The Secret Doctrine 2.9.36

The Fourth Race developed speech.

The Commentaries explain that the First Race—the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called “Self‐born”—was, in our sense, speechless, for it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a “sound‐language,” to wit, chant‐like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the “Sweat‐born” or the early Third Race. In its second half, when the “Sweat‐born” gave birth to the “Egg‐born,” the middle Third Race; and when these, instead of “hatching out”—may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age—as androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually—an act which forced the Creative Gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of “one language and of one lip.” This did not prevent the last two sub‐races of the Third Race from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their Divine Instructors, and their own already awakened minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven Races is divided into four Ages—the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age—so is every smallest division of such Races. Speech then developed, according to Occult Teaching, in the following order:

I. Monosyllabic speech: that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the close of the Third Root‐Race, the “golden‐coloured,” yellow‐complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called “thought‐transference,” though, with the exception of the Race called the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—the first in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had incarnated—thought was but very little developed in nascent physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel‐parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the Anthropologist.

II. Agglutinative speech: these linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother‐ language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay and finally death, so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races—that language, which is referred to as Râkshasî Bhâshâ, in old Sanskrit works—decayed and almost died out. While the “cream” of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Âryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, now scattered, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America.

III. Inflectional speech: the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called the “elder sister” of the Greek, instead of its mother—was the first language, now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race. The “Semitic” languages are the bastard descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The Occult Doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Âryan and the Semite, and accepts even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Âryans—degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Chandâlas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex‐Brâhmans, who sought refuge in Chaldæa, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A‐Bram (No‐Brâhman) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those Âryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan and Kabul and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and invaded Arabia. But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent.

We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub‐races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross‐breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids.

In these red‐haired and hair‐covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the “Lords of Wisdom” did not incarnate, as we see. Thus through a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross‐breeding—unnatural “sexual selection”—originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later.

As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.