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The Pedigree of Man

By Annie Besant

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The Intellectual Pedigree

WE HAVE STUDIED the spiritual and physical evolution. The two lines of evolution, approaching each other, find themselves separated by a gulf. There is no bridge whereby they reach each other. " They who fashion the physical man descend from the material Worlds. They are inferior Spirits possessed of a dual body. They are the fashioners and creators of our body of illusion. Into the forms, projected by the Pitrs the Two Letters (the Monad, called also the Double Dragon) descend from the spheres of expectation. But they are like a roof with no walls nor pillars to rest upon. Man needs four Flames and three Fires to become one on earth, and he requires the essence of forty-nine fires to be perfect. It is those who have deserted the superior spheres, the Gods of Will, who complete the Manu of Illusion. For the Double Dragon has no hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze, where there is no tree or branch to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form where there is no agent of transmission, and the form knows it not.-- They are like the two lines of a triangle that has lost its bottom line." That, then is the description in the Occult Commentary of the position at which human evolution is now standing - above, the Monad, or Double Dragon; below, the physical form that knows not the over-brooding Spirit. Nothing more can be done by either of these. The Monad can come no further downwards; the Double Dragon cannot breathe the coarse atmosphere of earth. That helpless, senseless empty form can mount no further; that is the bhuta, the shadow, that cannot climb any higher up the ladder of evolution. It is the senseless, the weak, the powerless, that demands some help from outside.
But the divine plan for the building of man cannot be frustrated here any more than anywhere else. And they from the heavenly spheres, they who are able to bridge the gulf between the
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spiritual and the material. It is the bridge of intellect they will build, the bridge of mind. Now the mind cannot be given by the Lords of the Twilight; for although they themselves possess it, it is not in them so thoroughly transcended that they are able to throw it off from them for the helping of others. Those who are able to spare of their own mind must of themselves have transcended mind, for only when we transcend can we two lines of the ancestry of man.. We traced his spiritual ancestry, and tried to catch some glimpses of the mighty Hierarchies of Spiritual Intelligences who co-operated in the sending forth of the Spirit, of the Monad, on his long pilgrimage through the worlds. We also traced the up-climbing of Matter, ever organised into better and better forms; and we saw how this building of Matter was guided by other spiritual Intelligences, who, having conquered Matter in their own previous evolution, were fitted to control and shape it for the practically helpless incoming human Monads. Now our two lines of evolution, approaching each other, find themselves separated by a gulf. The one has been descending from the celestial sphere, and the other has been up-climbing from the mud and slime of earth. But they now face each other across a gulf, and there is no bridge whereby they may reach each other, whereby they come into touch, the one with the other. That is the position in which we find ourselves; and this is graphically described in an ancient Occult Commentary. It is written there:" It is from the material worlds that descend they who fashion physical man at the new Manvantaras. They are give. While we still identify ourselves with anything it remains our own possession; we cannot part with it for another.
Thus the mind cannot be given by the Lords of the Twilight; they have, indeed achieved intelligence for themselves, but they have not yet reached the stage in which they can give that intelligence to others. The stately poetry of the Book of Dzyan sketches for us the difficulty which confronted those who had done so much to shape man, but who had now reached the limit of their powers. Listen: "The Breath needed a form; The Fathers gave it. The Breath needed a gross body; the earth moulded it. The breath needed the Spirit of life; the solar Lhas breathed it
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into its form. The Breath needed a mirror of its body; 'We gave it our own,' said the Dhyanis. The Breath needed a vehicle of desires; 'It has it,' said the Drainer of Waters." So far had they gone. "But Breath needs a mind, to embrace the universe; 'We cannot give that,' said the Fathers. 'I never had it,' said the Spirit of the earth. The form would be consumed were I to give it mine,' said the great Fire. .. Man remained an empty senseless Bhuta."
Hence arose the need for some who had conquered the mind, who were the Lords of Mind, to come forward and help to awaken the powers of Manah, latent in the forms; at the same time, many of them were to incarnate within the forms, to become the Kings, the Teachers, the Guides of human evolution. There will be the intellectual Ancestors, as the Lunar Pitrs were the Physical Ancestors.
