the Mediæval Ages, utter that* which in the sight of orthodox theology was a terrible blasphemy, for it would have led them directly through the “Holy” office of the Inquisition, to stake and rack. But for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected and as ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manicheeism, invented the devil, and by placing a theological extinguisher on the radiant star-god, Lucifer , the “Son of the Morning,” thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes — a black and tenebrous light —the myth has struck its roots too deep in the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas and laugh at her horned and cloven-footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi-exoterically , the “First-born” of the Almighty — Fiat Lux , — or the angels of primordial light, were commanded to create ; one third of them rebelled and refused ; while those who “obeyed as Fetahil did— failed ” most signally.

To realise the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and understand Eastern philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedantins, with regard to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the infinite and absolute deity. Esoteric philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyas , the “Central Sun” emits creative light —passively so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of creating , or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent beings — who became collectively a Being or creative God — differentiated already from the one absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned creation.*

Now the Vatican MSS. of the Kabala — a single copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain — contains the most complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians† and other Gnostics; and in that parchment the Seven Suns of Life are given in the order they are found in the Saptasurya . Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions of the Kabala which are procurable in the public libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyan-Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Aryans.

As is well known, the Kabala never originated with the Jews, who got their ideas from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians.

Thus even the now exoteric Kabalistic teachings speak of a Central Sun, and of three secondary suns in each solar system — our own included. As shown in that able though too materialistic work, “New Aspects of Life and Religion ,” which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect deeply thought out and assimilated: —

“The Central Sun ... was to them (as much as to the Aryans) the centre of Rest ; the centre to which all motion was to be ultimately referred. Round this central sun... ‘the first of three systemic suns...revolved on a polar plane... the second, on an equatorial plane’... and the third only was our visible sun. These four solar bodies were ‘the organs on whose action what man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet, earth, depends .’ The channels through which the influence of these bodies was conveyed to the earth they (the Kabalists) held to be electrical” (p . 287).... “The radiant energy flowing from the central sun* called the Earth into being as a watery globe,” whose tendency, “as the nucleus of a planetary body, was to rush to the (central) Sun... within the sphere of whose attraction it had been created,” “but the radiant energy, similarly electrifying both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed motion towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the revolving planet (earth) thus sought to reach.

“In the organic cell the visible sun found its own proper matrix, and produced through this the animal (while maturing the vegetable) Kingdom, finally placing man at its head, in whom, through the animating action of that Kingdom, it originated the psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal kingdom, at the head of the creation, was the animal, the soul-less, the perishable man ... Hence man, although apparently its crown, would, by his advent have marked the close of creation; since creation, culminating in him, would at his death have entered on its decline”... (p . 289).

This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the seven Suns with the seven systems of planes of being , of which the “Suns” are the central bodies, and you have the seven angelic planes, whose “Host” are gods thereof, collectively. (See Comm. to Stanza VII Book I .) They are the Head-group divided into four classes from the incorporeal down to the semi-corporeal, which classes are directly connected — though in very different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions — with our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth (the first and highest), which is called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the Aryan Cosmogony; one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of nature; the other spiritualizes matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh principle reaches man through all the phases of being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes through (the Kabala teaches from ) the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the second (the polar Sun), which two radiate on man his Atma. Group Three (the equatorial Sun) cement the Buddhi to Atman and the higher attributes of Manas , while group Four (the spirit of our visible sun) endows him with his Manas and its vehicle — the Kama rupa , or body of passions and desires, the two elements of Ahamkara which evolve individualized consciousness —the personal ego . Finally, it is the spirit of the Earth in its triple unity that builds the physical body, attracting to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sarira .

Now, as everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything else, the order in which he is generated is described fully in the Eastern teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the Kabala. Says the Book of Dzyan with regard to primeval man when first projected by the “Boneless,” the incorporeal Creator: “First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow-Son (the Body) were ‘CREATED.’ But where was the pivot (the middle principle, Manas)? Man is doomed. When alone, the indiscrete (undifferentiated Element) and the Vahan (Buddhi) — the cause of the causeless — break asunder from manifested life ” —“unless cemented and held together by the middle principle, the vehicle of the personal consciousness of JIVA”; explains the Commentary. In other words, the two higher principles can have no individuality on Earth , cannot be man , unless there is (a ) the Mind, the Manas-Ego, to cognize itself, and (b ) the terrestrial false personality, or the body of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round a pivot (which it is, truly), to the physical form of man. It is the Fifth and the Fourth principles* — Manas and Kama rupa —that contain the dual personality: the real immortal Ego (if it assimilates itself to the two higher ) and the false and transitory personality, the mayavi or astral body, so-called, or the animal- human Soul — the two having to be closely blended for purposes of a full terrestrial existence. Incarnate the Spiritual Monad of a Newton grafted on that of the greatest saint on earth — in a physical body the most perfect you can think of — i.e ., in a two or even a three-principled body composed of its Sthula Sarira , prana (life principle), and linga sarira —and, if it lacks its middle and fifth principles, you will have created an idiot —at best a beautiful, soul-less, empty and unconscious appearance. “Cogito — ergo sum ” —can find no room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate.

There are students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning underlying the allegory — so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church — of the Fallen Angels. “The Kingdom of Spirits and spiritual action which flows from and is the product of Spirit Volition,

“Like produces like and no more at the genesis of being, and evolution with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self- Existent † are called C REATIONS, for they appear in the Spirit Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in its UNBORN Nature, which is beyond time and (limited or conditioned) Space. Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and creatures: they are the development (evolution ) of the discrete elements .” (Com. xiv.) Again: —

“The Heavenly rupa (Dhyan Chohan) creates (man ) in his own form ; it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal (manifested ) Substance ; that form is the ideal shadow of Itself: and this is THE MAN OF THE FIRST RACE.”

To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this earth only, it was the duty of the first “differentiated Egos” — the Church calls them Archangels — to imbue primordial matter with the evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition —”the Angels were commanded to create .” After the Earth had been made ready by the lower and more material powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be “fruitful and multiply,” the higher powers, the Archangels or Dhyanis, were compelled by the evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution — MAN. Thus the “Self-created” and the “Self- existent” projected their pale shadows; but group the Third, the Fire-Angels, rebelled and refused to join their Fellow Devas.

Hindu exotericism represents them all as Yogins , whose piety inspired them to refuse creating , as they desired to remain eternally Kumâras , “Virgin Youths,” in order to, if possible, anticipate their fellows in progress towards Nirvana — the final liberation. But, agreeably to esoteric interpretation, it was a self-sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The “Rebels” would not create will-less irresponsible men, as the “obedient” angels did; nor could they endow human beings with only the temporary reflections of their own attributes; for even the latter, belonging to another and a so-much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of a higher progress. No spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on earth — the lowest and most material plane — for one who on that plane, at all events, is inherently perfect and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Man remaining the pale shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless perfection, the one negative and passive attribute of the real I am that I am , would have been doomed to pass through life on earth as in a heavy dreamless sleep; hence a failure on this plane. The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first (if ever) pronounced the cruel words, “Behold, the man is become as one of us , to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live for ever... ” must have been indeed the Ilda-baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature, whose reflection created Ophiomorphos . In this case it is but natural — even from the dead letter standpoint — to view Satan , the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the “Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah, as alleged; and he who was the first to whisper: “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil” — can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “adversary” to Jehovah the “personating spirit,” he still remains in esoteric truth the ever-loving “Messenger” (the angel), the Seraphim and Cherubim who both knew well, and loved still more, and who conferred on us spiritual, instead of physical immortality — the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew.”

