II. And if such eye‐witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective

clairvoyance is granted), how can humanity and the first palæolithic men be no earlier than about the middle of the Tertiary period? We must bear in mind that most of the men of Science do not allow man to have appeared before the Quaternary period, and thus shut him out completely from the Cainozoic times. Here we have extinct species of animals, which disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of years ago, described by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said, could hardly have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either the Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the Quaternary period, or man must be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus. It does not follow that, because the Occultists believe in and defend Ancient Wisdom and Science, even though winged saurians are called “flying camels” in the translations of the _Zohar_, we therefore as readily believe in all the stories which the Middle Ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk of the Third Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit Christopher Scherer’s and Father Kircher’s cock‐and‐bull stories of their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their assertions as either dreams or fibs.(468) Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a “poetical license” the story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of his heart.(469) We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea‐serpent is one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped detection? It is a creature contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and exists no more. The reader may enquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly, because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity of the human race; and, secondly, to show the difference between the real zoological meaning of the words “Dragon,” “Nâga,” and “Serpent,” and the metaphorical meaning, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the _quidproquos_ and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice. “Sed et Serpens?” Aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the serpent of _Genesis_ an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic force, superintelligent, a “great fallen light,” a spirit, sidereal, aërial and tellurian at the same time, “whose influence circumambulates the globe” (_qui circumambulat terram_), as De Mirville,(470) a Christian fanatic of the dead‐letter, has it, and which only “manifested itself under the physical emblem which agreed the better with its moral and intellectual _coils_”—_i.e._, under the ophidian form. But what will Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the “Divine Healer,” if the serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil; the “Evil One” itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when it is traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit? For, if the followers of the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and Æsculapius, or Asclepios, who are, in truth, one, are “devils and sons of devils,” and the wand and serpent of the latter, the “Devil’s wand”; how about the Brazen Serpent of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the Heathen “wand” and the Jewish “serpent” are one and the same, namely, the Caduceus of Mercury, son of Apollo‐Python. It is easy to comprehend why the Jews adopted the ophidian shape for their “seducer.” With them it was purely _physiological_ and _phallic_; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on the part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once that the mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read numerically. The Occultists know that the Serpent, the Nâga, and the Dragon have each a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the astronomical and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted Lights and the two Serpents of the Gnostics, the good and the evil. They also know that, when _generalized_, the conclusions of both Science and Theology present two most ridiculous extremes. For, when the former tells us that it is sufficient to trace the legends of the serpents to their primal source, the astronomical legend, and to meditate seriously on the Sun, the conqueror of Python, and the celestial Virgin in the Zodiac forcing back the devouring Dragon, if we would have the key of all the subsequent religious dogmas—it is easy to perceive that, instead of generalizing, the author simply has his eye on Christian religion and _Revelation_. We call this the one extreme. We see the other when Theology, repeating the famous decision of the Council of Trent, seeks to convince the masses that: From the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the Devil has full power over him, and possesses him _by right_—_diabolum dominium et potestatem super homines habere et jure eos possidere_.(471) To this Occult Philosophy answers: Prove first the existence of the Devil _as an entity_, and then we may believe in such congenital possession. A very small amount of observation and knowledge of human nature may be sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma. Had Satan any reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the ecclesiastical sense), it is the poor Devil who would find himself chronically obsessed and even possessed by the wicked—hence by the bulk of mankind. It is humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty, unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which has begotten, given birth to, and reared in love the Evil One. But this is a digression. The whole world of thought is reproached by the Church with having adored the serpent. The whole of humanity burnt incense to it or stoned it. The _Zends_ speak of it as do the _Kings_ and _Vedas_, as the _Edda_ ... and the _Bible_.... Everywhere the sacred serpent [the Nâga] has its shrine and its priest; in Rome it is the Vestal who ... prepares its meal with the same care that she bestows on the sacred fire. In Greece, Æsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and delegates to it his powers. Every one has heard of the famous Roman embassy sent by the Senate to the god of medicine and its return with the not less famous serpent, which proceeded of its own will and by itself toward its master’s temple on one of the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it [the serpent] in her hair, not an Augur but questioned it with care, not a Necromancer whose tombs are free from its presence! The Cainites and the Ophites call it Creator, while recognizing, as Schelling did, that the serpent is “evil in substance and in person.”(472) Yes, the author is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the prestige which the serpent enjoys to our own day, he ought to study the matter in India and learn all that is believed about, and still attributed to, the Nâgas (cobras) in that country; one should also visit the Africans of Whydah, the Voodoos of Port‐au‐Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of Mexico, and the Pâ, or Men‐serpents of China, etc. But why wonder that the serpent is “adored” and at the same time cursed, since we know that from the beginning it was a symbol? In every ancient language the word _dragon_ signified what it now does in Chinese, _long_ or “the being who excels in intelligence,” and in Greek, δράκων, or “he who sees and watches.”(473) Is it to the animal of this name that any of these epithets can apply? Is it not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the primitive meaning may have led savages now, that the above qualifications were intended to apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by Serpents and Dragons? These originals—called to this day in China the “Dragons of Wisdom”—were the first disciples of the Dhyânîs, who were their Instructors; in short, the Primitive Adepts of the Third Race, and later, of the Fourth and Fifth Races. The name became universal, and no sane man before the Christian era would ever have confounded the man and the symbol. The symbol of Chnouphis, or the Soul of the World, writes Champollion: Is among others that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this reptile, the emblem of the Good Genius, is a veritable Agathodæmon. It is often represented bearded.... This sacred animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones.... The serpent has various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ.(474) Agathodæmon was endowed “with the knowledge of good and evil,” _i.e._, with Divine Wisdom, for without the latter the former is impossible.(475) Repeating Jamblichus, Champollion shows him to be: The deity called Εἰχτῶν [or the Fire of the Celestial Gods—the Great Thot‐Hermes],(476) to whom Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic.(477) The “invention of magic”! A strange term to use, as though the unveiling of the eternal and actual mysteries of Nature could be _invented_! As well attribute, millenniums hence, the _invention_ instead of the discovery of radiant matter to Mr. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the discoverer, for, as said in the last footnote but one, Thot‐Hermes is a generic name, as is Enoch—Enoïchion, the “inner, spiritual eye”—Nebo, the prophet and seer, etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man, but a generic title of many Adepts. Their connection with the serpent in symbolic allegories is due to their enlightenment by the Solar and Planetary Gods during the earliest intellectual Race, the Third. They are all the representative patrons of the Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son of the Sun‐God Apollo, and he is Mercury; Nebo is the son of Bel‐Merodach; Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son of Vivasvat—the Sun or Sûrya, etc. And while, astronomically, the Nâgas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarases, Grâmanîs (or Yakshas, minor Gods), Yâtudhânas and Devas, are the Sun’s attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are Gods and Men—when incarnated in the _Nether_ World. Let the reader be reminded, in this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir Buddhist Nâgas. These are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nâgas ethnologically, but “wise men.” The _Bible_, from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_, is but a series of historical records of the great struggle between White and Black Magic, between the Adepts of the Right Path, the Prophets, and those of the Left, the Levites, the clergy of the brutal masses. Even the students of Occultism, though some of them have more archaic MSS. and direct teaching to rely upon, find it difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the Sodales of the Right Path and those of the Left. The great schism that arose between the sons of the Fourth Race, as soon as the first Temples and Halls of Initiation had been erected under the guidance of the “Sons of God,” is allegorized in the Sons of Jacob. That there were two Schools of Magic, and that the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the words pronounced by the dying Jacob. And here it may be well to quote a few sentences from _Isis Unveiled_.