We have come to a time since when eighteen million years have rolled over our earth; eighteen million years ago the Lords of the Flame descended. Now we notice, coming to the earth, three distinct classes of great Beings. These we dwell upon for a moment, for, hidden in their varied nature, lies the secret of the intellectual growth of man, and by their play upon the forms, and the different stages that these forms have reached, we shall be able , when once we understand it, to solve the problem of the differences that we find in the intellectual development of the human races. Remember, on the one side, that you find among those who are called "men" such beings as are rapidly dying out; such men as the Veddas of Ceylon, arboreal beings with scarcely a language, making only inarticulate and animal cries; such beings as the wild men of Bornea, hardly distinguishable from giant apes; such men as the aborigines of Australia, that are so little developed in intelligence that they do not remember from one day to another, that they cannot count more than two - one, two, more to signify all beyond two. Compare with those who are still reckoned, and rightly reckoned, within the human pale, such men as a Newton, such men as a Descartes, such men as the past great Teachers in India or like the mighty Rshi Vyasa, who still wore the human form; or take
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the great teachers, the great Mystics, and range them on the one side and these backward, disappearing, races on the other. It seems as though the name 'human' could scarce be stretched to cover the two, as though the difference in intelligence were too wide to be explained simply by evolution. We shall only solve the problem by an understanding of the mystery of the intellect, of the mystery of the Sons of Mind.
Now those who come to the earth are summed up under that last name; Manasputras, they are called, literally the Sons of Mind. But the name, in itself, does not convey much information, beyond the fact that they were endowed with mind; and a good deal of difficulty has arisen in the thought of our students, because to some of the Manasaputras the loftiest terms are applied, and they were spoken of by names that imply the highest spiritual intelligence, while on the other hand, the same name is applied to beings who are obviously interior, who are obviously inferior , who are obviously of very limited intelligence. You have to recognise the fact that the name of Manasaputra means nothing more than it says, a son of mind, i.e. a being possessed of mind, possessed of intelligence; and just as 'man' is a wide term, covering many grades of humanity, and indicating nothing as to the grade in evolution of the man, so is the term Manasaputra employed by HPB following the usages of the ancient Hindu Shastras, and it is a term of the widest signification, covering many, many grades on the ladder of intelligence.
Let us, then, separate off the first three great classes, who are all far above our humanity, when They come to our globe; the fourth class are the Solar Pitrs from the Moon. The first class are spoken of as the Sons of Night, as the Sons of the Dark Wisdom, and this word "dark" or "night" comes over and over again in regard to them. If we speak quite accurately, this adjective should be used to distinguish them from the Agnishvatta Pitrs, who form the second class of the Manasaputras, and are called the Lords of the Flame, or the Sons of Wisdom. And I shall use the adjective when the first class is in question, so as to avoid confusion. These are Asuras,
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born of the Body of Brahma, which, thrown aside, became the Body of Night. If you look over the Hindu scriptures, you will find beings named Asuras playing a very active part in the early stories of the world, and the. name covers a larger class than these with whom we are now concerned. It is worth while to delay upon it for a moment, for the influence of modern religious thought has cast a lurid light upon the name, and has made it almost equivalent to the Christian "Devil," a being who has no representative in Hinduism. The word Asura is derived from Asu, breath or life, asumat meaning simply a living being; in the Rigveda. Varuria, Indra Agni, are called Asuras, the. living ones, and it designates spiritual beings, and by no means those who were evil. It is true that later on, Asuras and Suras are put in opposition to each other, for their functions in evolution were different; moreover the Suras were on the whole far more passive than the Asuras, more moved by the sense of unity and of a common purpose, and hence yielding more ready obedience to the loss of the system, and promoting their smooth working, and keeping things in status quo, while the asuras were turbulent and