As narrated in King’s “Gnostics,” “Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit, he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man, but this one proved a failure. It was a monster, soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda- Baoth was forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his own creature. Following the impulse of the divine light, man soared higher and higher in his aspirations; very soon he began presenting not the image of his creator Ilda-Baoth but rather that of the Supreme Being, the ‘primitive man,’ Ennoia. Then the Demiurgos was filled with rage and envy; and fixing his jealous eye on the abyss of matter, his looks envenomed with passion were suddenly reflected as in a mirror; the reflection became animate, and there arose out of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos — ‘the embodiment of envy and cunning. He is the union of all that is most base in matter, with the hate, envy, and craft of a spiritual intelligence.’ ” This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead letter text of chapter iii. of Genesis.

Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of animals on earth into a potential god, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Il-da-Baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never- dying, singeing fire and flames of an extinguishable hell. Two poles, yet the same idea; the dual aspect of a refined torture: a fire producer —the personified emblem of Fwsforo” of the astral fire and light in the anima mundi —(that element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne phosphor kein gedanke,” i.e ., without phosphorus no thought), burning in the fierce flames of his terrestrial passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought , discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart — a Prometheus indeed, because a conscious , hence a responsible entity.* The curse of life is great, yet how few are those men, outside some Hindu and Sufi mystics, who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) in cor poreal being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “night’s” rest. For, to quote from an able article by one† who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim to it: —

“Satan, or Lucifer, represents the active , or, as M. Jules Baissac calls it, the ‘Centrifugal Energy of the Universe’ in a cosmic sense. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is pain, which is the Re-action of the pleasure of action, and death —which is the revolution of life — Satan, burning in his own hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum — the expansive disintegration of the nebulæ which is to concentrate into new worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the eternal Inertia of the passive energy of the Kosmos — the inexorable ‘I AM ’ —the flint from which the sparks are beaten out. Fitly is he... and his adherents... consigned to the ‘sea of fire,’ because it is the Sun (in one sense only in the Cosmic allegory), the fount of life in our system , where they are purified (disintegrated) and churned up to re- arrange them for another life (the resurrection); that Sun which, as the origin of the active principle of our Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan...” To demonstrate furthermore the accuracy of Baissac’s general theory (in Le Diable et Satan ) cold is known to have a ‘Centripetal’ effect. “Under the influence of cold everything contracts.... Under it life hybernates , or dies out, thought congeals, and fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire-Sea — it is only in the ‘Nifl-heim’ (the cold Hell of the Scandinavian Eddas ) of the ‘I AM ’ that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of Immortal Existence in the Nifl- heim, and that existence must be painless and peaceful , because it is Unconscious and Inactive . In the Kingdom of Jehovah (if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him) there is no Misery, no War, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no Individual Consciousness .* All is absorbed in the spirit of the most Powerful. It is emphatically a kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission as that of the ‘Arch-Rebel ’ is one of War and Revolution ... It (the former) is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvana . But then Theosophy teaches that separation from the Primal Source having once occurred , Re-union can only be achieved by Will — Effort — which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.”

It is “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil — to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyans- Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man to become his own creator and an immortal god — that men can reach Nirvana and the haven of heavenly divine Peace.

To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom Michael and Gabriel, the Archangels, both belong), the divine “Rebels” — called by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived” — preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery (even if unconscious ) of the beings (evolved as shadows out of their Brethren) through the semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,”† before he can do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogis offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity — created god-like and perfect at first — and to endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status and, descending on our globe, take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahayuga, thus exchanging their impersonal individualities for individual personalities — the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love , was construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the rebel angels hurled down from heaven into the darkness of Hell” — our Earth. Hindu philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras hurled down by Siva, are only in an intermediate state in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian theology, claiming to be based on the rock of divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour — has invented, to enforce that claim paradoxically, the dreary dogma of hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy.

As to Rabbinical Wisdom — than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries — it calls these Beings, the “Evil One;” and the Kabalists— Nahash , “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls , that have thrown themselves, after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One , into an abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on earth. (Zohar iii., 61, C .)

And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar and the Kabala in their right interpretation — for the latter is ours — but only with the gross, pseudo -esoteric explanations of the later, and especially those of the Christian Kabalists.

“Our earth and man ,” says the Commentary, “being the products of the three Fires ” —whose three names answer, in Sanskrit, to “the electric fire, the Solar fire, and the fire produced by friction ,” —these three fires, explained on the Cosmic and human planes, are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and become — according to their applications — the upadhis and the vehicles , or the noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimanin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic LOGOS, by Swaha , one of Daksha’s* daughters. In the metaphysical sense the “Fire of friction” means the Union between Buddhi , the sixth, and Manas , the fifth, principles, which thus are united or cemented together; the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the monad ; in the physical, it relates to the creative spark , or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, it is said (whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Suchi) were condemned by a curse of Vasishta, the great sage, “to be born over and over again .” (Bhagavata-Purâna iv. 24, 4.) This is clear enough.

Therefore, the FLAMES , whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpati, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumâras,* etc. etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric doctrine they are generally named the Asuras, or the Asu-ra Devata or Pitar-devata (gods) for, as said, they were first Gods — and the highest — before they became “no -gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of the Earth† — exoterically , note well, in orthodox dogma.

No Theologian, any more than an Orientalist, can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpati, the Manus, and the Rishis, nor the direct connection of these — or their correlation rather — with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all the Nations originally had in common. All these gods and demi- gods are found reborn on earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause .

Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as seen, absolutely necessary to show that the sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure and more so than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the churches. The “old Book” goes into various details of Astral life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It may, therefore, be left for later explanations, and the First and Second Races can now only receive bare notice. Not so for the Third Race — the Root-Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason. Men evolving pari passu with the globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred million of years before — the first human sub-race had already begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it: “the inner man (the conscious Entity) was not .” This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is , the very entire essence and esse of the high Intelligences condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this manvantara.

(b ) This verse (thirty-ninth) relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, esoteric philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its forefathers or “Creators” were all divine beings — though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their hierarchy — men were nevertheless born on seven different centres of the continent of that period. Though all of one common origin, yet for reasons given their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.* As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purâna . The Kumâra — the Rudra gods, so called (see further ), are described as incarnations of Siva, the destroyer (of outward forms ), named also Vamadeva. The latter, as a Kumâra , the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin youth, springs from Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human races, as regards complexion and type — and three chief variations of these. Thus in the 29th Kalpa — in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form which Siva ever destroys and remodels periodically, down to the manvantaric great turning point about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race — in the 29th Kalpa, Siva, as Swetalohita, the root Kumâra, becomes, from moon-coloured, white ; in his next transformation — he is red (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric teaching); in the third— yellow ; in the fourth — black .

Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval races — as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and hardly an objective, though colossal form. The evolution of these races, their formation and development, went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of those zones. It names three great divisions, namely, the RED-YELLOW, the BLACK, and the BROWN-WHITE.† The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red- brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock — the Fifth Root-Race — and spring from one single progenitor, called in Hindu exotericism by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu: the latter, remember, being that generic personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago — at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis* (See the Root and Seed Manus further on), and who is said to live even now in his mankind. (Vide at the end of this Stanza , “THE PRIMEVAL MANUS OF HUMANITY.”) The light yellow is the colour of the first SOLID human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root Race (after its fall into generation — as just explained), bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Siva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red-yellow (the red Indians and the Mongolians being the descendants of these) and finally into Brown-white races — which now, together with the yellow Races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purâna is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients.