(478) The dying Jacob thus describes his sons: “Dan,” he says, “shall be a _serpent_ by the way, an _adder_ in the path, that biteth the horse‐heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards [_i.e._, he will teach candidates _Black_ Magic]. I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord!” Of Simeon and Levi the patriarch remarks that they “are brethren; instruments of _cruelty_ are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their _secret_; unto their _assembly_.”(479) Now in the original, the words “their secret” read—“their Sod.”(480) And Sod was the name for the great Mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all Sun‐Gods and had serpents for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of the fiery serpents by saying that this was the name given to the tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in short, and that Moses was the chief of the Sodales.(481) It is to the Mysteries that the original meaning of the “Dragon‐Slayers” has to be traced, and the question is fully treated of hereafter. Meanwhile it follows that, if Moses was the Chief of the Mysteries, he was the Hierophant thereof; and further, if, at the same time, we find the Prophets thundering against the “abominations” of the people of Israël, that there were two Schools. “Fiery serpents” was, then, simply the epithet given to the Levites of the priestly caste, after they had departed from the Good Law, the traditional teachings of Moses, and to all those who followed Black Magic. Isaiah, when referring to the “rebellious children” who will have to carry their riches into the lands whence come “the viper and _fiery_ flying _serpent_,”(482) or Chaldæa and Egypt, whose Initiates had already greatly degenerated in his day (700 B.C.), meant the sorcerers of those lands.(483) But these must be carefully distinguished from the “Fiery Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist.” In the _Great Book of the Mysteries_ we are told that: _Seven Lords created seven Men; three Lords [Dhyân Chohans or Pitris] were holy and good, four less heavenly and full of passion.... The Chhâyâs [phantoms] of the Fathers were as they._ This accounts for the differences in human nature, which is divided into seven gradations of good and evil. There were seven tabernacles ready to be inhabited by Monads under seven different Karmic conditions. The Commentaries explain on this basis the easy spread of evil, as soon as the human Forms had become real men. Some ancient philosophers, however, in their genetical accounts, ignored the seven and gave only four. Thus the Mexican local _Genesis_ has “four _good_ men,” described as the four real ancestors of the human race, “who were neither begotten by the Gods nor born of woman”; but whose creation was a wonder wrought by the Creative Powers, and who were made only after “_three attempts at manufacturing men had failed_.” The Egyptians in their theology had only “four Sons of God”—whereas in _Pymander_ _seven_ are given—thus avoiding any mention of the evil nature of man. When, however, Set from a God sank into Set‐ Typhon, he began to be called the “seventh son”; whence probably arose the belief that “the seventh son of the seventh son” is always a natural‐born magician—though at first only a _sorcerer_ was meant. Apap, the serpent symbolizing evil, is slain by Aker, Set’s serpent;(484) therefore Set‐ Typhon could not be that evil. In the _Book of the Dead_, it is commanded that Chapter clxiii should be read “in the presence of a serpent on two legs,” which means a high Initiate, a Hierophant, for the discus and ram’s horns(485) that adorn his “serpent’s” head in the hieroglyphics of the title of the said chapter, denote this. Over the “serpent” are represented the two mystic eyes of Ammon,(486) the hidden “Mystery God.” The above passages corroborate our assertion, and show what the word “serpent” really meant in antiquity. But as to the Nagals and Nargals; whence came the similarity or names between the Indian Nâgas and the American Nagals? The Nargal was the Chaldæan and Assyrian chief of the Magi [Rab‐ Mag], and the Nagal was the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from Nergal‐Serezer, the Assyrian god, and the Hindû Nâgas. Both have the same faculties and the power to have an attendant Dæmon, with whom they identify themselves completely. The Chaldæan and Assyrian Nargal kept his Dæmon, in the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nagal keeps his wherever he can—in the neighbouring lake, or wood, or in the house, in the shape of some household animal.(487) Such similarity cannot be attributed to _coincidence_. A new world is discovered, and we find that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race, it was already an old one; that Arjuna, Krishna’s companion and Chelâ, is said to have descended into Pâtâla, the “antipodes” and therein married Ulûpî,(488) a Nâga, or Nâgî rather, the daughter of the king of the Nâgas, Kauravya.(489) And now it may be hoped the full meaning of the serpent emblem is proven. It is neither that of evil, nor, least of all, that of the devil; but is, indeed, the ΣΕΜΕΣ ΕΙΛΑΜ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ, the “Eternal Sun Abrasax,” the Central Spiritual Sun of all the Kabalists, represented in some diagrams by the circle of Tiphereth. And here, again, we may quote from our earlier volumes and enter into further explanations. From this region of unfathomable Depth (Bythos, Aditi, Shekinah, the Veil of the Unknown) issues forth a Circle formed of spirals. This is Tiphereth; which, in the language of symbolism, means a grand Cycle, composed of smaller ones. Coiled within, so as to follow the spirals, lies the Serpent—emblem of Wisdom and Eternity—the Dual Androgyne; the cycle representing Ennoia, or the Divine Mind (a Power which does not create but which must assimilate), and the Serpent, the Agathodæmon, the Ophis, the _Shadow_ of the Light (non‐eternal, yet the greatest Divine Light on our plane). Both were the Logoi of the Ophites; or the Unity as Logos manifesting itself as a double principle of Good and Evil.(490) Were it Light alone, inactive and absolute, the human mind could not appreciate nor even realize it. Shadow is that which enables Light to manifest itself, and gives it objective reality. Therefore, Shadow is not evil, but is the necessary and indispensable corollary which completes Light or Good; it is its _creator_ on Earth. According to the views of the Gnostics, these two principles are immutable Light and Shadow; Good and Evil being virtually one and having existed through all eternity, as they will ever continue to exist so long as there are manifested worlds. This symbol accounts for the adoration by this sect of the Serpent, as the Saviour, coiled either round the sacramental loaf, or a Tau (the phallic emblem). As a unity, Ennoia and Ophis are the Logos. When separated, one is the Tree of Spiritual Life, the other, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Therefore, we find Ophis urging the first human couple—the material production of Ilda‐baoth, but owing its spiritual principle to Sophia‐ Achamoth—to eat of the forbidden fruit, although Ophis represents divine Wisdom. The Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, are all symbols transplanted from the soil of India. The Arasa‐maram [?], the banyan tree, so sacred with the Hindûs—since Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences—is called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death. The Java‐Aleim of the Sacerdotal College are said, in the Chaldæan tradition, to have taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day Foh‐ tchou(491) who lives in his Foh‐Maëyu, or the temple of Buddha, on the top of the Kouin‐Long‐Sang,(492) the great mountain, produces his greatest religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung‐Ming‐Shŭ, or the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone gives immortality. This marvellous display takes place every three years, when an immense concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy place.(493) Now it may become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or the “Wise Men,” who are claimed to have been initiated into the Mysteries of Nature by the Universal Mind, represented by the highest Angels, were named the “Serpents of Wisdom” and “Dragons”; and also how the first physiologically complete couples—after being initiated into the Mystery of Human Creation through Ophis, the Manifested Logos and the Androgyne, by eating of the fruit of knowledge—gradually began to be accused by the material spirit of posterity of having _committed sin_, of having disobeyed the “Lord God,” and of having been tempted by the Serpent. So little have the first Christians—who despoiled the Jews of their _Bible_—understood the first four chapters of _Genesis_ in their esoteric meaning, that they have never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that the “Serpent” was actually the “Lord God” himself, who, as the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind to become creators in their turn.