aggressive, independent and separative, prone to discontent and eager for change. The Suras embody Order, the Asuras Progress, and hence they are constantly in opposition, though in reality both are equally necessary. You may remember that, in the churnjng of the ocean, the Asuras were at one end of Shesha and the Suras at the other, both employed in the churning, and there was a struggle for Amruta, the nectar of immortality, which was denied to the Asuras, eagerly as they desired to quaff it. Let us see why it was denied. The principle that is embodied in the Asuras, their very essence, their dominating characteristic, is Ahamkara, the l-making faculty, the will to be separate. This is the over-mastering force to them, their characteristic mark, and by this you may know them. They are ever the rebels, and where they are there is war. Ahamkara develops in struggle, in isolation, in rebellion, and calls all tumultuous forces into exercise, and thus establishes the I. The time comes when that I learns that its truest self-expression is in the divine will, is the I of the universe, and then the Asura breaks the bonds of matter and knows himself to be one with the Supreme with whom he battled.  Then he may drink the nectar
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of immortality, which is poured ever into the cup of unity alone, and may be drunk by those in whom it is transcended, but not by those in whom it is triumphant, who embody its very essence. Such beings, then, formed the first class of the Manasaputras who came to our earth; they had developed extraordinary intelligence; reaching the human stage in the first planetary Chain, they had during incalculable aeons of time been developing and growing in the subtler spheres, playing the part of Barhishad Pitrs in the second Chain, of Agnishvatta Pitrs in the third, and into ours they came as the Sons of Dark Wisdom for the tremendous struggle of the fourth Chain, and the fourth Round, and the fourth Globe, the ne plus ultra of the separateness of matter and the truimph of Ahamkara. When the order goes forth from the Planetary Logos to the "Sons" to "create their images," they begin their last struggle for separate independence, the struggle which, in its ending, will teach them the true nature of the "I." They will not create; " One third refuses. Two obey. The curse is pronounced. They will be born in the Fourth, suffer and cause suffering." These will be the "Lords of the dark Faces" in Atlantis, striving against the "Lords of the Dazzling Face" and in, their terrible overthrow, learning the final lesson, and turning to seek unity through the foremost races of humanity. These asuras form the fifth of the great Creative Orders, that of Makara, fitly named the most mysterious of all.
The second class of Manasaputras are those so familiar to theosophists under the name of the Agnishvatta Pitrs; they are the fruitage of the second Planetary Chain, born of Brahma's Body of Light, or of the Day, radiant, splendid Beings, Pitrs of the Devas, the Suras, in the subtler spheres, and Deva-like in their nature, with the sense of unity stronger than the sense of separateness. They occupy various grades in evolution, some more advanced than others. They form a part of the sixth Creative Order. Their names are many in ancient story; the occultist calls them the Sons of Wisdom - not of the Dark Wisdom, observe - the Lords of the Flame, the Sons of the Fire, the Fire Dhyanis, the "Heart of the Body:" also he speaks of them as the Triangles - since the three aspects, Atma-Buddhi-
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Manas are all active in them - who on earth become the Pentagons; for Manah becoming dual, and Buddhi reflecting itself in Karma, they become five-fold; Atma they cannot give to man, that is too high a task, but they send its force into etheric matter and so make the truly human Prana, thus giving the "spiritual plasm," the life-side of the permanent atoms, that flows from "the six-fold Heavenly Man." Yet again he calls then the Pranidhananath, the Lords of profound meditation, the Lords of Yoga. They are the Virgins, the Kumaras, who cannot create the man of flesh, when Brahma desires to populate the earth, being too pure and subtle for the task. On the third Chain, they had brought forth the men of that Chain, but now matter was denser and they more subtle. After accomplishing their task on earth - the task we have to deal with now - they were reborn as the sons of Marichi, or some say of Pulastya, and become the Pitrs of the Devas; their heavenly abode is Viraja Loka, named after another of their many cognomens, the Vairajas. Many are the forms they have taken, and many their names in the Puranas; they are Ajitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas, Sandhyas, Adtyas, Rajasas, etc.
