The Secret Doctrine 2.9.35

Then all men became endowed with Manas. They saw the sin of the mindless.

But they had already separated, before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural. Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its final development on account of the sin committed—even this race will find itself on the last day on one of the Seven Paths. For:

The Wise guard the home of nature’s order, they assume excellent forms in secret.

But we must see whether the “animals” tampered with, were of the same kind as those known to Zoölogy.

The “Fall” occurred, according to the testimony of ancient Wisdom and the old records, as soon as Daksha—the reïncarnated Creator of men and things in the early Third Race—disappeared to make room for that portion of mankind which had “separated.” This is how one Commentary explains the details that preceded the “Fall”:

In the initial period of man’s Fourth Evolution, the human kingdom branched off in several and various directions. The outward shape of its first specimens was not uniform, for the vehicles [the egg‐like, external shells, in which the future fully physical man gestated] were often tampered with, before they hardened, by huge animals, of species now unknown, and belonging to the tentative efforts of Nature. The result was that intermediate races of monsters, half animals, half men, were produced. But as they were failures, they were not allowed to breathe long and live, although, the intrinsically paramount power of psychic over physical nature being yet very weak, and hardly established, the “Egg‐ born” Sons had taken several of their females unto themselves as mates, and bred other human monsters. Later, animal species and human races becoming gradually equilibrized, they separated, and mated no longer. Man created no more—he begot. But he also begot animals as well as men, in days of old. Therefore the Sages [or wise men], who speak of males who had no more will‐begotten offspring, but begat various animals along with Dânavas [Giants] on females of other species—animals being as [or in the manner of] sons putative to them; and they [the human males] refusing in time to be regarded as [putative] fathers of dumb creatures—spoke truthfully and wisely. Upon seeing this [state of things], the Kings and Lords of the last Races [of the Third and the Fourth] placed the seal of prohibition upon the sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new [Karma](441). They [the Divine Kings] struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red and Blue Races.

In another we find:

There were blue and red‐faced animal‐men even in later times; not from actual intercourse [between the human and animal species], but by descent.

And still another passage mentions:

Red‐haired, swarthy men going on all‐fours, who bend and unbend [stand erect and fall on their hands again], who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore‐mothers.

Perchance in these specimens Hæckelians might recognize, not the “Homo Primigenius,” but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi‐human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters—those “failures” mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Hæckel’s Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The Orang‐ Outang, the Gorilla, the Chimpanzee and Cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.

How was the separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief is more logical and reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation; as the former hides an Esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race “with bones” was produced out of a previous Race and Races, which were “boneless.” This is an Esoteric tenet spread far and wide. It is almost universal under its various forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Aræa, “red earth.” Taaroa, the Creative Power, the chief God, “put man to sleep for long years, for several lives.” This means racial periods, and is a reference to his mental sleep, as shown elsewhere. During that time the deity pulled an Ivi (bone) out of man and she became a woman.

Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may signify, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine Builder of man—a “Progenitor.” Do we then believe in such “supernatural” Beings? We say: No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside Nature. Nor are we Cosmolaters or Polytheists for believing in “Heavenly Man” and Divine Men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and universal tradition. We reject, however, such groundless and baseless traditions as have outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, although they may have found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous tradition, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of Beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following incorporeal (Arûpa) Men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in Dynasties of Divine Beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little Modern Science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry.

No, certainly not. We do not believe in supernatural but only in superhuman, or rather interhuman, intelligences. One can easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that:

The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that everyone seems ashamed of—even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept be it a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past.

But the “supernatural” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If Theology asks us to believe that it was only four or five thousand years ago that men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature only five thousand years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides Geology, Anthropology and Ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if this same Theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years—the age of Methuselah—five million years ago, we should have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a Megalosaurus to a common lizard.

A Naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. “There is no question of selection between human races,” say the anti‐Darwinists, and no Evolutionist can deny the argument—one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi‐ human, if not quite an animal, race; the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric Science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man’s bestiality. But we have even to‐day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half‐animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro‐Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice.

De Quatrefages and other Naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, but this does not prevent another law asserting itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of different kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to choose a member of such mixed tribes. Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of European colonists. The great Naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is very evident. “Crossing,” as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women—i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a “soulless” and mindless monster, with a real human, though still as mindless a man—brought on sterility; and this, not only as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet—but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric Philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps left by Science and corrects her false premisses.

Yet, in this particular, Geology and even Botany and Zoology support the Esoteric Teachings. It has been suggested by many Geologists that the Australian native—coëxisting as he does with an archaic fauna and flora—must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin Ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the Esoteric position. As Jukes says:

It is a very curious fact that not only these marsupial animals [the mammals found in the Oxfordshire Stone‐field Slates], but several of the shells—as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks—much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the Oolitic [Jurassic] period _less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere_, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain something of the Oolitic type, _while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the globe_ [! !].

Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d’être for such a “curse of retardation”? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main Continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub‐race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its “virgin soil” notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.

To return once more, however, to the history of the Third Race, the “Sweat‐born,” the “Egg‐bearing,” and the “Androgyne.” Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of course. The passage from the first to the last transformation required numberless generations, during which the simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first developed into a bisexual being; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third Race mankind is the most mysterious of all the five hitherto developed Races. The mystery of the “How” of the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist; the present work giving only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre‐natal shells, or eggs, and to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the newly born sub‐races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of the fourth sub‐race of the Third Race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by identically the same process as our historical generations. This required, of course, millions of years. The reader has been made acquainted with the approximate figures, at least of the exoteric calculations.

We are approaching the turning‐point of the evolution of the Races. Let us see what Occult Philosophy says on the origin of language.