(494) They never realized that the Cross was an evolution from the Tree and the Serpent, and thus became the _salvation of mankind_. By this it would become the very first fundamental symbol of Creative Cause, applying to geometry, to numbers, to astronomy, to measure and to animal reproduction. According to the _Kabalah_, _the curse on man came with the formation of woman_.(495) The circle was separated from its diameter line. From the possession of the double principle in one, that is, the Androgyne condition, the separation of the dual principle was made, presenting two opposites, whose destiny it was, for ever after, to seek reünion into the original _one_ condition. The curse was this, viz., that Nature, impelling the search, evaded the desired result by the production of a new being, distinct from that reünion or oneness desired, by which the natural longing to recover a lost state was and is for ever being cheated. It is by this tantalizing process of a continued curse that Nature lives.(496) The allegory of Adam being driven away from the Tree of Life means, Esoterically, that the newly separated Race abused and dragged down the mystery of Life into the region of animalism and bestiality. For, as the _Zohar_ shows, Matronethah—Shekinah, the wife of Metatron symbolically—“is the way to the great Tree of Life, the Mighty Tree,” and Shekinah is Divine Grace. As explained, this Tree reaches the heavenly vale and is hidden between three mountains (the upper Triad of Principles, in man). From these three mountains, the Tree ascends above (the Adept’s knowledge aspires heavenward), and then redescends below (into the Adept’s Ego on earth). This Tree is revealed in the day time and is hidden during the night, _i.e._, revealed to an enlightened mind and hidden to ignorance, which is night.(497) As says the Commentary: _The Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots of the Tree of Life._ But then also, as the author of _The Source of Measures_ writes: In the Kabalah it is plainly to be found that the “Tree of Life” was the ansated cross in its sexual aspect, and that the “Tree of Knowledge” was the separation and the coming together again to fulfil the fatal condition. To display this in numbers the values of the letters composing the word Otz (עץ), tree, are 7 and 9, the seven being the holy feminine number and the nine the number of the phallic or male energy. This ansated cross is the symbol of the Egyptian _female‐male_, Isis‐Osiris, the germinal principle in all forms, based on the primal manifestation applicable in all directions and in all senses. This is the Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from the more philosophical Eastern or Âryan views upon the subject.(498) The separation of the sexes was in the programme of Nature and of natural evolution; and the creative faculty in male and female was a gift of Divine Wisdom. In the truth of such traditions the whole of Antiquity, from the patrician philosopher to the humblest spiritually inclined plebeian, has believed. And as we proceed, we may successfully show that the _relative_ truth of such legends, if not their absolute exactness—vouched for by such giants of intellect as were Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, and others—begins to dawn upon more than one modern Scientist. He is perplexed; he stands startled and confused before proofs that are being daily accumulated before him; he feels that there is no way of solving the many historical problems that stare him in the face, unless he begins by accepting ancient traditions. Therefore, in saying that we believe absolutely in ancient records and _universal_ legends, we need hardly plead guilty before the impartial observer, for other and far more learned writers, and that too among those who belong to the modern Scientific School, evidently believe in much that the Occultists do—in “dragons,” for instance, and not only symbolically, but also in their actual existence at one time. It would have indeed been a bold step for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, time‐honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events. Nowadays it is a less hazardous proceeding.(499) Thus opens the Introduction to a recent (1886) and most interesting work by Mr. Charles Gould, called _Mythical Monsters_. He boldly states his belief in most of these monsters. He submits that: Many of the so‐called mythical animals, which throughout long ages and in all nations have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter‐of‐fact Natural History, and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time; ... traditions of creatures _once coëxisting with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible_.... For me the major part of those creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature evolved out of the imagination of Âryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew.... To me the specific existence of the unicorn seems not incredible, and, in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its origin to a lunar myth.(500)... For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from “the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature.” It seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the utterance of these oft‐told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognizable, than that _uncultured savages should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the present day_; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions are _transformations_ than to believe them to be _inventions_.(501) It is shown by the same Geologist that: Palæontologists have successively traced back the existence of man to periods variously estimated at from _thirty thousand to one million_ years—to periods when he coëxisted with animals which have long since become extinct.(502) These animals, “weird and terrible,” were, to give a few instances: (1) The genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebræ show them to have attained a length of nearly two hundred feet. The remains of such monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus Montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length. (3) The Dinosaurians, in the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains, of still more gigantic proportions. (4) The Atlantosaurus Immanis, a femur of which alone is over six feet in length, and which would be thus over one hundred feet in length. But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the discovery of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh‐ bone over twelve feet in length!(503) Then we read of the monstrous Sivatherium in the Himâlayas, the four‐horned stag, as large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic Megatherium; of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with crocodile jaws on a duck’s head, etc. _All these were coëxistent with man, most probably attacked man, as man attacked them._ And we are asked to believe that the said man was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that, surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a gigantic flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one great man of Science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why man should not have been “contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and go back _as far as the Secondary Period_.”(504) The very conservative Professor Jukes writes: It appears that the flying dragons of romance had something like a real existence in former ages of the world.(505) And the author goes on to ask. Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and China, shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from others which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization?(506) The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants—themselves smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons—and hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely every day. But even they have already had a few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in size in the same proportion as men have done. For the remains of a pigmy elephant, E. Falconeri, were found in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were associated with the remains of pigmy hippopotami, the former being only two feet six inches high. There is also the still existing Hippopotamus (Chœropsis) Liberiensis, “which M. Milne‐ Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height.”(507) Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy‐ tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that: The things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically speaking, to the things that are unknown.(508) Thus they laugh only at their own ignorance. The “Sons Of God” And The “Sacred Island.” The “legend” given in _Isis Unveiled_(509) in relation to a portion of the globe which Science now concedes to have been the cradle of humanity—though it was but one of the _seven_ cradles, in truth—runs as follows: Tradition says, and the records of the _Great Book_ (the _Book of Dzyan_) explain, that long before the days of Ad‐am, and his inquisitive wife, He‐va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himâlayan range, and its western prolongation. In it an island, which, for its unparalleled beauty, had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the Race which preceded ours. “The last remnant” means the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” who, with a few tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it was the Third Race, inhabiting the great Lemurian Continent, which preceded the veritable and complete human Races—the Fourth and the Fifth. Therefore was it said in _Isis Unveiled_ that: This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the “Sons of God”; not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real Elohim, though in the oriental _Kabalah_ they have another name. It was they who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now _lost_ “word.” The “Island,” according to belief, exists to the present hour, as an oasis surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Gobi Desert—whose sands “no foot hath crossed in the memory of man.” This word, which is no word, has travelled once round the globe, and still lingers as a far‐off dying echo in the hearts of some privileged men. The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges were aware of the existence of this island; but the “word” was known only to the Java Aleim (Mahâ Chohan in another tongue), or chief Lord of every College, and was passed to his successor only at the moment of death. There were many such Colleges, and the old classical authors speak of them. There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages, known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions.(510) Tradition asserts, and Archæology accepts the truth of the legend, that there is more than one city now flourishing in India, which is built on several other cities, making thus a subterranean city of six or seven stories high. Delhi is one of them, Allahabad another; examples being found even in Europe, _e.g._, in Florence, which is built on several defunct Etruscan and other cities. Why, then, could not Ellora, Elephanta, Karli, and Ajunta have been built over subterranean labyrinths and passages, as it is claimed? Of course we do not allude to the caves which are known to every European, whether _de visu_ or by hearsay, notwithstanding their enormous antiquity, though that even is disputed by modern Archæology; but to a fact, known to the initiated Brâhmans of India and especially to Yogîs, viz., that there is not a cave‐temple in the country but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and that these underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn _their_ caves and corridors. Who can tell whether the lost Atlantis—which is also mentioned in the _Secret Book_, but, again, under another name, peculiar to the sacred language—did not still exist in those days?— we went on to ask. It _did_ exist most assuredly, for it was approaching its greatest days of glory and civilization when the last of the Lemurian continents went down. The great lost Continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania.(511) If the hypothesis—now so much doubted, and positively denied by some learned authors, who regard it as a joke of Plato—is ever verified, then, perhaps, will the Scientists believe that the description of the God‐inhabited continent was not altogether a fable.(512) And they may then perceive that Plato’s guarded hints and his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world, and at the same time, by cleverly combining truth and fiction, of disconnecting himself from a story which the obligations imposed at Initiation forbade him to divulge. To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of hierophants was divided into two distinct categories;(513) those who were instructed by the “Sons of God” of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revelation; and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis—if such must be its name—and who, being of another race (produced _sexually_ but of _divine_ parents), were born with a sight which embraced all hidden things, and was independent of both distance and material obstacle. In short, they were the Fourth Race of men mentioned in the _Popol Vuh_, whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once. In other words, they were the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, the first who had a Dynasty of Spirit‐Kings; not of Manes, or “Ghosts,” as some believe,(514) but of actual living Devas, or Demi‐gods or Angels, again, who had assumed bodies to rule over this Race, and who, in their turn, instructed them in arts and sciences. Only, as these Dhyânîs were Rûpa or material Spirits, they were not always good. Their King Thevetat was one of the latter, and it is under the evil influence of this King‐Demon that the Atlantis‐Race became a nation of wicked “magicians.” In consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to narrate; its substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came to an end by the submersion of Atlantis, which finds its imitation in the stories of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood. The giants and magicians “and all flesh died ... and every man.” All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are substantially identical with the great Father of the Thlinkithians,(515) who, they say, also escaped in a large boat like the Hindû Noah Vaivasvata. If we believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story that, from the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and the descendants of the Atlantean Noah, a mixed race of righteous and wicked sprang up. On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, various Buddhas, its numerous “Saviours,” and great hierophants; on the other hand, its “_natural_ magicians” who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual enlightenment, ... perverted their gifts to evil purposes. We may supplement this by the testimony of some records and traditions. In _L’Histoire des Vierges: les Peuples et les Continents Disparus_, Louis Jacolliot says: One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense continent, which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia. The high plateaux of Hindûstan and Asia, according to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those distant epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent.... According to the Brâhmans, this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindûstan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the peoples which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from their speech _was derived the Sanskrit_. The Indo‐Hellenic tradition, preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from the plains of India, also relates the existence of a continent and a people to which it gives the name of Atlantis and Atlantides, and which it locates in the Atlantic in the northern portion of the Tropics. Apart from this fact, the supposition of an ancient continent in those latitudes, the vestiges of which may be found in the volcanic islands and mountainous surface of the Azores, the Canaries and Cape de Verd Islands, is not devoid of geographical probability. The Greeks, who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond the Pillars of Hercules, on account of their dread of the mysterious Ocean, appeared too late in antiquity for the stories preserved by Plato to be anything else than an echo of the Indian legend. Moreover, when we cast a look on a planisphere, at the sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan Archipelago to Polynesia, from the Straits of Sunda to Easter Island, it is impossible, upon the hypothesis of continents preceding those which we inhabit, not to place there the most important of all. A religious belief, common to Malacca and Polynesia, that is to say, to the two opposite extremes of the Oceanic world, affirms “that all these islands once formed two immense countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify them, the latter swallowed up the two continents, and, since then, it has been impossible to make him give up his captives. Alone, the mountain‐peaks and high plateaux escaped the flood, by the power of the gods, who perceived too late the mistake they had committed.” Whatever there may be in these traditions, and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India was developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly important to Science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they may be.(516) This Oceanic tradition corroborates the legend given from the “Records of the Secret Doctrine.” The war mentioned between the yellow and the black men, relates to a struggle between the “Sons of Gods” and the “Sons of Giants,” or the inhabitants and magicians of Atlantis. The final conclusion of the author, who personally visited all the islands of Polynesia, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows: As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer. The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands, Viti (Fiji), Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna (? Foutouha), Ouvea (? Oueeha), the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou (? Pomatou), the Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues. All navigators agree in saying that the extreme and the central groups could never have communicated in view of their actual geographical position, and with the insufficient means they had at hand. It is physically impossible to cross such distances in a pirogue ... without a compass, and travel months without provisions. On the other hand, the aborigines of the Sandwich Islands, of Viti, of New Zealand, of the central groups, of Samoa, Tahiti, etc., _had never known each other, had never heard of each other_, before the arrival of the Europeans. _And yet each of these people maintained that their island had at one time formed part of an immense stretch of land which extended towards the West on the side of Asia._ And all, brought together, were found to speak the same language, to have the same usages, the same customs, the same religious belief. And all to the question, “Where is the cradle of your race?” for sole response, _extended their hand toward the setting sun_.(517) Geographically, this description clashes slightly with the facts in the Secret Records; but it shows the existence of such traditions, and this is all one cares for. For, as there is no smoke without fire, so a tradition must be based on some approximate truth. In its proper place we will show Modern Science fully corroborating the above and other traditions of the Secret Doctrine with regard to the two lost Continents. The Easter Island relics, for instance, are the most astounding and eloquent memorials of the primeval giants. They are as grand as they are mysterious; and one has but to examine the heads of the colossal statues, that have remained unbroken, to recognize at a glance the features of the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race giants. They seem of one cast though different in features—of a distinctly sensual type, such as the Atlanteans (the Daityas and “Atalantians”) are said to have had in the Esoteric Hindû books. Compare these with the faces of some other colossal statues in Central Asia—those near Bamian, for instance—the portrait‐statues, tradition tells us, of Buddhas belonging to _previous_ Manvantaras; of those Buddhas and heroes who are mentioned in the Buddhist and Hindû works, as men of fabulous size,(518) the good and holy brothers of their wicked coüterine brothers generally, just as Râvana, the giant king of Lankâ, was the brother of Kumbhakarna; all descendants of the Gods through the Rishis, and thus, like “Titan and his enormous brood,” all “Heaven’s first‐born.” These “Buddhas,” though often spoilt by the symbolical representation of great pendent ears, show a suggestive difference, perceived at a glance, in the expression of their faces from that of the Easter Island statues. They may be of one race—but the former are “Sons of Gods”; the latter the brood of mighty sorcerers. All these are reïncarnations however, and, apart from unavoidable exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are _historical characters_.