The third class of Manasaputras consists of Beings who come to our earth from another planetary Chain. They are not, like the other two classes, the results of the evolution of our own Chains in the earlier phases, but come from outside, from the Chain wherein the planet Venus, Shukra, is Globe D. You may have noticed certain phrases in old stories which give a relation between our earth and Shukra, the planet Venus. It is said that the earth is the adopted child of Shukra. You may have read that Shukra was the preceptor of the Asuras, Danavas and Daityas, or you may have read again that Shukra was incarnated as Ushanas on our earth. What is the meaning of these puzzling phrases? They refer to this third class of Manasaputras; Venus is earlier in evolution than our globe; she is older. She is in her seventh Round while we are only in or fourth, so that she is capable of acting as a parent to the earth by virtue of the far higher evolution of her humanity; hence it is said that she adopted the earth as her child, the earth which was her younger brother.    That, translated  into more intelligible
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language, means that she sent to the earth some of her own sons, Men marvellous in Knowledge and in power, Men of her seventh Round. She sent them to the younger earth, in order that they might act there as the Instructors of mankind. They duty was not to throw out the sparks of mind, but to take bodies on earth, and become the teachers and the Guides of the young humanity. They came to the earth when the third Race, was under the presiding power of Shukra, the planet whence they came, a radiant splendid band, and made to Themselves outer coatings, drawing round themselves translucent material, through which shine Their starry subtle bodies. The First of Them, Their Chief, is known by many mystic names in the old writings. HPB speaks of Him as the Root-Base of the occult Hierarchy; she speaks of Him as the spreading Banyan-tree, because from Him, by His creation of the Sons of will and of yoga, the occult Hierarchy was formed which over-shadows the earth, the Tree of Life under which we take shelter. She calls Him also the Great Initiator, because alone from Him the power of true Initiation descends. By these and other descriptive names He is indicated in H's mysterious Being; and sometimes He is called the Virgin, the Kumara, the One above all others. Round Him is a small, a very small, band of Beings from His own sphere. His own planet, who come to earth to labor with Him for the evolution of mankind. The humanity of this fourth Round had not evolved far enough to yield any sons for the great emprise; all needed teaching; none could teach. Hence the need for help from outside. They form what has been called the nursery of adepts. It is the nucleus of the first great White Lodge upon earth, which - from that day, more than eighteen million years ago, until now, in this modern 20th century - has never ceased to function, has never changed its character; it is the one supreme Lodge of the Guides and the Teachers of humanity, without which spiritual evolution were practically impossible, without which the earth would wander in the darkness, and for long ages could not find her way home to the Supreme. These, then, the Sons of Venus, are the third class of the Manasaputras, the root of the great White Lodge.
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There remains still one more class of Manasaputras: they are the Solar Pitrs from the Moon, grouped into two large divisions according to their stage of evolution; they have been abiding in the lunar Nirvana between the lunar and terrene Chains, and have dwelt there still through the vast period occupied by the three and a half Rounds of the terrene Chain, which have passed. On this a teacher remarks: "These 'failures' are too far progressed and spiritualised to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyan-chohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower kingdoms." The "successes" of the Moon were the Lunar Pitrs, the Lords of the twilight, the rest being, comparatively, "failures." Of these, the second division entered the humanity of earth after the separation of the sexes in the third Race, the first division entered during the fourth Race, the Atlantean. They did, however, hover round the earth from the early stages of its activity in this fourth Round, as though watching for the time when their tabernacles would be ready for their incoming.
We must now take up the coming of the Sons of Mind in definite order, seeing the condition of the third Race at their coming, and the various events that surrounded and followed immediately on that coming. A preparatory touch was given to the second Root race, to quicken its evolution, and it was "endowed with the first primitive and weak spark" of intelligence; but we need not dwell on this, but may pass to the definite coming of the Manasaputras.