When reading of “the last transformation,” let the reader consider at this juncture, if that took place 18,000,000 years ago, how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage? And if man, in his gradual consolidation, developed pari passu with the earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second , and the first half of the Third Race? For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state; the archaic teachings, moreover, telling us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of man, the Earth, man, and everything on the Globe was of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our dematerialization , as the spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then — aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15, or 20,000,000 years ago, does not square with Geology , which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc., etc., that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time , aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly , what is the date assigned by geology to those “oldest palæzoic rocks”? And secondly , why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves (of carbonic acid apparently, as science seems to imply) break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral, i.e ., viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily mean as thin as smoke, in occult phraseology, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: How could an astral Earth have affected the other planets in this system? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one planet was suddenly removed? The objection is evidently invalid, since our system is composed of older and younger planets, some dead (like the moon), others in process of formation, for all astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our system have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis-Himalayan secret teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindu Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is eighteen million and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as physical , or approximately physical, man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root- Race. Beyond that period MAN, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300 million years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in “Esoteric Buddhism.” Moreover, whereas the Hindu Purânas speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one. (Vide supra ).

We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man.

The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and Anthropogony as described actually existed, that its records are preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of ancient Scriptures.

The Purânas on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, read esoterically and expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes is, that the Purânas, giving as much, and perhaps more attention to the causes than to the effects, allude to the pre-Cosmic and pre-Genetic periods rather than to those of so-called Creation, whereas the Bible, saying only a few words of the former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while nearly skipping the pre-Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race.

Now, whatever the onslaught made on the Order of creation in Genesis , and its dead letter account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism,* he who reads the Hindu Purânas — its allegorical exaggerations notwithstanding — will find them quite in accordance with physical Science.

Even what appears to be the, on the face of it, perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahmâ assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds in the Secret Commentaries a perfectly scientific explanation, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, and the constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our globe; for Science teaches us now that nine-tenths of the stratified formations of the earth’s crust have been gradually constructed beneath water, at the bottom of the seas. The ancient Aryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of natural history, geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand, proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the Bible, (See “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” p. 337), to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism “earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the less philosophical and more immoral religions (! !) of the ancient world.” Only, while we find in Biblical esotericism physiological sexual mysteries symbolised, and very little more (something for which very little real philosophy is requisite ), in the Purânas one may find the most scientific and philosophical “dawn of creation,” which, if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy tale-like allegories, would show that modern zoology, geology, astronomy, and nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in the ancient Science, and were known to the philosophers in their general features, if not in such detail as at present!

Purânic astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, was shown even by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindu astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation of nebulæ, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms — far more correct than Europeans have even now — for chronological and other purposes, were known in India to perfection.

If we turn to geology and zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajâpati, and their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Aryans — the authors of the most perfect philosophical systems of transcendental psychology, of Codes of Ethics, and such a grammar as Pânini’s, of the Sankhya and Vedanta systems, and a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Müller the most perfect on earth — such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing fairy-tales ; such tales as the Purânas now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the fable , the genealogy and origin of Kasyapa, with his twelve wives, by whom he had a numerous and diversified progeny of nagas (serpents), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of living things, and who was thus the father of all kinds of animals, but a veiled record of the order of evolution in this round? So far, we do not see that any Orientalist ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. “The Satapatha Brâhmana,” says one, “gives a not very intelligible account of Kasyapa’s origin.... He was the son of Marîchi, the Son of Brahmâ, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind.... Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he made akarot , hence the word kûrma (tortoise). Kasyapa means tortoise; hence men say: ‘All creatures are descendants of Kasyapa,’ etc., etc. (Hindu Class. Dict .)

He was all this; he was also the father of Garuda , the bird, the “King of the feathered tribe,” who descends from , and is of one stock with the reptiles , the nagas; and who becomes their mortal enemy subsequently as he is also a cycle, a period of time, when in the course of evolution the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life ,” —“survival of the fittest ,” etc., etc., turned in preference on those they issued from, to devour them , — perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room

In that admirable epitome of “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” a lesson in natural history is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance with it of the Bible. The author remarks that Geology, commencing with —

”... the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of the Laurentian, continued in a chain, every link of which is firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life and first indication of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians (or frog family); the Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land animals began to appear; and finally, the Tertiary, in which mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type and species to species, are gradually differentiated and specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, until we arrive at the Glacial and Pre-historic periods, and at positive proof of the existence of man.”

The same order, plus the description of animals unknown to modern science, is found in the commentaries on the Purânas in general, and in the Book of Dzyan — especially. The only difference, a grave one, no doubt, — as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the false personality and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox psychology — is as follows. Having been in all the so-called “Seven creations,” allegorizing the seven evolutionary changes, or the sub-races , we may call them, of the First Root-race of Mankind —MAN was on earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three Rounds,* his physical frame — one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods — was ready to receive the divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, i.e ., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid-point of the 3rd Root Race that man was endowed with Manas . Once united, the two and then the three made one; for though the lower animals, from the amœba to man, received their monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, all have to remain dormant till each reaches its human form, before which stage manas (mind) has no development in them.† In the animals every principle is paralysed, and in a fœtus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third (the astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama , which is desire, instinct) whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy- tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it.

Now the writer is certain to meet what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization — that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature, “from the primitive speck of protoplasm and the nucleated cell in which all life originates,” and “is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous , and last of all, of the human type .” (Laing, 335.)

This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against that ; for all this relates to the shell of man — his body, which in its growth is subject, of course, like every other (once called) morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization — which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic (so-called ) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man — it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in nature, ever-present and as ever invisible, and unknowable, and of intra -Cosmic gods, who all were men.*

But we would ask, what does science and its exact and now axiomatic discoveries prove against our Occult theory? Those who believe in the law of Evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell (which from a vital has become a morphological cell, until it awoke as protoplasm pure and simple) — these can surely never limit their belief to one line of evolution. The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age — we mean “primordial” matter of science — is the same in every essential particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial living matter of to-day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if the now orthodox theory of Evolution were quite correct, namely, a constant, ever-flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of that, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal being all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms, assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity in the description of paleontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely — MAN and the lower genera of being!

“Certain well-marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, but persisting comparatively unaltered , while other forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed ‘persistent types’ of life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds” (Huxley, “Proceed. of Roy. Inst.,” vol. iii., p. 151).

Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., etc., as off-shoots of a moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the amphibian, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms — which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to man, on every planet, in the Three preceding Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be the arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question: — “What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination of pre-mammalian organic species?” — is easily answered. One is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects, which are destined to receive the final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The fish evolved into an amphibian — a frog — in the shadows of ponds, and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the formation of the types in this one. On strict analogy, the cycle of Seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through every kingdom of Nature, are repeated on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think over and work out this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby, though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of mother-Nature before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyani, still more perfect than he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built chain of worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the astral merges into physical evolution. Of this Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey, it says. But now see the contradiction.

Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club mosses, some of them generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the carboniferous epoch, for: — “The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species..... Subkingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus... the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas.... The arachnida , the highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus differing only from its living congeners only in... the eyes,” etc., etc.; all of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter’s authoritative statement about the Foraminifera . “There is no evidence,” he says, “of any fundamental modification or advance in the Foraminiferous type from the palæozoic period to the present time.... The Forminiferous Fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous period; but there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type .” (“Introduction to the study of the Forminifera,” p. xi.)

Now, if there is no indication of change in the Forminifera, a protozoon of the lowest type of life, mouthless and eyeless, except its greater variety now than before, man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his Palæolithic ancestor being even found superior in some respects to his present frame. Where is, then, the claimed uniformity of law, the absolute rule for one species shading off into another, and, by insensible gradations, into higher types? We see Sir William Thomson admitting as much as 400,000,000 of years in the earth’s history, since the surface of the globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living things;* and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so-called “age of reptiles,” we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching its highest developments . We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period “we find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from previously existing forms... Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains; and subsequently,” are notified of — “the gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval man himself may claim to have been evolved .” (“The Beginnings of Life.”)