(519) When did they live? How long ago lived the two Races, the Third and Fourth; and how long after did the various tribes of the Fifth begin their strife, the wars between Good and Evil? We are assured by the Orientalists that chronology is both hopelessly mixed and absurdly exaggerated in the _Purânas_ and other Hindû Scriptures. We feel quite prepared to agree with the accusation. But, if Âryan writers have occasionally allowed their chronological pendulum to swing too far one way, beyond the legitimate limit of fact; nevertheless, when the distance of that deviation is compared with the distance of the Orientalists’ deviation in the opposite direction, moderation will be found on the Brâhmanical side. It is the Pandit who will, in the long run, be found more truthful and nearer to fact than the Sanskritist. The Sanskritist’s curtailing—even when proved to have been resorted to in order to fit a personal hobby—is regarded by Western public opinion as “a _cautious_ acceptance of facts,” whereas the Pandit is brutally treated in print as a “_liar_.” But, surely, this is no reason why everyone should be compelled to see this in the same light! An impartial observer may judge it otherwise. He may either proclaim both unscrupulous historians, or justify both, each on his respective ground, and say: Hindû Âryans wrote for their Initiates, who read truth between the lines; not for the masses. If they did mix up events and confuse Ages _intentionally_, it was not with the view of deceiving any one, but in order to preserve their knowledge from the prying eye of the foreigner. But, to him who can count the _generations_ from the Manus, and the _series of incarnations_ specified in the cases of some heroes,(520) in the _Purânas_, the meaning and chronological order are very clear. As for the Western Orientalist, he must be excused, on account of his undeniable ignorance of the methods used by archaic Esotericism. But such existing prejudices will have to give way and disappear very soon before the light of new discoveries. Already Dr. Weber’s and Prof. Max Müller’s favourite theories—namely, that writing was not known in India, even in the days of Pânini (!); that the Hindûs had all their arts and sciences—even to the Zodiac and their architecture (Fergusson)—from the Macedonian Greeks; these and other such cock‐and‐bull hypotheses, are threatened with ruin. It is the ghost of old Chaldæa that comes to the rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert Lecture (1887) Professor Sayce of Oxford, speaking of newly‐discovered Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, refers at length to Ea, the God of Wisdom, now identified with the Oannes of Berosus, the half‐man, half‐fish, who taught the Babylonians culture and the _art of writing_. This Ea, to whom, thanks only to the Biblical Deluge, an antiquity of hardly 1,500 B.C. had been hitherto allowed, is now spoken of in the following terms, to summarize from the Professor: The city of Ea was Eridu, which stood 6,000 years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf. The name means “the good city,” a particularly holy spot, since it was the centre from which the earliest Chaldæan civilization made its way to the north. As the culture‐god was represented as coming from the sea, it was possible that the culture of which Eridu was the seat was of foreign importation. We now know that there was intercourse at a very early period between Chaldæa and the Sinaitic peninsula, as well as with India. The statues discovered by the French at Tel‐ loh (dating from at latest B.C. 4,000) were made of the extremely hard stone known as diorite, and the inscriptions on them stated the diorite to have been brought from Magan—_i.e._, the Sinaitic peninsula, which was then ruled by the Pharaohs. The statues are known to resemble in general style the diorite statue, Kephren, the builder of the second Pyramid, while, according to Mr. Petrie, the unit of measurement marked on the plan of the city, which one of the Tel‐loh figures holds on his lap, is the same as that employed by the Pyramid builders. Teak wood has been found at Mugheir, or Ur of the Chaldees, although that wood is an Indian special product; add to this that an ancient Babylonian list of clothing mentions _sindhu_ or “muslin,” explained as “vegetable cloth.”(521) Muslin, best known now as Dacca muslin, known in Chaldæa as Hindu (Sindhu), and teak wood used 4,000 years B.C., and yet the Hindûs, to whom Chaldæa owes its civilization, as has been well proven by Colonel Vans Kennedy, were _ignorant of the art of writing_ before the Greeks taught them their alphabet—if, at least, we have to believe Orientalists! Stanza X. The History Of The Fourth Race. 38. The birth of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race. 39. The sub‐races of the Fourth Humanity begin to divide and interblend; they form the first mixed races of various colours. 40. The superiority of the Atlantean over other Races. 41. They fall into sin and beget children and monsters. 42. The first germs of anthropomorphism and sexual religion. They lose their “third eye.” 38. THUS, TWO BY TWO, ON THE SEVEN ZONES, THE THIRD RACE GAVE BIRTH TO THE FOURTH; THE SURA BECAME A‐SURA.(522) 39. THE FIRST,(523) ON EVERY ZONE, WAS MOON‐COLOURED;(524) THE SECOND YELLOW LIKE GOLD; THE THIRD RED; THE FOURTH BROWN, WHICH BECAME BLACK WITH SIN.(525) THE FIRST SEVEN HUMAN SHOOTS WERE ALL OF ONE COMPLEXION.(526) THE NEXT SEVEN,(527) BEGAN MIXING.(528) To understand Shloka 38, it must be read together with the Shlokas of Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical than physical Nature. It is only after the so‐called “Fall,” that the Races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. In order that the student may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall—so mystic and transcendental in its real significance—he must at once be told the details which preceded it, seeing that modern Theology has made of the event a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs are made to turn. The Archaic Commentaries, as the reader may remember, explain that, of the Host of Dhyânîs, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, _on this plane_, senseless Monads—some “obeyed” (the Law of Evolution) immediately the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, _i.e._, when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent divine purity, “created” by Kriyâshakti the semi‐ divine man, who became the Seed on Earth for future Adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom—unfettered as it then was by the bonds of Matter—said: “We can choose, ... we have wisdom,”(529) and so incarnated far later—these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies inferior (physiologically) to their Astral Models, because their Chhâyâs had belonged to Progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven Classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, these produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for æons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination.(530) This was the “Fall of the Angels,” owing to their rebellion against Karmic Law. The “fall of _man_” was no fall, _for he was irresponsible_. But “creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the “prerogative of God alone”—the legitimate _attribute_ patented by Theology in the name of an _infinite_ Deity of their own making—the power of Kriyâshakti had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as a usurpation of divine rights. Thus, in the light of such narrow views, the foregoing must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the image of God,” and a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead‐letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the Occultists have already been told, “makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first.” “Why do you make of your God a Devil—both, moreover, created in _your own_ image?”—is our reply. The Esoteric interpretation of the _Bible_, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of Theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches—more anti‐Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists. The true meaning of the old doctrine of the “Fallen Angels,” in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the _Kabalah_, and explains the _Bible_. It is found preëminently in _Genesis_ when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In _Genesis_ (vi), the “Sons of God”—B’ne Aleim—become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in Heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of the Angels.”