We must return for a moment to the stanza already quoted: "At the fourth the Sons are told to create Their Images. One-third refuse. Two obey. The curse is pronounced. They will be born in the fourth, suffer and cause suffering." Now these sentences are good examples of the difficulty of unravelling the old writings. The word "fourth" occurs twice, and it is used in two entirely different senses. In the first phrase you must supply Round : at the fourth Round the Sons of Mind, the Manasaputras, were told to create their Images ; one-third-the Asuras, the rebels-refused, and two-thirds-the Agnishvatta Pitrs, and the children of Venus-obeyed ; the curse was pronounced ;
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they, the Asuras, will be born in the fourth Race, suffer and cause suffering. That is a good example as I said, of the difficulty of translating old books. Rounds, Kalpas, Globes, Races-they are mixed up anyhow. The significant number is given, and the reader has to discover to what particular cycle of evolution the number applies. Once you have the key, the key of the cycles, then you can turn it in the lock, but until you have the key the sentence is more puzzling than illuminating ; and that is what is called by the name of "blind." it does not mean that any thing untrue is stated, but it means that the truth is stated in a way which needs explanation to be understood by the uninitiated. The key is given when the man is ready. But as it was important to keep the knowledge in a convenient form, which could not be readily under-stood until men were ready-because of the harm that had come in the old days of Atlantis by giving knowledge to those who were .morally unprepared-the distinctive words that enable one to identify the time and place were removed from the commentaries that became public property. Thus, by the removal of these specific words, the whole thing became confused. You will find exactly the same thing in the Puranas. They are practically largely unintelligible until some of the keys are given ; and, as you know, it is the function of Theosophy to give those keys to men.
One-third have refused ; they are to be born in the fourth Race. They will come, and come in the Atlantean Race, and play there a mighty part. For the present they remain behind ; the doom of rebirth under worse conditions is upon them ; they would not descend at the right moment, they would not help in the human evolution. It is said that they came down and looked on the forms, "the vile forms of the first third" Race. Notice the Ahamkara coming out, the sense of separation, the pride, the contempt. They looked on these forms, the early third, and they despised them. "They rejected," "They spurned," are the phrases used, Ahamkara reigned supreme ; they would not descend ; hence the curse, and- the curse which came in a terrible form, making their work more difficult when they came, making their struggle keener, harsher and more turbulent, teaching the needed lesson. So we can leave our Asuras for the
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present, awaiting their time. Two-thirds obeyed. They are the Agnishvatta Pitrs, and the children of Venus. They are willing to take up their work, to perform their duty. The third Race is evolving. Recall what I said to you yesterday about the three stages of the third Race. First, the sexual form ; the second, hermaphrodite ; the hermaphrodite is divided into two sexes, separation'occurs. The divine men from Venus descend when the time is ripe for the second stage of the third Race, and by their influence the latent androgynity is quickened into definite hermaphroditism, and some very beautiful forms are produced. "It is through Shukra that the 'double ones' of the third descended from the first Sweat-born. While the majority of the third and fourth sub-races slowly evolved the human form through, to us, repulsive forms, animal-like, ape-like in type, a few, specially shaped for the indwelling of the sons of Venus were "towering giants of godly strength and beauty."
Glance over the earth for a moment and see the differences of form. There is the wonderful Hermaphrodite, beautiful, strong and mighty, evolved under the immediate direction of the Lords of Venus for their own use, they being a perfected humanity, male-female having passed beyond the separation of sexes ; these contained no ex-lunar Monads, but were evolved as forms, the incoming tenants from Venus acting as the Monads of the forms. There are the slowly evolving third and fourth sub-races, passing through the hermaphrodite stage, and slowly separating off into male and female, as explained in the last lecture. They are tenanted by the four classes of ex-lunar Monads that have touched the human stage ; the three of them that became human in the first, second and third Rounds show out different stages of development, and the forms over which they brood develop human characteristics at a rate proportioned to the stage reached by the brooding Monads. Far behind them come in the less evolved, occupying lower and lower forms, until you come to those who have only begun their human evolution in the fourth Round itself; the forms of these are naturally very crude, very animal-like, and they are called the "narrow-headed." These, neglected and despised by their more advanced brethren, became, as we shall see later, the source of
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a terrible degradation, and may serve as a lesson to the more developed classes - a lesson, alas! Only too sadly needed still-of the Nemesis entailed on the whole, by the law of collective karma, when the higher neglects and despises the lower, and they in turn re-act upon the higher by the degradation into which they drag it.
To the earth, showing these varied conditions, come the Lords of Venus, and, immediately following them, the Lords of the Flame, the Agnishvatta Pitrs. A few of the Lords of Venus make for themselves bodies by will and yoga, as before mentioned, and a few enter the hermaphrodite forms. They have evolved from the egg-born. As the Agnishvatta Pitrs come, some of them take the embryonic forms within the eggs, evolve them and enter into them ; "Those who entered became Arhats." Thus was established upon earth the first great occult Hierarchy, which has ever since continued its gracious work, with the various grades appearing in it.