He may ; but no one, except materialists, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the Quadrumanous order, than that primeval man, who has remained stationary in his human specialization ever since his fossil is found in the oldest strata , and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type — has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape.

That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and at last the human type ,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Hæckel, in his Shopfungsgeschichte , shows a double drawing representing two embryos — that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, except the slight difference in the head, larger and wider about the brain in the man, are undistinguishable. “In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal and finally of man. If we take him up at the more advanced stage where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form... for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks’ growth between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them . Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy” (“Modern Science,” etc., p. 171).

Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile — a Naga , instead of coupling man with the quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the other, and more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to Æsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it since prehistoric times, it is no new discovery. In “Isis,” Vol. I., 389, it is noticed and half explained.

As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in itself the totality of the kingdoms of nature , and since it seems to be “a persistent type” of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern philosophies believe in evolution, which Manu and Kapila* give with far more clearness than any scientist does at present. No need to repeat that which was fully debated in Isis Unveiled , as the reader may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rested, in our earlier books.† But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, “from the structureless Amœba to man,” are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre-Silurian epochs, in the sea or landmud. The Occultists believe in an inherent law of progressive development .‡ Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself.

On page 145 of the “Origin of Species” we find him stating that, since there can be no advantage “to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm... to become highly organized,” therefore, “natural selection,” not including necessarily progressive development —leaves the animalcule and the worm (the “persistent types”) quiet.

There does not appear much uniform law in such behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some Super -Natural selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma , which Eastern Occultists would call the “Law of Retardation,” may have something to do with it.

But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance to his law — as is given to it now by his atheistic followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive: (1) On account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; (2) on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and (3) because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to us — nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says himself: —

“For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone , relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved , and of each page only here and there a few lines .”

It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride or unreasonable belief in man’s representing even here on earth — (in our period, perhaps) — the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own, for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” such as to prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by palæontologists. Believing as we do that man has evolved from, and passed through, (during the preceding Rounds) the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the orangoutang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would forward the Occult doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man, most irresistibly. One may even enquire how it is that biologists and anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape — how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory, unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a non -precedent in nature, quite a special and unique case. And that is what all this leads physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance, not man. The pithecoid is an accidental creation , a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.

The occult doctrine, is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying law in nature, the latter having no personal, “special design,” but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole manvantaric period and deals with the land worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same evolutionary law, and both have to progress according to Karmic law. Both have started from the same neutral centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of the cycle.

It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only — the middle, or the transition point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man what he is now during the first two and a half Root-races. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the secondary period, as we claim.

Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult teaching, “a god on earth who had fallen into matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma; and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the actual man and his inner nature, the Fall mentioned above having left no original sin on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with.

Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc — which is centrifugal for spirit and centripetal for matter — and those he prepares to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces — viz., matter will become centrifugal and spirit centripetal — that all such transformations are next in store for the anthropoid ape also , all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round — and these will all be men in the Fifth Round, as present men inhabited ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round.

Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples — “blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it — of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-race during the period of what is called the “Fall into generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident , a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume (anthropogenesis), it is the speechless animal that first started sexual connection, having been the first to separate into males and females. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow the bestial example — as shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by the animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in the woman. The Ape is, indeed, as remarked in Isis Unveiled (Vol. II 278) “a transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family — a hybrid branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter ” — or man. The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the Egos of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human “Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu , Adam’s first wife, whom the Talmud describes as a charming woman, with long wavy hair, i.e. —a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael-Lilith, or man-animal united, a being called Hayo Bischat , the Beast or Evil Beast (Zohar ). It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals (or men of a lower order) in the Fifth Round, while the adepts of a certain school hope that some of the Egos of the apes of a higher intelligence will reappear at the close of the Sixth Root-race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Species and genera of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown — man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root-Race likewise, as well as after every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in the latter. In the Sixth Root-Race the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms — though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches — will develop from the “cast off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were none before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the monads of the unprogressed men of our race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated baboon. (But see Part III., Addenda .)

This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation” or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant ex nihilo .

This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter.

There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first “mindless” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later “Lemurians”; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.

As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are “productions of blind natural forces,” we are assured by some; “quite modern” we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by sceptic and materialist, and made subservient to the Bible in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian “deluge theory,” it is declared by the Christian clergy “the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of modern science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the scientists as a dream.

Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. Only Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the Purânas, nor anywhere else. But with simply one of the esoteric keys in hand it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless “lands of the gods,” Devas and Munis described in the Purânas, in their Varshas, Dwipas , and zones . Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk.

It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three races — except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the first had no history of its own. Of race the second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention only to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans before the history of our own race (the Fifth) can be attempted.

What is known of other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic science is daubed with the contemptuous term “Superstition.” The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato’s “winged” and hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to their new place in nature: our divine races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of sea slime.

Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber, “the fictions of ancient poetry.... will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.” However one-sided the efforts of the learned author of the “Mysteries of the Kabiri ,” —efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old paganism, “to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture,” — time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that “truth” by showing it unveiled . Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of archaic paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri — the most mysterious gods of antiquity — was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, of these scholars had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter. “We have no reason to think,” he writes, “that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first (the fourth in esoteric teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge .” (Chap. I. p . 9). To this, Faber adds: —

“I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegian isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly, indeed, in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of Scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlanteans were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phœnicians, and the Egyptians.” (“A Dissertation on the Kabiri,” p . 284.)

In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept Biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the giants. (See “Lettres sur l ’ Atlantide .”) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French confrere , as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah — that he “formerly inhabited the island Atlantis” (ibid ). This island, whether it was the “Poseidonis” mentioned in “Esoteric Buddhism,” or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.

No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows; and if a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis? *

Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and post diluvian nation, which, however, as he says, certainly “flourished before the foundation of the Hindu, the Egyptian, and the Phœnician empires.” In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria , he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was sunk under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of science, who will accept neither the tradition that several continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric cycle — it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindus, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses (as every Initiate would) the two continents, and assigns to the small island which sunk last all the events pertaining to the two enormous continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the first couple , from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In saying so, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to “Earth,” he means “matter,” as the Atlanteans were really the first purely human and terrestrial race — those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.

Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated adept, about the history of the Third Race after its “Fall,” though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations — all of which was based upon, and followed the early Aryan calculations — to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.† One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.

The THIRD RACE FELL — and created no longer: it begot its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “lords the gods” of the Bible ‘ the “Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature: but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness — we must not say sin — of what they had done, only when too late: after the angelic monads from higher spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various “fires” are latent, and in others they are active. The vital fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher principles awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus non-existing . And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in matter. But as said in PYMANDER: —

“This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature* being mingled with Man† brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the essence of the Seven (Pitris, governors) and her own; the Fire and the Spirit and Nature (the noumenon of matter); which (commingling) forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes (negative and positive) according to the essences of the seven governors.” (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect . 16.)

Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,‡ “the Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that “things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.” It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir: —

“All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres . This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches ME, who am the light of lights.”

In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow — Dyooknah — of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.

The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven; which became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the war between spirit and matter. This war will last till the inner and divine man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of the former will be at eternal feud with his master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was created by the Elements and was not born.

The above is made clear in all the great theogonies, principally in the Grecian (see Hesiod and Theogony ). The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos , who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal* (vide foot note infra ), it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p . 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos , who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves — as, later on, these men evolve their progeny — without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos ,* time , who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism — matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial — terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution.