(531) But what, in reality, is the _Book of Enoch_ itself, from which the author of _Revelation_ and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel(532) have so profusely quoted? Simply a _Book of Initiation_, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain Archaic Mysteries performed in the _inner_ Temples. The author of the _Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quichés_ very justly suggests that the so‐called “Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch’s) experience at Initiation, and what he learned in the Mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity (! !); furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the beginning of the Christian era, when ... the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude, in his Epistle,(533) quotes from the _Book of Enoch_; and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the _Book of Enoch_ from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a writer who lived after ... or was even coëval with” the writers of the _New Testament_, unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, were also a production of the already established Church—which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the “Fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself. In Indian exotericism, these Angels (Asuras) are also denounced as the “enemies of the Gods”; those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the Devas. In Christian Theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends, gathered from Pagan sources. The _coluber tortuosus_, the “tortuous snake”—a qualification said to have originated with the Jews—had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it; among others, _a purely astronomical_ signification. The “Serpent” fallen from on high (_deorsum fluens_) was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead (τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή) to the day when Jesus saw it fall “as lightning ... from heaven,”(534) notwithstanding the Roman Catholic interpretation of “_cadebat ut fulgur_.” It means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the Logos—who is Wisdom, but at the same time, as the opponent of ignorance, Satan or Lucifer. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and so quickening, the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of Mahat, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life—Humanity, if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state, was of course doomed to _moral_ as well as to physical death. The Angels _fallen into generation_ are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the Logos, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or Logos, may be said to have saved those who believed in the Secret Teachings, from “eternal death,” and to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This is the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also—because the Logos is Christos—that “principle” of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego—the Higher Self—formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi, the sixth, and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth “principle.”(535) “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and conscious, self‐active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of the “Heavenly Man” with the “Virgin of the World,” or Nature, as described in _Pymander_; the result of which is their progeny—immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John’s _Revelation_(536) the marriage of the Lamb with his Bride. This “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her “linen” may be “clean and white” _outwardly_, like the “whited sepulchre,” but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not the “righteousness of saints,”(537) but rather the blood of the saints she has “slain upon the earth.”(538) Thus the remark made by the great Initiate, in _Luke_—referring allegorically to the ray of enlightenment and reason, _falling like lightning_ from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to the old Wisdom‐Religion, then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept(539)—was distorted out of all recognition, as was also his own personality, and made to fit in with one of the most cruel and the most pernicious of all theological dogmas. But if Western Theology alone holds the patent and copyright of Satan—in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction—other nationalities and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of a tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. They have both disfigured, and hinted at, the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories on the subject. Nor have the semi‐esoteric dogmas of Paurânic Hindûism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen Gods. The _Purânas_ teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parâshara, in the _Vishnu Purâna_, to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras and Munis, who have _to be born in every age_—to reïncarnate in every Manvantara. This, Esoterically, is equivalent to saying that the “Flames” born of the Universal Mind, or Mahat, owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and the impulse of Evolutionary Law, had—without any gradual transition—landed on this Earth, after having, as in _Pymander_, broken through the “Seven Circles of Fire,” or, in short, the seven intermediate Worlds. There is an Eternal Cyclic Law of Re‐births, and the series is headed at every new Manvantaric Dawn by those who have enjoyed their rest from reïncarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons—by the highest and the earliest Nirvânîs. It was the turn of these “Gods” to incarnate in the present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories; hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.(540) The Gods who had “_fallen_ into generation,” whose mission it was to complete _Divine_ Man, are found represented later on as Demons, Evil Spirits, and Fiends, at feud and war with Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one Eternal Law. But no conception of such creatures as the Devils and the Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahommedan religions was ever intended by these thousand and one Âryan allegories.(541) The true Esoteric view about “Satan,” the opinion held on this subject by the whole of philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an Appendix, entitled “The Secret of Satan,” to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford’s _Perfect Way_.(542) No better and clearer indication of the truth could be offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some length: 1. And on the seventh day [seventh creation of the Hindûs],(543) there went forth from the presence of God a _mighty Angel_, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him the dominion of the outermost sphere.(544) 2. Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being descended into generation.(545) 4. _Among the Gods is none like unto him_, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms, the power and the glory of the worlds: 5. Thrones and empires, the dynasties of kings,(546) the fall of nations, the birth of churches, the triumphs of Time. For, as is said in Hermes: 20. Satan is the door‐keeper of the _Temple of the King_; he standeth in Solomon’s porch; he holdeth _the Keys of the Sanctuary_; 21. That no man may enter therein save the anointed, having the arcanum of Hermes. These suggestive and majestic verses had reference, with the ancient Egyptians and other civilized peoples of antiquity, to the _creative and __ generative Light of the Logos_—Horus, Brahmâ, Ahura Mazda, etc., as primeval manifestations of the Ever‐unmanifested Principle, whether called Ain Suph, Parabrahman, or Zeruâna Akerne, or Boundless Time, Kâla—but the meaning is now degraded in the _Kabalah_. The “Anointed”—who has the secrets and mysteries of Hermes, or Budha, Wisdom, and who alone is entrusted with the “Keys of the Sanctuary,” the Womb of Nature, in order to fructify it and call to active life and being the whole Kosmos—has become, with the Jews, Jehovah, the “God of Generation” on the Lunar Mountain—Sinai, the Mountain of the Moon (Sin). The “Sanctuary” has become the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum has been anthropomorphized, and “phallicized,” and dragged down into Matter, indeed. Hence arose the necessity of making of the “Dragon of Wisdom,” the “Serpent” of _Genesis_; of the conscious God who needed a body to clothe his too subjective divinity, Satan. But the “innumerable incarnations of Spirit,” and “the ceaseless pulse and current of Desire,”(547) refer, the first, to our doctrine of Karmic and Cyclic Rebirths, the second—to Erôs, not the later God of material, physiological love, but to the Divine Desire in the Gods, as well as in all Nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one “Dark,” because invisible and incomprehensible, “Flame” could achieve only by themselves descending into Matter. Therefore, as continued in the Appendix: 12. Many names hath God given him [Satan], names of mystery, secret and terrible. 13. ... The Adversary, because Matter opposeth Spirit, and Time accuseth even the saints of the Lord. 28. Stand in awe of him, and sin not: speak his name with trembling.... 29. For Satan is the magistrate of the Justice of God [Karma]; he beareth the balance and the sword. 31. For to him are committed _Weight and Measure and Number_. Compare the last sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabalah to the Prince in the Book of _Al Chazari_, says, and it will be found that Weight and Measure and Number are, in the _Sepher Jetzirah_, the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three Sephrim, or figures, ciphers), covering the whole collective number of 10; and that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the “Heavenly Man” or the Logos. Thus Satan and the Anointed were identified in ancient thought. Therefore: 33. Satan is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades, the Angel of the manifest Worlds. The seven Lokas, or Saptaloka, of the Earth with the Hindûs; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of which Theology makes a region bordering on Hell, _is simply our Globe_, the Earth, and thus Satan is called the “Angel of the _manifest_ Worlds.” It is “Satan who is the God of our planet and _the only_ God,” and this without any metaphorical allusion to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the Logos. The first and “eldest of the gods,” in the order of microcosmic [divine] evolution, Saturn (Satan) [astronomically] is the _seventh and last_ in the order of macrocosmic emanation, being the circumference of the Kingdom of which Phœbus [the Light of Wisdom, also the Sun] is the centre. The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish God an “Angel of Matter,” or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and whose Planet was Saturn. 