Then begins the labor of the gradual lifting of humanity, by imparting to "animal man" the spark of intellect, and thus evolving the 6th and 7th sub-races. This is the special work of the Agnishvatta Pitrs. The Lords of Venus do not take part in this. They are the highest grade of the Hierarchy of Sages, who train great Teachers for men, and from among whom in the rarest cases, One appears among me. We read of Them as settling at Shamballah, that mystic Holy City in the Central Gobi desert. They come down there from the far North, where Their earlier home had been, from the Land of the Gods, and They build Shamballah and settle therein, where ever since They dwell unchanged. It is said that Shamballah is over the heart of the Earth, a mystic phrase, meaning that within it dwell. They who are the heart of humanity's life, for from Them and back to Them flow all the streams of spiritual life. As from the heart in man the life-blood goes forth to nourish every part of the body, and returns thither charged with impurities, to be cleansed and again sent forth, so from this spiritual Heart go forth the currents of spiritual life ; to that Heart the currents return loaded with impurity, when they have become polluted by their contact with
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the lower world ; there are re-purified, and thence are again sent out. Thus is carried on the perpetual Sacrifice by which human evolution is sustained and quickened.
When the Lords of Venus - the Dragons of Wisdom as They are often called - came to our earth, they brought with them the seeds of various types of living things evolved on Venus, to improve and quicken the terrene evolution. You may remember that when the coming of Manu with other Rshis is mentioned, it is said that he brought with Him in His ship - the Ark - many seeds of life. And these seeds were not only the seeds of life spiritual and life intellectual, but also of physical life as it existed in Venus. Wheat, for instance, does not belong to our earth, and much are the botanists puzzled as to its origin ; by crossing the wheat produced from the Venus seeds with earth-born grasses, the early Instructors evolved the various food-grains. Bees and ants, with their extraordinary social systems and well-regulated activities, are natives of Ve'nus, coming from a sphere where all evolution had progressed much further than our own, so that even in the realms of vegetable and animal life all stands on a higher level than we have yet reached.
These Dragons of Wisdom are the "the primitive Adepts of the third Race, and later of the fourth and fifty Races," says H.P.B. and were the "Sons of the Fire," the immediate disciples of the "Fathers," the "Primordial Flame." They gave the Buddhas, i.e. the supreme Buddha and the Bodhisattva for the Third Race, as well as many Arhats, a few of the Agnishvatta Pitrs also entering into this glorious company ; from Them also the Beings who occupied similar stations in the fourth Race, and in the fifth Race twenty-four are found, these mostly being Agnishvatta Pitrs, and recognised among the Jains as the twenty-four Tirthankaras.
The divine Hermaphrodites of the middle third Race, the "holy Fathers," as They are called, created Sons by will and yoga for the incarnation of the highest Agnishattas, the "Ancestors- the spiritual forefathers- of all the subsequent and present Arhats or Mahatmas," that is their Gurus; and we are told that, in the
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seventh Race, these Sons of will and yoga, with others like them, will produce mind-born sons.
These again are They who, watching over the evolution of the later third and the fourth Races, became wroth with the children of Atlantis, as we shall see later, when they became steeped in degradation, and brought about the great catastrophes which whelmed Atlantis beneath the waves of ocean They are ever spoken of as the divine instructors, They who superintended the spiritual evolution of humanity, and guided the cosmic forces so as to subserve that evolution. The divine Kings - of the earliest dynasties - who guided humanity intellectually, teaching them sciences and arts and superintending their social evolution, were some of the highest Agnishvatta Pitrs. These were the Titan-Kaborim, to whom allusions are made in the records of very ancient peoples. Says H.P.B.: "They are truly the great beneficent and powerful Gods, as Cassius Hermone calls them. At Thebes Core and Demeter, the Kabirim, had a sanctuary, and at Memphis, the Kabiri had a temple so sacred, that none excepting the priests, were suffered to enter its holy precincts... They were also, in the beginning of times, the Rulers of mankind, when incarnated as Kings of the 'divine dynasties.' They gave the first impulse to civilisation, and directed the mind, with which they had endued men, to the invention and perfection of all the arts and science. Thus the Kabiri are said to have appeared as the benefactors of men, and as such they lived for ages in the memory of nations. To these Kabiri or Titans is ascribed the invention of letters... of laws and legislature, of architecture, as also of the various modes of magic, so-called and of the medical use of plants'. Occultists speak of these divine Beings also as the Manushis, who taught and sacred language the Senzar, to the third and fourth Races.