This allegory is the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea —by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. — X., et seq., and also Berosus ’ account of primeval creation .) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus — Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.† Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,‡ and varies from Zeus, the Great “Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly man” (Pymander); and even in the Bible he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on — by transmutation — under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely human Atlantean cycle — if Uranus and Kronos who precede him are found insufficient — may be found in Hesiod, who tells us that the Immortals have made men and created the Golden and the Silver age (First and Second Races); while Jupiter created the generations of Bronze (an admixture of two elements), of Heroes, and the men of the age of Iron. After this he sends his fatal present, by Pandora, to Epimetheus,* which present Hesiod calls “a fatal gift,” or the first woman . It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of divine creative fire.” Her apparition on earth is the signal of every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering — as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean Vendidad .

Two deluges may also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the theogonies save the Bible.† Everywhere the man of our race appears after a cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.‡ “Gods and mortals have one common origin” says Hesiod (ibid. v . 108); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI ., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah’s (see Apollod ., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam . I, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology (Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth . 1, 545), all men were drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the “master of all”) advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la Grece Antique —the four ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the races. “The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others,” he says, “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 purity... qualifies the first race... The men of the second race, those of the age of Silver, are already 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” (Op. at D ., 143-155). The fourth generation (race) is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes (see “The Seven Against Thebes ,” by Æschylus), or under the walls of Troy.

Thus, the four races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the classics. But this is all “Mythology” and poetry. What can modern science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of the domain of that same science, 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 if that speck be not a figment of our opponents’ imagination.

41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK AT. WIVES FROM THE “MINDLESS,” THE NARROW-HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE. ALSO KHADO (Dakini ) WITH LITTLE MINDS (b ).

42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR 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 Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, the memory of whom lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and which 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. One who has read and studied the Commentaries on the archaic doctrine, will easily recognise in some Atlanteans, the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all these 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 leads us naturally to inquire into the religious ethics of these early races, mythical as these 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, as 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 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 had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.*

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 equally as ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” as 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 had a religion — and a most beautiful one — from the very beginning of their intellectual life. Had they not their bright gods of the elements around them, and even within themselves?† Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by those who had given them life 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 Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the NOUMENOI of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of nature - the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in what Science is pleased to call

the “modes of motion” — the imponderable forces and what not — are the still higher noumenoi 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.” Since then, 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 far-away dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,* as the first anthropomorphists who worshipped form and matter. That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship , thence led to phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms 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” (Gen . vi.); 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 blended, so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean Continent); the Atlanteans, toward the Southern 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 this 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 angle-iron 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 considerable space is devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject. 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, has never had any being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten, nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; 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, 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 — it is evident that our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of the 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 those angels are identical with their “Fallen” Spirits, than the esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.* 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 Dhyan-Chohans had incarnated.* “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 Purânas; in Adi Parvan (p . 115) and Brahmâ Purâna , etc. In one portion of the Pushkara Mahatmya , 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.

Happily for the human race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races — save some 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 human gore shed, 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. 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† and 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 in the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. 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 Lanka — the opponents conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments of attention.

Here, again, we come into collision with Science. The latter denies, so far, that man has ever been much larger than the average of the tall and powerful men one meets with occasionally now. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces such traditions as resting upon ill-digested facts. Instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward. Thus, in 1613, in a locality called from time immemorial the “Field of Giants” in the Lower Dauphine (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 Teutobochus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier’s Dinotherium giganteum of the family of tapirs, 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 they are now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us was the Roman Emperor Maximus, we are told, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day we see every year 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 ½ feet tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. And 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 rule 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 (which is positively denied) to prove undeniably in the opinion of science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. 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 and pulverize a brazen, far more a human skeleton. But 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, almost nothing 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 Atlas or Orion, whose mighty shoulders are 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. “All those bones” writes Frederic de Rougemont — who, though believing too piously in Noah’s ark and the Bible, is none the less a Scientific witness — “all those skeletons found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liege, etc., etc... those skulls which remind all of the negro type... and which by reason of that type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men of very high stature “... (“Histoire de la Terre ,” p . 154) 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 stop at 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* and actual existence would have to be proven. But we may turn to the scientific journals of 1858, which spoke of a sarcophagus of giants found that year on the site of that 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 at Sigeus. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilaus, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as well as that other one discovered by Messecrates of Stire, at Lemnos — “horrible to behold,” according to Philostratus (Heroica, p . 35). 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 recognised Orion, the son of Ephialtes (Nat. Hist., vol. VII, ch. xvi .). 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 Hillus, son of Hercules — all giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pègues (cited in de Mirville ’ s Pneumatologie ) affirms in his curious work on “The Volcanoes of Greece ” 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 must have necessitated everywhere the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.” (Page 48.)

In the same work above cited of the Abbé Pègues, the author wonders why in Bible and tradition the Gibborim , (Giants, the mighty ones) the Rephaim , or the spectres (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 “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 one —the Third; and to the race of the Atlantean Giants — the Fourth, after which “men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet (Elevations p . 56) 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 . Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of images , of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is the latter 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.*

It is 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 does not, as sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, refer at all to the physiological fall of men, but to their acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, which knowledge comes 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” (Genesis iv .). It is not, however, by the dead-letter of the Hebrew Bible that we shall check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine ; but point out, rather, the great similarities between the two in their esoteric meaning.

It is 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 .” (Genesis, chapter v .)†

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 they belong to a 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 Shoo-King (4th part, chap. XXVII, p. 291), anyone can read in the French translation, “When the Mao-tse” (“that antediluvian and perverted race,” explains the Annotator, “which had 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”),* “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) saw that his people had lost the last vestiges of virtue. Then he commanded Tehong and Lhy (two lower Dhyan Chohans) to cut away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there was no more going up and down! “†

“Going up and down” means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two worlds. Not being 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 only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to bad purposes — remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the secret teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which never died since that period: —

“The inner man of the first *** only changes his body from time to time ; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvana, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind ....” “Out of the seven virgin-men (Kumâra* ) 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 (Gnyana). Thou shalt never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones (Maha...) before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand .”...† (Catechism of the inner Schools.)

It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized in the “Linga Purâna ,” which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as 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 Siva is pre- eminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogis 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 Siva, a god, and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type, in the Hindu Pantheon. Higher than the “Four” is only ONE on Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Book 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 on the tile, which George Smith calls “the Curse after the Fall” (see p. 81 of his “Chaldean Account of Genesis”), 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 in line 12 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 (14 and 15),“ for which Hea expresses the desire that ” ‘Wisdom and knowledge ’ hostilely may they injure him (man).”

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldean 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 Manasic spirit, which made him learn the secret of creation on the Kriyasaktic, 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 (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 and Typhon of the “pagans” (i.e ., if the accounts given in the Book of Enoch,* and in Hermes, in Purânas and Bible are taken literally), when read esoterically means simply this: —

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 .“* 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 Kabala 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” (Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the Kabala ). This shows how the event — of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the divine Secrets of Heaven to the daughters of men — 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 man.

