Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Secret Doctrine
By Helena P. Blavatsky
Book II-Part I- The Final Evolution Of Man
§§ (33) The creators repent. (34) They atone for their neglect. (35) Men become endowed with minds. (36) The fourth race develops perfect speech. (37) Every androgynous unit is separated and becomes bisexual.
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33. SEEING WHICH (the sin committed with the animals), THE LHAS (the spirits, the "Sons of Wisdom") WHO HAD NOT BUILT MEN (who had refused to create), WEPT, SAYING: --
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34. "THE AMANASA (the 'mindless') HAVE DEFILED OUR FUTURE ABODES (a). THIS IS KARMA. LET US DWELL IN THE OTHERS. LET US TEACH THEM BETTER, LEST WORSE SHOULD HAPPEN." THEY DID. . . .
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35. THEN ALL BECAME ENDOWED WITH MANAS (minds). THEY SAW THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS.
But they had already separated before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on account of the sin committed, -- even this race will find itself on the last day on one of the seven paths. For "the wise* guard the home of nature's order, they assume excellent forms in secret."** But we must see whether the "animals" tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to zoology.
(a) The "Fall" occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the old records, as soon as Daksha (the reincarnated Creator of men and things in the early Third Race) disappeared to make room for that portion of mankind which had "separated." This is how the Commentary explains the details that preceded the "Fall": --
"In the initial period of man's Fourth evolution, the human kingdom branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles (the egg-like, external shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated) were often tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now unknown, and which belonged to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long and live, though the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the 'Egg-Born' Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated and mated no longer. Man created no more -- he begot. But he also begot animals, as well as men in days of old. Therefore the Sages (or wise men), who speak of males who had no more will-begotten offspring, but begat various animals along with Danavas (giants) on females of other species -- animals being as (or in a manner of) Sons putative to them; and they (the human males) refusing in time to be regarded as (putative) fathers of dumb creatures -- spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this (state of things), the kings and Lords of the Last Races (of the Third and the Fourth) placed the seal of prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new (Karma).* They (the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races.**
In another we find: --
"There were blue and red-faced animal-men even in later times; not from actual intercourse (between the human and animal species), but by descent."
And still another passage mentions: --
"Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers."
Perchance in these specimens, Haeckelians might recognize, not the Homo primigenius, but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi-human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters -- those "failures" mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Haeckel's Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid* blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.
How was the separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation; as the former hides an esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race with bones was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which were "boneless." This is an esoteric tenet spread far and wide, as it is almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Araea, "red Earth." Taaroa, the creative power, the chief god, "put man to sleep for long years, for several lives," which means racial periods, and is a reference to his mental sleep, as shown elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and she became a woman.*
Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may mean, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine Builder of man -- "a Progenitor." Do we then believe in such "supernatural" beings? We say, No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside nature. Nor are we Cosmolators or Polytheists for believing in "Heavenly Man" and divine men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and UNIVERSAL tradition. We reject, however, every groundless and baseless tradition, which, having outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, has found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous traditions, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following incorporeal, "Arupa," men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in dynasties of divine beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little modern science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry.
No, certainly not. We do not believe in the supernatural but only in the superhuman, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One may easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that: "The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that every one seems ashamed of -- even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept even a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past."**
But the "supernatural" of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature 5,000 years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides geology, anthropology and ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if that same theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years -- the age of Methuselah -- five million years ago, we would have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a megalosaurus to a common lizard.
A naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. "There is no question of selection between human races," say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument -- one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice.
Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes.* Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing," as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless"* and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises.
Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native -- co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora -- must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position.
"It is a very curious fact," says Jukes,** "that not only these marsupial animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several of the shells -- as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks -- much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the 0olitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain. Something of the Oolitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the Globe." (! !)
Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d'etre for such a "curse of retardation"? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its "virgin soil" notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.
To return, however, once more to the history of the Third Race, the "Sweat-Born," the "Egg-bearing," and the "Androgyne." Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of course. The passage from the former to the latter transformation required numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third-Race-mankind is the most mysterious of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the "How" of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs,* and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the newly born sub-races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub-race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by the same identical process as our historical generations. This required, of course, millions of years. The reader has been made acquainted with the approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations, in Stanza II.
We are approaching the turning-point of the evolution of the Races. Let us see what occult philosophy says on the origin of language.
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36. THE FOURTH RACE DEVELOPED SPEECH.
The Commentaries explain that the first Race -- the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called "Self-born" -- was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a "Sound-language," to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the "Sweat-born" (the early Third Race). In its second half, when the "Sweat-born" gave birth to the "Egg-born," (the middle Third Race); and when these, instead of "hatching out" (may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age) as androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually, an act which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of "one language and of one lip." This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race* from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors,** and their own already awakened minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven races is divided into four ages -- the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age -- so is every smallest division of such races.*** Speech then developed, according to occult teaching, in the following order: --
I. Monosyllabic speech; that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the close of the Third Root-race, the "golden-coloured," yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called "thought-transference," though, with the exception of the Race called the "Sons of Will and Yoga" -- the first in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had incarnated -- thought was but very little developed in nascent physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist.*
II. These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother-language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay and finally death,** so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races -- that language, which is referred to as "Rakshasi Bhasa," in old Sanskrit works -- decayed and almost died out. While the "cream" of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America.
III. The inflectional speech -- the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called "the elder sister" of the Greek, instead of its mother -- was the first language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race). At any rate, the "Semitic" languages are the bastard descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans -- degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Tchandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A-bram (No Brahmin) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those Aryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan and Kabul,* and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and invaded Arabia.
But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent. We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub-races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross-breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization, which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids. In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the "Lords of Wisdom" did not incarnate, as we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural "sexual selection"), originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later.*
As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.
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37. THE ONE (androgyne) BECAME TWO; ALSO ALL THE LIVING AND CREEPING THINGS, THAT WERE STILL ONE, GIANT-FISH, BIRDS, AND SERPENTS WITH SHELL-HEADS (a).
This relates evidently to the so-called age of the amphibious reptiles, during which ages science maintains that no man existed! But what could the ancients know of antediluvian prehistoric animals and monsters! Nevertheless, in Book VI. of the Commentaries is found a passage which says, freely translated: --
"When the Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men-animals, these (the animals) became ferocious, and men and they mutually destructive. Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. After (the separation) the Satya (Yuga) was at an end. The eternal spring became constant change and seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing. Then man appealed to the superior Fathers (the higher gods or angels). The Nirmanakaya of the Nagas, the wise Serpents and Dragons of Light came, and the precursors of the Enlightened (Buddhas). Divine Kings descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer in the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first Races), which had turned into a white frozen corpse."
The above is suggestive. We will see what can be inferred from this brief statement. Some may incline to think that there is more in it than is apparent at first sight.
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[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has gradually and with every generation and variety tended more and more to return to the original type of its male forefather -- the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.