Let us turn from the Rulers to the humanity They ruled. The highest grades of this humanity, the immediate pupils and ministers of the divine Kings, were Agnishvattas of lower classes, some of whom gradually evolved into Arhats in the better types of body in the fourth and fifth sub-races. The second class of the Solar Pitrs from the Moon came into
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incarnation in the sixth and seventh sub-races, leading the advance under these of humanity-untii superseded by the first class, who came into the fourth Race. Below these came the four classes of ex-lunar. Monads previously mentioned, thus presenting to our gaze an immense variety of human grades, from the semi-divine men, surrounding the divine Kings, down to the narrow-headed semi-animal types. In all the higher classes the third eye functioned actively, so that the astrai worlds were as open to them as the physical ; its powers decreased in the lower classes, until in the narrow-headed vision was very dim. In the sixth and seventh sub-races, as we have seen, it gradually retreated inwards, to-disappear altogether among the Atlanteans.
We see in Lemuria, during the earlier part of the later third Race, the dawn of an exquisite civilisation, in which the Elders guide the youngers, who are still obedient, tractable, intuitive -the youngest of all following blindly and submissively in the wake of their seniors. The organisation is due only to the Elders ; hence its beauty. But it obviously cannot be permanent, for it is the beauty of infancy, carefully guarded and shielded, not the beauty of manhood, self-sustaining and self-directed. Guided by the divine Kings, the sixth sub-race built the first rock and lava cities in the region of Madagascar, and many such cities followed, whereof, here and there, vast fragments remain, rocks that no modern engineer could handle, ruins of huge temples-cyclopean ruins, they are called. To the early Greeks and the early Egyptians they handed on the types of such building, and in the temples of Egypt, such as that of Karnac, we see traces of Lemurian building as practised by their later descendants of the fourth Race. So, again, in southern India traces of this massive style of building appear in some of the old temples. Judging by the ruins of Karnac, you may imagine the building of those who were mightier yet than they who raised those ponderous stones ; or see the mighty pyramid of Egypt, and measure the knowledge and the skill that reared its stupendous strength. But those stones were not raised by mere bulk of muscles, nor by skilful apparatus, strong beyond modern making ; they were raised by those who understood and could control the forces of terrestrial
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magnetism, so that the stone lost its weight, and floated, guided by the touch of a finger, to rest on its appointed bed. Some of the extra-ordinary rocking-stones still remain, that were poised by Lemurian fingers-or to use a name more familiar to you, by the fingers of Danavas. For the Danavas were the sixth and seventh sub-races of the Third Race. Those stones are one of the puzzles modern science has failed to solve, trying explanations of erosion by ice and water, that are manifestly inadequate. And what are they, the rocking-stones ? Means by which messages might come from. Those above to those below, in which the swayings of the Morse telegraph needle spell out messages to-day.
I have just named the Danavas, and you remember that in the ancient stories the Danavas were pure and pious in their early days, and dually deteriorated in their later. Let us follow this downward process, and see how it came about.