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 Purânic 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 “Siva 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 at, but in whom lower, more material , though sidereal, beings had incarnated. These beings in female forms (Lilith is the prototype of these in the Jewish traditions) are called in the esoteric accounts “Khado” (Dâkini, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the chief of these Liliths, Sangye Khado , (Buddha Dâkini, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of “walking in the air,” and the greatest kindness to mortals ; but no mind —only animal instinct.*

(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 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 describes them well 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 one has to deal, when reading of them, 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 dullness and superstition, an endless series of recognized philosophers, who mention these races and assert that, even in their own time, they saw their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old — no fewer and as 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 our modern wise men are; for, as well remarked by the author of some “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 4th 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 that, which, 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 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 denial a priori of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being that the new “incarnate ” bred with, 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 its first verse (24th): — 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 being filled and perfected, 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 were supposed, with Cain and Abel, 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 Singhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles as speaking animals and no more, some British people believe firmly, in their arrogance, that every other human family — especially the dark Indians — is an inferior race. Moreover there are naturalists who have sincerely 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 at” 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 the animals were — quite different physically and anatomically from what they have become; and they were nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world breeds 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 prima facie deduction rather than an absolute law” even now. He shows that “different species, do, in fact, often breed together, as may be 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 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 that of several other domestic animals (p. 101); “like foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rutimeyer as descended from three distinct species of fossil-oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos frontosus .” 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 (see Addenda ).

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 in more than one way, if not entirely, the modern Evolution theory 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, however unconsciously to itself, modern Science pleads our case upon 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 ever did that —

“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 Dwipa ” (continent) spoiled his (the dumb man’s) Sires .” (Commentary.)

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 Brahminical exoteric books which approximate to the esoteric teaching.

(d )... Then , “the third eye acted no longer ,” says the Stanza, because MAN had sunk too deep into the mire of matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Verse 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 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 grounds 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.*

It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical, human side of the extinct races, in this 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. That, which finds its 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 facts in nature — is withheld.

But even such statements as these — e.g ., 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 a Cyclops in days of old — will all 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.* As En-Soph is “One, notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him ” (Zohar ,” i. 2l a ), 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 (Ibid., iii . 48 a ).” “The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man” (ii . 76 a ). 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 .” The author proceeds, “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.”

If the idea is what we understand it to mean — for the “rings” spoken of throw some confusion upon it — 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.‡

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 Vendidad of the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldean and the Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindu Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and his Ark with the Seven Rishis, as in that of the Rishis, each of whom is shown the father and progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters (See Vishnu and other Purânas ). Open the Mazdean Vendidad , at Fargard ii., at verse 27 (73) and read the command of Ormazd to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three races, after telling him to build a vara (“an enclosure,” an argua 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., etc.; and v. 28 (74)...”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 .” Those “men” in the “Vara” are the “Progenitors,” the heavenly men or Dhyani, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For “Vara,” or the “Ark” (or again the Vehicle) simply means MAN.* Verse 30 says:... “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. And when Yima inquires 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” (31).

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 is told that “There are uncreated lights and created lights” and that “there” (in Airyana Vaêgô, 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) 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 (V . 40), which is forthwith followed by Verse 41 saying that “Every fortieth year, to every couple (hermaphrodite) two are born, a male and female,” † the latter being 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 ....”

Which 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 Zarathustra. Thus when the latter asks —

V . 42. “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 Zarathustra.’...”

“The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth he would be king of birds. He brought into the var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds .” (Bund. xix and xxiv .)

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 (of the tree) the birds lodge and build their nests,” or the Souls and the Angels have their place!.* Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. “Bird” was a Chaldean, 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” (Zohar, ii., 8 b ). “Like a bird that is flying from its nest, and that is the Soul from which the Shekeenah (divine wisdom or grace) does not move away” (Zohar, iii., 278 a ; Myer’s Qabbalah, 217). “The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, is boundless space,” says the Commentary, meaning Hansa, the bird of Wisdom.

It is Adam Kadmon who is the (Sephirothal) tree, and it is he who becomes the “Tree of knowledge of good and evil” esoterically. And that “tree hath around it seven columns (seven pillars) of the world, or Rectores “; the same “Progenitors ” or “Sephiroth ” again “operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,” etc., one of which orders begets giants (Nephilim ) on Earth.

It was the belief of entire antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already yielded in isolated cases groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.† These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindu Purânas and the Greek Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans — men of a superhuman tremendous physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times — and of actual Cyclopes — three-eyed mortals.

It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the “origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”

In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated ex nihilo so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.*

The evidence for the Cyclopes — a race of giants — will be pointed out in forthcoming Sections, in the Cyclopean remnants, so called to this day. An indication that, during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism — which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race — the early Fourth Race may have been three- eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.

To the Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychic involution proceeds on parallel lines with physical evolution ; that the inner senses — innate in the first human races — atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses; to the student of Esoteric symbology, finally, this statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simply a phase of the law of growth, a proven fact , in short. They understand the meaning of this passage in the Commentaries which says: —

“There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females (hermaphrodites); with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them .† A KALPA later (after the separation of the sexes) men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim ; and coordinately the third eye commenced to lose its power .... When the Fourth (Race ) arrived at its middle age, the inner vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old sages .* ... The third eye, likewise, getting gradually PETRIFIED,† soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the inner man (during trances and spiritual visions) the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly ...... The undefiled Lanoo (disciple, chela) need fear no danger ; he who keeps himself not in purity (who is not chaste) will receive no help from the ‘deva eye .’ ”

Unfortunately not. The “deva-eye” exists no more for the majority of mankind. The third eye is dead , and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the PINEAL GLAND. As for the “four-armed” men, it is they who become the prototypes of the four-armed Hindu gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.

Such is the mystery of the human eye that, in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action, some scientists have been forced to resort to occult explanations. The development of the Human eye gives more support to the occult anthropology than to that of the materialistic physiologists. “The eyes in the human embryo grow from within without ” out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester, thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines , suggests the curious view that “our” earliest vertebrate ancestor was a transparent creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man “a transparent creature” once upon a time, we are taught, hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes in the epidermis? If it started inside , the theory goes into the waste-basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester’s extraordinary suggestion — or shall we say admission? — is rendered perhaps necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses “FROM WITHIN WITHOUT,” from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory: The third eye retreated inwards when its course was run — another point in favour of Occultism.

The allegorical expression of the Hindu mystics when speaking of the “eye of Siva,” the Tri-bochana (“three-eyed”), thus receives its justification and raison d ’ etre — the transference of the pineal gland (once that “third eye”) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery — incomprehensible to some — of the connection between abnormal , or Spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked, “Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine qua non rule and condition of regular chelaship, or the development of psychic and occult powers” The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the “third eye” was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality (Spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical), it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by physiologists as the spleen is — when we learn this, the connection will become clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the medulla oblongata , reacts powerfully on the pineal gland, for, owing to the number of “centres” in that region, which controls by far the greater majority of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, there must be exerted a very powerful “inductive” action by the medulla on the pineal gland.

All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all; then it may rest on the assumptions of materialistic science itself.

It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation this time, that many of the animals — especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata — have a third eye, now atrophied, but necessarily active in its origin.* The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia , recently discovered in New Zealand (a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well ), presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria punctata , but the chameleon, certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that it was no more than the prolongation of the brain ending with a small protuberance, called epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. It offered — as its development and anatomical structure showed — such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There were and are palæontologists who feel convinced to this day that this “third eye” has functioned in its origin, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the pineal gland in Quain’s Anatomy (Vol. II. ninth edit., pp . 830-851. “Thalamencephalon ” Interbrain ) : —

“It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity..... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process, to be noticed later, into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus , and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.

“The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea ) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.

“The two optic thalami formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina ). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior, behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the third ventricle . Behind, the two thalami continue united by the posterior commissure , which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by the peduncles of the pineal gland.....

“At an early period the optic tracts may be recognised as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina .

“The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the Thalamencephalon.”

The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres backwards, the pineal gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection to be traced between the (originally) hollow optic tracts and the eyes anteriorly, the pineal gland and its peduncles behind, and all of these with the optic thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria punctata have a very important bearing on the developmental history of the human senses, and on the occult assertions in the text.