34. And God hath put a girdle about his loins [the rings of Saturn], and the name of the girdle is Death. In Anthropogony this “girdle” is the human body with its two lower principles. These three die, while the innermost Man is immortal. And now we approach the _secret_ of Satan. 37. ... Upon Satan only _is the shame of generation_. 38. He hath lost his virginal estate [so hath the Kumâra, by incarnating]: _uncovering heavenly secrets_, he hath entered into bondage. 39. He encompasseth with bonds and limits all things.... 42. Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss [the manifested world] the legions of Satan. 43. These are the Unmanifest and the Manifest; the free and the bound [in Matter]; the virginal and the fallen. 44. And both are the ministers of the Father, fulfilling the Word divine. Therefore: 55. Holy and venerable is the Sabbath of God: _blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of Hades_ [Satan]. For: 41. The glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord [God in the manifested World]: the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai [the whole Kosmos]. When the Church, therefore, curses Satan, it curses the Kosmic reflection of God; it anathematizes God made manifest in Matter or in the objective; it maledicts God, or the ever‐incomprehensible Wisdom, revealing itself as Light and Shadow, Good and Evil in Nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited intellect of Man. This is the true philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the Adversary in the _Kabalah_; the same tenets and spirit being found in the allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with it. We say “historical,” because allegory and mythical ornamentation round the kernel of tradition, in nowise prevent that kernel being a record of real events. Thus, the _Kabalah_, repeating the time‐honoured revelations of the once universal history of our Globe and the evolution of its Races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which have formed the _Bible_. Its historical foundation, in however imperfect a form, is now offered in these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus the allegorical and symbolical meaning of the Serpent of _Genesis_ is found explained by the “Sons of Wisdom”—or Angels from higher Spheres, though all and each pertain to the Kingdom of Satan, or Matter—revealing to men the mysteries of Heaven. Hence, also, all the so‐called myths of the Hindû, Grecian, Chaldæan, and Jewish Pantheons are found to be built on fact and truth. The Giants of _Genesis_ are the historical Atlanteans of Lankâ, and the Greek Titans. Who can forget that Troy was once upon a time proclaimed a myth, and Homer a non‐existent personage, while the existence of such cities as Herculaneum and Pompeii was denied, and attributed to mere fairy legends? Yet Schliemann has proved that Troy did really exist, and the two latter cities, though buried for long ages under the Vesuvian lava, have had their resurrection day, and live again on the surface of the Earth. How many more cities and localities called “fabulous” are on the list of future discoveries, how many more personages regarded as mythical(548) will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the decrees of Fate in the Astral Light. As the tenets of the Eastern Doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of Hermetic literature. Let him, for instance, read carefully the opening pages of the _Pymander_ of Hermes Trismegistus, and he will see our doctrines corroborated therein, however veiled its text. There also he will find the evolution of the Universe, of our Earth, called “Nature” in _Pymander_, as of everything else, from the “Moyst Principle,” or the great Deep, Father‐Mother—the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos. First the “Universal Mind,” which the hand of the Christian translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father; then the “Heavenly Man,”(549) the great Total of that Host of Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior Worlds or of the Men of our Globe, but which nevertheless _fell_ into Matter by virtue of that same evolution, as the Second Logos of the “Father.”(550) Synthetically, every Creative Logos, or “the Son who is one with the Father,” is the Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian Theology makes of the seven “Angels of the Presence” the Virtues, or the personified attributes, of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahmâ, became Archangels. The Roman Catholic Theodice itself, recognizing in its creative Verbum Princeps the Head of these Angels (_caput angelorum_) and the Angel of the great Counsel (_magni consilii angelus_), thus recognizes the identity of Christ with them. “The Sura became A‐Sura”—the Gods became No‐Gods—says the text; _i.e._, Gods became Fiends—Satan, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the teaching of the Secret Doctrine, to be allegorized as Good and Sacrifice, a God of Wisdom, under different names. The _Kabalah_ teaches that Pride and Presumption—the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism—are the causes that emptied Heaven of _one‐ third_ of its divine denizens, mystically, and of _one‐third_ of the stars, astronomically; in other words, the first statement is an allegory, and the second a fact. The former, nevertheless, is, as shown, intimately connected with humanity. In their turn the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of “creation” was due to, and the result of, that legendary “War in Heaven,” brought on by the rebellion of the Angels(551) against Creative Law, or the Demiurge. The statement is correct, but the _inner_ meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude further explanation of the difficulty, by appealing to divine mystery, or to the sin of prying into its policy—is to say nothing at all. It may prove sufficient for believers in the Pope’s infallibility, but will hardly satisfy the philosophical mind. Yet the truth, although known to most of the higher Kabalists, has never been told by any of their number. One and all, Kabalists and Symbologists, have shown an extraordinary reluctance to confess the primitive meaning of the Fall of the Angels. In a Christian such silence is only natural. Neither Alchemist nor Philosopher during the Mediæval Ages could have uttered that(552) which in the sight of Orthodox Theology was terrible blasphemy, for it would have led them directly through the “Holy” Office of the Inquisition, to rack and stake. But for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected but ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with Manicheeïsm, invented the Devil, and by placing a theological extinguisher on the radiant Star‐ God Lucifer, the “Son of the Morning,” thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes, _a black and tenebrous_ Light—the myth has struck its roots too deeply into the soil of blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her dogmas, and laugh at her horned and cloven‐footed Satan, to come out bravely and confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it is this. Semi‐ exoterically, the “First‐born” of the Almighty—Fiat Lux—or the Angels of Primordial Light, were commanded to “create”; one‐third of them rebelled and “refused”; while those who “obeyed” as Fetahil did—_failed_ most signally. To realize the refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and understand Eastern Philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental mystical tenets of the Vedântins, as to the utter fallacy of attributing functional activity to the Infinite and Absolute Deity. Esoteric Philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyâs, the “Central Sun” emits _Creative Light_—passively, so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of Being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless Energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes comprehensible how the process of “creating,” or rather of fashioning, the organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated intelligent Beings—who became collectively a Being or Creative God, differentiated already from the One Absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is to conditioned “creation.”(553) Now the Vatican MS. of the _Kabalah_—the only copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been in the possession of Count St. Germain—contains the most complete exposition of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians(554) and other Gnostics; and in that parchment the “Seven Suns of Life” are given in the order in which they are found in the Saptasûrya. Only four of these, however, are mentioned in the editions of the _Kabalah_ which are procurable in public libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyân Chohans, and proves the speculation to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Âryans. As is well known, the _Kabalah_ did not originate with the Jews, for the latter got their ideas from the Chaldæans and the Egyptians. Thus even the _exoteric_ Kabalistic teachings speak of a “Central Sun,” and of three secondary Suns in each Solar System—our own included. As shown in that able though too materialistic work, _New Aspects of Life and Religion_, which is a synopsis of the views of the Kabalists in an aspect deeply thought out and assimilated: The central sun ... was to them [as much as to the Âryans] the _centre of rest_; the centre to which all motion was to be ultimately referred. Round this central sun ... “the first of three systemic suns ... revolved on a polar plane ... the second, on an equatorial plane” ... and the third only was our visible sun. These four solar bodies were “_the organs on whose action what man calls the creation, the evolution of life on the planet earth, depends_.” The channels through which the influence of these bodies was conveyed to the earth they [the Kabalists] held to be electrical.... The radiant energy flowing from the central sun(555) called the earth into being as a watery globe, ... [whose tendency], as the nucleus of a planetary body, was to rush to the (central) sun ... within the sphere of whose attraction it had been created.... But the radiant energy, similarly electrifying both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed motion towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the revolving planet [earth] thus sought to reach. In the organic cell the _visible sun_ found its own proper matrix, and produced through this the animal [while maturing the vegetable] kingdom, finally placing man at its head, in whom, through the animating action of that kingdom, it originated the psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal kingdom, at the head of the creation, was the animal, the _soul‐ less, the perishable man_.... Hence man, although apparently its crown, would, by his advent have marked the close of creation; since creation, culminating in him, would at his death have entered on its decline.