We are still on the downward arc, though nearing its close. Matter is rapidly becoming denser, and the bodies grow more and more material ; they are gigantic, strong, vigorous, and with the separation of the sexes, the creative instinct that is inherent in all life takes on the surging vehement form of sexual passion, hitherto unknown. That creative instinct in the sexless had worked smoothly, calmly, in the production of new forms. But now, violent physical excitement and pleasure mingled with it, and sexual passion arose, first in the animals and then in man. The Agnishvatta Pitrs who had incarnated, and the Solar Pitrs -clad in bodies growing denser and more robust with every birth conscious of their intellectual power and feeling themselves as Gods upon earth, sending down into their bodies strong currents of vitality that became transmuted in the densifying bodies into currents of sexual passion, hitherto unknown - were oft-times attracted by women of the less evolved classes, and, mating with them, produced a progeny of lower type than themselves. The bright Sons of Light wedded the more earthly women - "the Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and took them wives of ail that they chose," says the old Hebrew tradition truly enough and  humanity descended deeper into
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matter. It was necessary to go down into the depths of matter in order to conquer it, and in that first Kurukshetra many were conquered. A separation arose between those who, in the fierce struggle, still clung to the laws of the divine Hierarchy, and those who, succumbing to the intoxicating delights of sense encased in gross matter, turned their backs on the Lords of Light. As they drew apart quarrels arose, wars broke out, between them. The purer gravitated slowly northwards ; the coarser wandered far and wise, southwards, eastwards, westwards, made alliance with the grosser Elementals, and became worshippers of matter rather than of Spirit. They became the fathers of the Atlantean Race, the Race in which matter was to reach its densest state, and win its greatest triumphs. It is the first division between the followers of the light and the dark, the division which become more marked and with more terrible results in Atlantis. The deified images of these Lemurian giants were worshipped as those of Gods and heroes in the fourth and fifth Races, and many an ancient mythos records their great achievements, their colossal combats, their superb strength.
As the separation went on gigantic and far-reaching convulsions began to rend Lemuria apart ; earthquakes shook the land, and volcanoes burst out, sending far and wide raging floods of fiery lava. The huge continent split up into great islands, each itself as large as a continent, and these in turn were rent by new convulsions, until at last, some 700,000 years before the beginning of the Tertiary age, Lemuria as such disappeared, devastated by fire, channelled by lava, in great explosions of steam generated as fire warred with water, and amid roaring flames and surging billows, it sank, island after island, into the whirlpools of fire and sea.
On many districts which were not destroyed, some remaining as part of Atlantis, others isolated-such as Australia-some of the third Race people long survived. The aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians, how well-nigh extinct, belong to the seventh Lemurian sub-race; the Malays and Papuans have descended from a cross between this sub-race and the Atlanteans; and the Hottentots form another remnant. The Dravidiana of southern
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Indian are a mixture of the seventh sub-race with the second Atlantean sub-race. Where a really black race is found, such as the negro, Lemurian descent is strongly marked.
One other fact remains to place on record, ere we close to-day's study, for it resulted from the refusal of the Asuras to take their due place in evolution, and brought about a sore degradation, a descent instead of an ascent, of those who should have become truly men.
In this the occult record comes sharply into conflict with modern scientific teaching. Modern science posits a common animal ancestor for the anthropoid apes and man. Occultism asserts that the anthropoid apes are the late descendants of a mixture of the human and animal kingdoms that took place in the later third Race. You will remember that the lowest human class of the ex-lunar Monads-those who had touched the threshold of humanity at the close of the third Round, the "narrow-headed"-were not ready to receive the spark of mind; they had separated into sexes, but were ruled wholly by animal instincts. Some of these, in the seventh sub-race, mated with ape-like animals, not very far from themselves in form, but with Monads far less evolved than their own, still belonging to the animal kingdom, and from this union sprang a race half-human and half-animal; some of its descendants again inter-bred with some of the most degraded of the later Atlanteans, and the beings known as Satyrs in old Greek story, denizens of forests and lonely places, the terror of all more highly evolved men, bestial exceedingly-these were the progeny of that degrading alliance. From these according to occultism, descent the anthropoid apes, and these alone, of all now in the animal kingdom, will reach humanity on our Chain. In the sixth and seventh Races of this Round on our globe, they will attain to the astral human form, and in the fifth Round will enter definitely into the human kingdom. Such was the "sin of the mindless" and its results.
"Seeing which, the Lhas (Asuras) who had not built men, wept, saying: "The Amanasa (mindless) have defiled our future abodes. This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach
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them better, lest worse should happen. They did ...........Then
all men became endowed with Manah."
The earth was ready for the Atlantean evolution. The fourth Race was born.
 
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