It is well known, (and also regarded as a fiction now, by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man,) that Descartes saw in the pineal gland the Seat of the Soul . Although it is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of it in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that “special” locality, he concluded that it was that little gland tied to the brain, yet having an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion “by the animal Spirits * which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”

Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the pineal gland, as shown, is far more connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of the real processes employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding cyclic course of this great law, they would know instead of conjecturing; and feel as certain of the future physical transformations of the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then, would they see the fallacy and all the absurdity of their modern “blind-force” and mechanical processes of nature; realizing, in consequence of such knowledge, that the said pineal gland, for instance, could not but be disabled for physical use at this stage of our cycle. If the odd “eye” in man is now atrophied, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant form without some definite purpose and use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the cycle ran down toward that point when the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of the physical man, the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoologicaldevelopment, thatmedian”eye”endedby atrophying along with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the soul, says popular wisdom,* and Vox populi Vox Dei .

In the beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal, whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their coats of skin, viz., to evolve from within without the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism — the third eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes developed† later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrata, in our day, i.e ., beneath an opaque skin.‡ Only the stages of the odd , or primeval eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the “Cyclopean” eye was, and still is , in man the organ of spiritual sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by nature for further use in Æons to come.

This explains why the pineal gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is the vertebrata in which it is the most prominent and objective, and in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the anatomist. No less light is thrown thereby on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali yuga —the black age which began nearly 5,000 years ago — it was said (paraphrased into comprehensible sentences):

“We (the Fifth Root-Race) in our first half (of duration) onward (on the now ASCENDING arc of the cycle) are on the mid point of (or between) the First and the Second Races — falling downward (i.e ., the races were then on the descending arc of the cycle)..... Calculate for thyself , Lanoo, and see .” (Commentary xx.).

Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period — namely, in the second half of the First Spiritual ethero-astral race — nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element. As it was on its descending line, and as we are parallel to it, on the ascending , we are, therefore devoid of the Spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the manasa period of our cycle of races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter — or that equilibrium between brain intellect and Spiritual perception. One important point has, however, to be borne in mind.

We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas , as a direct ray from the Universal MAHAT — a ray unimpeded by matter — will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of developmental evolution repeated on a smaller scale, it must be the more so in the case of a Root-Race. Our race then has, as a Root-race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the Spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again — the oldest — having crossed their crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.

It becomes comprehensible now why the “odd eye” has been gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the “Lemurians.”

It is a curious fact that it is especially in human beings that the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been developed, and that the optic thalami, corpora quadrigemina , and corpora striata are the principal parts which are developed in the mammalian brain. Moreover it is asserted that the intellect of any man may to some extent be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary that if the development and increased size of the pineal gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the pineal gland at the expense of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres. It is a curious speculation which would receive a confirmation in this case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of a human being, and which is allowed by science to be the great centre for all the physiologically co-ordinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc., etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres — the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed pineal gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.

It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.

This is, then, the organ which gave rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of man with one head but two faces. These may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldean fragments. Apart from the work already cited — the Shan Hai King, compiled by King Chia from engravings on nine urns made 2,255 B.C., by the Emperor Yu, they may be found in another work, called the “Bamboo Books,” and in a third one, the “Rh Ya” — “initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, B.C., 1,122”: — says Mr. Ch. Gould in his “Mythical Monsters .” The Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 at the opening of the grave of King Seang of Wai, who died B.C 295. Both these works mention men with two faces on one head — one in front and one behind (p . 27).

Now that which the students of Occultism ought to know is that THE “THIRD EYE” IS INDISSOLUBLY CONNECTED WITH KARMA. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.

The “eye of Siva” did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the eye lost its powers. But such was the law of Evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, no FALL. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a god, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say “sin” it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning; as the term Karma * would be the right one to use in this case; while the reader who would feel perplexed at the use of the term “spiritual” instead of “physical” iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the psychic , if not of the “Spiritual man.” While in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual being which sinned, the Spirit element being still the “Master” principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.

As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of the theosophical teachings.

Questions with regard to Karma and re-births are constantly offered, and a great confusion seems to exist upon this subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new soul is created by God for every newly-born infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether in such case the number of incarnating Monads on earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conceptions, the number of the incarnating monads — even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed — still, there must be a limit. It was stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, had ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.

Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of KARMA is inextricably interwoven with that of Re-incarnation.

It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same individuality throughout the life-cycle; the assurance that the same MONADS — among whom are many Dhyan- Chohans, or the “Gods” themselves — have to pass through the “Circle of Necessity,” rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless shells, or astral figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us — nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terrible and apparent injustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues —far more deserving in every way —perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away, helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one’s ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him — that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.*

Of all the terrible blasphemies and accusations virtually thrown on their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably “pious” Christian assert, in connection with every evil and undeserved blow, that “such is the will of God.”

Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees, who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and creator for helpless man, and of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve’s words: —

“But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?” Logic and simple common sense , we answer: if we are made to believe in the “original Sin,” in one life, on this Earth only, for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire (and this whether they are good or bad, says the Predestinarian),* why should not every man endowed with reasoning powers condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man’s unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as —

“Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast involved

The pride of human wisdom, to confound

The daring scrutiny and prove the faith

Of thy presuming creatures!...”

Truly a robust “faith” is required to believe that it is “presumption” to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to “perplex” him, and to test a “faith” with which that “Power,” moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.

Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law — whether Conscious or Unconscious — predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is ETERNITY itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is ACTION itself. It is not the Wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the Ocean’s motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinise its mysteries. On the contrary, he who unveils through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is working for the good of his fellow-men. KARMA is an Absolute and Eternal law in the World of manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists — still less as fatalists:” * for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect in its effects in the phenomenal world.

Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of re-birth, or of the re-incarnation of the same spiritual individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. The latter are like the various costumes and characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. The inner , or real man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet for the brief space of a few acts, which represent, however, on the plane of human illusion the whole life of Hamlet. And he knows that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night; but the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact. In actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real. Nevertheless, the permanent individuality is fully aware of the fact, though, through the atrophy of the “spiritual” eye in the physical body, that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false personality.

The possession of a physical third eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of Third SUB-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame made it disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perceptions lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether before the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many “Noahs.”

The student has to bear in mind that there were many such deluges as that mentioned in Genesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section devoted to the subject of pre-historic continents. To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the esoteric doctrine has much in it of the legends contained in the Hindu Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former — only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that “Vaivasvata Manu” — a generic name indeed! — was the Noah of the Aryans and his prototype, all this, which is also the belief of the Occultists, necessitates at this juncture a new explanation. (Vide Part III. “Submerged Continents .”)

Those who are aware that the “great Flood,” which was connected with the sinking of an entire continent — save what became a few islands — could not have happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago; and that Vaivasvata Manu is the Indian Noah connected with the Matsya (or the fish) Avatar of Vishnu — may feel perplexed at this discrepancy between facts stated and the chronology previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to turn to the Theosophist of July, 1883, and after studying the article therein, “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” the whole question can be explained to him. It is in this explanation, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brahmins.

