The Secret Doctrine 2.10.42

They built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped. Then the Third Eye acted no longer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is so stated in the Vishnu and Brahmâ Purânas, in the Mahâbhârata and in the Harivamsha. In one portion of the Pushkara Mâhâtmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will‐born progeny, the “Sons of passive Yoga,” will not create men, “converts half himself into a female by whom he begets daughters,” the future females of the Third Race which begat the Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In the Vishnu Purâna it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.

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

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

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

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

Are Giants A Fiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only after his defection from the Neo‐Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that “serpents and giants signify demons.”

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

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

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

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

The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin‐men [Kumâra](644) four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them, “He is dead”; behold, he is alive and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

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

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

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from “three distinct species of fossil‐ oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos frontosus.” Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

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

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Races With The “Third Eye.”

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

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

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

The mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the note explains:

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

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

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

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

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

The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,

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

It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, 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 all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded 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 Hindû Purânas and the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super‐human 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, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth 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 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 students of Esoteric symbology the above 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 the 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.(673) A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately 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.(674)... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,(675) 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, Chelâ] 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 became the prototypes of the four‐armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.

Such is the mystery of the human eye that some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to 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; and 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 latter 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 perhaps rendered 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 Hindû mystics who speak of the “Eye of Shiva,” the Tri‐lochana, or “three‐eyed,” thus receives its justification and raison d’être: 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 quâ non condition of regular Chelâship, 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, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes 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 also 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 greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful “inductive” action must be exerted 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, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.

It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have a third eye, now atrophied, but which was 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, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended 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. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain’s Anatomy:

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 recognized 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 posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.

It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland the Seat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man. Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter 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 which was tied to the brain, and yet had 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 is, as shown, far more closely 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 would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern “blind‐force” and “mechanical” processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize 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” is now atrophied in man, 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 for some 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 towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median “eye” at last atrophied together 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 the 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 only 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 vertebrates, 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 in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown 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 Age which began nearly 5,000 years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is 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 Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.

Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo‐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 Mânasa 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 the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.

[Transcriber’s Note: The graph shows, to the left, “Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.” To the right is “Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain‐intellectuality.” Below is “Meridian of Races.”]

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 evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be 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 the 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 now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was 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 in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a 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 to this that if the development 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 posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, 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 has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, the Shan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255 B.C., they may be found in another work, called the Bamboo Books, and in a third, the ’Rh Ya, whose author was “initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122 B.C.” The Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295 B.C. Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.

Now what 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 Shiva” did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva‐Man of the Third Race 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, for Karma would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should 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. And 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 Theosophical Teachings.

Questions with regard to Karma and Re‐births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the 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 the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so 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. It has been 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, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle‐point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and 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 Reïncarnation.

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 Dhyân 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 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 to 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 what are virtually accusations thrown at 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 the face of 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 asked to believe in “original sin,” in one life only on this Earth 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 be good or bad, says the Predestinarian—why should not everyone of us who is 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 on 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 coëqual 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 scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils 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 reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various 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 only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, the permanent Individuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the “spiritual” Eye in the physical body, that 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 the third sub‐race of the Fourth Root‐Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to 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 of Part III devoted to the subject of pre‐historic “Submerged Continents.” To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû 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 term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.

The Primeval Manus Of Humanity

Those who are aware that the “Great Flood,” which was connected with the sinking of an entire Continent (save only 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, Avatâra of Vishnu, may feel perplexed at the apparent discrepancy between the 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, for by studying the article therein, on “The Septenary Principle in Esotericism,” the whole question can be explained to him. It is in the explanation there given, I believe, that the Occultists differ from the Brâhmans.

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

Who was Manu, the son of Svâyambhuva? 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 Dhyân Chohans (Devas), at the beginning of the First Round. But we are told in his Laws (i. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa, or “interval from creation to creation”—read rather 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 [Globes] 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 Seed‐Manus—_the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming_ Round (or the Shishtas—the surviving fittest; a mystery divulged only to those who have passed their third degree in Initiation)—those who have learned all this will be better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the Hindû Sacred 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 x 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 (Dhyân 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 [Globe]. It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement that a Manvantaric period (Manu‐antara) means, as the term implies, the time between the appearance of two Manus or Dhyân Chohans; and hence a Minor Manvantara is the duration of the seven Races on any particular planet [Globe], and a Major Manvantara is the period of one human Round along the Planetary Chain. Moreover, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 Root‐Races on the seven planets [Globes] 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 in India represents 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 or Atlantean—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.

For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their respective order and in their relation to each Round:

1st Round, 1st (Root) Manu on Planet A—Svâyambhuva. 1st Round, 1st (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Svârochi, or Svârochisha. 2nd Round, 2nd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Auttami. 2nd Round, 2nd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Tâmasa. 3rd Round, 3rd (Root) Manu on Planet A—Raivata. 3rd Round, 3rd (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Châkshusha. 4th Round, 4th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Vaivasvata (our Progenitor). 4th Round, 4th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Daksha‐sâvarna. 5th Round, 5th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Brahma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Dharma‐sâvarna. 6th Round, 6th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Rudra‐sâvarna. 7th Round, 7th (Root) Manu on Planet A—Rauchya. 7th Round, 7th (Seed) Manu on Planet G—Bhautya.

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 [Globe]. 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 Hindû ideal embodiment, called respectively Xisuthrus, Deucalion, Noah and 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”) as 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 these several and quite distinct 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 Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake, remarked: “the first principle in Hindû religious philosophy is unity in diversity.” If all those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, it 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—for 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 Dhyân Chohan, not even the highest, can realize completely

The condition of the preceding Cosmic Evolution, ... the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences in all the Cosmic Evolutions throughout Eternity.

This is very plain: the first Manu is called Svâyambhuva, 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 Vaishvânara, 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) which 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. Svâyambhuva, or Self‐born, is the name of every Cosmic Monad which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a Planetary Chain (of which Chains there are seven in our System). And the radiations of this Centre become again so many Manus Svâyambhuva (a mysterious generic name, meaning far more than appears), each of them becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity.

As to the question of the four distinct Races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race, there is nothing mystical in the subject, except the ethereal bodies of the first Races; and this is a matter of legendary, nevertheless very correct, history. The 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 Hindûs have, to this day.

Trying to account for the community of legends held by Chinese, Chaldæans, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, in remote antiquity, 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.

How many of such cataclysms have changed the whole surface of the earth may be inferred from the following Stanza of Commentary Twenty‐two:

During the first seven crores [70,000,000 years] of the Kalpa 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(697) the Mother [Earth] grows opaque, and in the fourteenth(698) 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 [120,000,000] of years ago. But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier.

Thus, if we are to believe Esoteric Teaching, universal geological disturbances and changes have not occurred for the last 120 million years, but the Earth, even before that time, was ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about 18,000,000 years ago, after the first great failure of Nature to create beings alone—i.e., without the help of the divine “Fashioners”—had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three Races. 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 allegorically called 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 Water for the Feminine Principle—the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it:

Ἀρχὴ 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.

Archê (Ἀρχὴ) or 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 Trimûrti—composed of Brahmâ, the Creator, Shiva, the Destroyer, and Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu is shown, in the allegory, under the form of a Fish, guiding the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu across the Waters of the Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word Fish (as Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, and others have done). Its theological meaning is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus was called the Fish, as were Vishnu and Bacchus; ΙΗΣ, the “Saviour” of Mankind, being but the monogram of the God Bacchus, who was also called ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Fish. Moreover, the Seven Rishis in the Ark symbolized the seven “principles,” which became complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and thus ceased to be a divine creature.

But to return to the Races; details as to the submersion of the Continent inhabited by the Second Root‐Race are not numerous. The history of the Third, or Lemuria, is given, as is also that of Atlantis, but the others are 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). During this Deluge—an actual geological deluge this time—Vaivasvata Manu is also shown saving mankind, allegorically—in reality, a portion of it, the Fourth Race—just as he saved 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, which was 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. This is the Cataclysm of which the old records, as in the Book of Enoch, say, “the ends of the Earth got loose”; and upon which have been built the legends and allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deucalion and all the tutti quanti of the Elect Saved. Tradition, not taking into account the difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both “Deluges” indifferently. 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, have remained in the annals of history, save in the Sacred Records of the East.

Hence, Modern Science denies the existence of Atlantis. It even denies any violent shiftings of the Earth’s axis, and would attribute the change of climate 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 others, such as Sir Henry James and Sir John Lubbock, 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 Volume, where the Geology and Anthropology of our modern day are carefully compared with the teachings of Archaic Science. At any rate, the period assigned by the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not seem to disagree very much with the calculations of Modern Science, which, however, calls Atlantis “Lemuria” whenever it accepts such a submerged Continent. With regard to the pre‐human period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even prior to the appearance of the “mindless” First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants. We might, however, add that what Science, which recognizes physical man only, has a right to regard as the pre‐human 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 millions of years.

The author of the Qabbalah truly remarks that: “Man to‐day, as an individual, is only a concatenation of the being‐hood of precedent human life,” or lives, rather.

According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam, went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons, viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge’boor‐ah, Qai‐yin and Ra’h‐min Seth. These three were divided into ... 70 species, called; the principal roots of the human race.

Said Rabbi Yehudah: “How many garments [of the incorporeal man] are these which are crowned (from the day man was created)?” Said R. El’azar: “The mountains of the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua’h spirit, which is in the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings ...: and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in it, to and fro in the world.”

This relates to the Races, their “garments,” or degree of materiality, and to the three “principles” of man in their three vehicles.