For the benefit of those, however, who may not have “The Theosophist” of that month and year to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:

“Who was Manu, the son of Swayambhuva? The secret doctrine tells us that this Manu was no man, but the representation of the first human races evolved with the help of the Dhyan-Chohans (Devas ) at the beginning of the first round. But we are told in his Laws (Book I . 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa — or interval from creation to creation (read interval from one minor ‘Pralaya’ to another* ) — and that in the present divine age, there have been as yet seven Manus. Those who know that there are seven rounds, of which we have passed three, and are now in the fourth; and who are taught that there are seven dawns and seven twilights or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on, and between the planets there is an awakening to illusive life, and an awakening to real life; and that, moreover, there are root-Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as the seed-Manus — the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (or the Sishtas —the surviving fittest* ; a mystery divulged only to those who have passed their third degree in initiation) — those who have learned all that will be better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the Sacred Hindu scriptures that the first Manu produced six other Manus (seven primary Manus in all), and these produced in their turn each seven other Manus† (Bhrigu I , 61-63) — the production of the latter standing in the occult treatises as 7 × 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu — the last one, the progenitor of our Fourth Round Humanity — must be the seventh , since we are on our fourth Round,‡ and there is a root -Manu at globe A and a seed Manu at globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a ‘Root Manu’ (Dhyan Chohan) and closes with a ‘Seed- Manu,’ so a Root and a Seed Manu appear respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human period on any particular planet.§ It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement that a Manu-antaric period means, as the term implies, the time between the appearance of two Manus or Dhyan Chohans; and hence a minor Manvantara is the duration of the seven races on any particular planet, and a major manvantara is the period of one human round along the Planetary chain. Moreover, that, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 × 7 Manus, and that there are 49 root- races on the seven planets during each Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu is called ‘Vaivasvata’ and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our Fifth race — who saved it from the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) — is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root, or primitive-Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root-Manu.

“Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root-Manu of our fourth Human Wave (the reader must always remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who are made to preside over the seven races of this our planet. Each of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and ever-recurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every Root-race. And it is this Vaivasvata — the Hindu ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah and by other names — who is the allegorical man who rescued our race, when nearly the whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration.”*

Thus it is shown that there is no real discrepancy in speaking of the Vaivasvata Manvantara (Manu-antara , lit. “between two Manus”) 18,000,000 odd years ago, when physical, or the truly human man first appeared in his Fourth Round on this earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g ., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or sidereal Flood (a mystery), or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged Atlantis, when the racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth Race, from utter destruction. As the several (and quite different) events are purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Purânas in one narrative, there may yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader’s mind. Therefore, as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions. The blinds which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric philosophy are great and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however, may be a little more removed and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be offered to the earnest student.

As somebody — Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake — remarked, “the first principle in Hindu religious philosophy is Unity in diversity .” If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, this is due to the fact that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same LOGOS, the celestial, as well as the terrestrial messengers and permutations of that Principle which is ever in a state of activity; conscious during the period of Cosmic evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic rest, as the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which “sleepeth not,” nor is it ever awake — for it is SAT or Be-ness , not a Being. It is from IT that issues the great unseen Logos, who evolves all the other logoi , the primeval MANU who gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the manifested Logos.† Hence we learn in the “Commentaries” that while no Dhyan Chohan, not even the highest, can realise completely “the condition of the preceding Cosmic evolution,” “the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences of all the Cosmic evolutions throughout Eternity.” This is very plain: the first Manu is called Swayambhûva , “the Self-manifested,” the Son of the unmanifested FATHER. The Manus are the creators of the creators of our First Race — the Spirit of mankind — which does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first “pre-Adamic” men on Earth.

Manu declares himself created by Virâj,* or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity),† which means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic activity: that Logos or UNIVERSAL MONAD (collective Elohim) that radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of activity — progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as of the yet undifferentiated human monads of planetary chains as well as of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is “Swayambhûva,” the SELF-BORN, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system), and whose radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhûva (a generic name, mysterious and meaning far more than appears), each of these becoming, as a Host , the Creator of his own Humanity. (See “The Manus and the Manvantaras Explained by a Western Mystic and Mathematician .”)

As to the question of the four distinct races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in it, except the ethereal bodies of the first races; and it is a matter of legendary, nevertheless, very correct history. That legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water, just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindus have, to this day.

Trying to account for the community of legends in the remote antiquity — held by Chinese, Chaldean, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks — and for the absence of any certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of “Mythical Monsters ,” remarks, that “we must not be surprised if we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture (as in China), the sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few thousands of years from natural decay... and how much more... if... minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes, deposition of volcanic ashes, the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life by deadly pestilence, by miasma, or by the outpour of sulphurous fumes.” (“Mythical Monsters ,” by Ch. Gould, p. 134.)

And how many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from this Stanza:

“During the first seven crores of the Kalpa (70,000,000 years) the Earth and its two Kingdoms (mineral and vegetable), one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi-ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore * the mother (Earth) grows opaque, and in the FOURTEENTH† the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of nature (geological changes) last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals .”

The last change took place nearly twelve crores of years ago (120,000,000 ). But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier . (Commentary, xxii .)

Thus, if we are to believe esoteric teaching, there have been no more universal geological disturbances and changes for the last 120 millions of years, and the Earth was, even before that time, ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about eighteen millions of years ago, after the first great failure of nature to create beings alone, without the help of the divine “Fashioners,” had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three races (See above Stanzas III. et seq .). The actual duration of the first two and a- half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The History of the Races begins at the separation of the Sexes, when the preceding egg-bearing androgynous race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub-races of the Third Root-Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this “destruction” which is called allegorically the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu (or “Humanity”) remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain: —

In the Symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for Chaotic unsettled matter — Chaos itself: and the Water for the feminine principle — the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it — “Arch; (ark) answers to the Hebrew rasit , or Wisdom.. and (at the same time) to the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca , in which the germ of nature (and of mankind) floats or broods on the great Abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane (or racial) cycle.” Ark is also the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which broods over chaos. Now Vishnu is the divine Spirit, as an abstract principle, and also as the Preserver and Generator , or Giver of life — the third person of the Trimurti (composed of Brahmâ, the Creator, Siva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver). Vishnu is shown in the allegory as guiding, under the form of a fish , the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu clean across the waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word fish . (See Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, etc .) Its theological meanings is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine . Jesus is called the “Fish,” and so were Vishnu and Bacchus: IHS, the “Saviour” of mankind, being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called IcQgS, the fish.* As to the Seven Rishis in the Ark, they symbolised the seven principles, which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human , and no longer a divine creature. (See for further details , “The Seventh Manu .”)

Nor have we many details about the submersion of the continent inhabited by the Second Root Race. But the history of the Third, “Lemuria,” is given, as is that of Atlantis, the others being only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary age (the Eocene),† and it is during this Deluge also — an actual geological deluge this time — that Vaivasvata Manu is again shown as saving mankind (allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is saved); so also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,‡ after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times.

It is the submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. It is of this cataclysm that the old records (See the “Book of Enoch ”) say that “the ends of the Earth got loose;” and upon which the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deukalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect saved, have been built. Tradition, taking into no account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both indifferently “deluges.” Yet there is a great difference. The cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor — the fourth continent — was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its civilizations and sciences, remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred records of the East.

Hence, Modern Science denies Atlantis and its existence. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the reason for the change of climates to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation and the precession of the equinoxes, there are other men of Science, such as Sir H. James (Athenæum, Aug . 25, 1860), and Sir John Lubbock (ibid ), who feel more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the astronomers are again arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not denounced — only to accept it later on whenever the hypothesis became undeniable fact?

How far our figures agree, or rather disagree with modern Science will be seen further in the Addenda to this Book, where the geology and anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the same in Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned in the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which calls Atlantis “Lemuria,” however, whenever it accepts such a submerged continent. With regard to the pre-human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even up to the appearance of the “Mindless” First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. More may be said: that which Science — recognizing only physical man —has a right to regard as the prehuman period, may be conceded to have extended from the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean race, since it is only then that man became the “complete organic being he is now.” And this would make Adamic man no older than a few million of years.*