(556) This Kabalistic view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern Doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the Seven Suns with the seven systems of Planes of Being, of which the “Suns” are the central bodies, and you have the seven Angelic Planes, whose “Host” collectively are the Gods thereof.(557) They are the Head Group divided into four Classes, from the Incorporeal down to the Semi‐ corporeal. These Classes are directly connected—though in very different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions—with our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth, the first and highest, which is called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the Âryan Cosmogony—one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of Nature; the other spiritualizes Matter, and its physiology is always made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh “principle” reaches man through all the phases of Being, pure as an indiscrete element and an impersonal unity, it passes through—the _Kabalah_ teaches _from_—the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the Second, the Polar Sun, which two radiate on man his Âtmâ. Group Three, the Equatorial Sun, cements the Buddhi to Âtman and the higher attributes of Manas; while Group Four, the Spirit of our visible Sun, endows him with his Manas and its vehicle, the Kâma Rûpa, or body of passions and desires—the two elements of Ahamkâra which evolve _individualized consciousness_, the personal Ego. Finally, it is the Spirit of the Earth, in its triple unity, that builds the Physical Body, attracting to it the Spirits of Life and forming his Linga Sharîra. But everything proceeds cyclically, the evolution of man like everything else, and the order in which he is generated is described fully in the Eastern Teachings, whereas it is only hinted at in the _Kabalah_. Says the _Book of Dzyan_ with regard to Primeval Man when first projected by the “Boneless,” the Incorporeal Creator: _First, the Breath, then Buddhi, and the Shadow‐Son [the Body] were __“__created.__”__ But where was the Pivot [the Middle Principle, Manas]? Man is doomed. When alone, the Indiscrete [Undifferentiated Element] and the Vâhan [Buddhi]—the Cause of the Causeless—break asunder from manifested life._ “_Unless_,” explains the Commentary: _Unless cemented and held together by the Middle Principle, the Vehicle of the personal consciousness of Jîva._ In other words, the two higher “principles” _can have no individuality on Earth_, cannot be _man_, unless there is (_a_) the Mind, the Manas‐Ego, to cognize itself, and (_b_) the terrestrial false Personality, or the Body of egotistical desires and personal Will, to cement the whole, as if round a Pivot—which it is, truly—to the physical form of man. It is the _fifth_ and the _fourth_ “principles”(558)—Manas and Kâma Rûpa—that contain the dual Personality; the real immortal Ego, if it assimilates itself to the two higher, and the false and transitory Personality, the Mâyâvi or Astral Body, so‐called, or the Animal‐human Soul—the two having to be closely blended for purposes of a _full_ terrestrial existence. Incarnate the Spiritual Monad of a Newton, grafted on that of the greatest saint on Earth, in a physical body the most perfect you can think of—_i.e._, in a two or even a three‐principled Body composed of its Sthûla Sharîra, Prâna (Life‐principle) and Linga Sharîra—and, if it lacks its middle and fifth “principles,” you will have created _an idiot_—at best a beautiful, soul‐ less, empty and unconscious appearance. “_Cogito—ergo sum_” can find no room in the brain of such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate. There are students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning underlying the allegory—so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church—of the “Fallen Angels.” The kingdom of spirits and spiritual action, which flows from and is the product of spirit volition, is outside and contrasted with and in contradiction to the kingdom of [divine] souls and divine action.(559) As said in the text of Commentary xiv: _Like produces like and no more at the genesis of Being, and evolution with its limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self Existent_(_560_)_ are called __“__Creations,__”__ for they appear in the Spirit‐Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in its Unborn Nature, which is beyond Time and [limited or conditioned] Space. Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called creation and creatures; they are the development [evolution] of the Discrete Elements._ Again: _The Heavenly Rûpa [Dhyân Chohan] creates [man] in his own form; it is a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal [manifested] Substance; that form is the ideal Shadow of Itself: and this is the Man of the First Race._ To express it in still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this Earth only, it was the duty of the first “differentiated” Egos—the Church calls them Archangels—to imbue Primordial Matter with the evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition—“the Angels were _commanded to create_.” After the Earth had been made ready by the _lower_ and more material Powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly started on their way to be “fruitful and multiply,” the higher Powers, the Archangels or Dhyânîs, were compelled by the Evolutionary Law to descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution—Man. Thus the “Self‐created” and the “Self‐existent” projected their pale Shadows; but Group the Third, the Fire‐Angels, _rebelled and refused_ to join their fellow Devas. Hindû exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them to refuse to “create,” as they desired to remain eternally Kumâras, “Virgin Youths,” in order, if possible, to anticipate their fellows in progress towards Nirvâna‐the final liberation. But, agreeably to Esoteric interpretation, it was a self‐sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The “Rebels” would not create will‐less irresponsible men, as the “obedient” Angels did; nor could they endow human beings with even the temporary reflections of their own attributes; for the latter, belonging to another and a so much higher plane of consciousness, would leave man still irresponsible, hence interfere with any possibility of higher progress. No spiritual and psychic evolution is possible on Earth—the lowest and most material plane—for one who, on that plane at all events, is inherently _perfect_ and cannot accumulate either merit or demerit. Had Man remained the pale Shadow of the inert, immutable, and motionless Perfection, the one negative and passive attribute of the real _I am that I am_, he would have been doomed to pass through life on Earth as in a heavy dreamless sleep; hence a failure on this plane. The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first pronounced (if, indeed, they ever were pronounced) the cruel words, “Behold, the man is become _as one of us_, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever ...”—must have been indeed the Ilda‐baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature, the reflection of which created Ophiomorphos. In this case it is but natural—even from the dead‐letter standpoint—to view Satan, the Serpent of _Genesis_, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual Mankind. For it is he who was the “Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton “created” by Jehovah, as alleged. And he who was the first to whisper, “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil,” can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “Adversary” to Jehovah, the “_personating_ spirit,” he still remains in Esoteric Truth the ever‐loving “Messenger,” the Angel, the Seraphim and Cherubim who both “knew” well, and “loved” still more, and who conferred on us Spiritual, instead of Physical Immortality—the latter a kind of _static_ immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew.” As narrated in King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_ concerning Ildabaoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses: Ildabaoth was far from being a pure spirit; ambition and pride dominated in his composition. He therefore resolved to break off all connection with his mother, Achamoth, and to create a world entirely for himself. Aided by his own Six Spirits, he created Man, intending him for the image of his power; but he failed utterly in his work, his Man proving a vast, soulless monster, crawling upon the earth. The Six Spirits were obliged to bring their work again before their father, to be animated: he did so by communicating the ray of Divine Light which he himself had inherited from Achamoth, who by this loss punished him for his pride and self‐sufficiency. Man, thus favoured by Achamoth at the expense of her own son, followed the impulse of the Divine Light that she had transferred to him, collected a further supply out of the creation with which it was intermingled, and began to present not the image of his creator Ildabaoth, but rather that of the Supreme Being, the “Primal Man.” At this spectacle the Demiurgus was filled with rage and envy at having produced a being so superior to himself. His looks, inspired by his passions, were reflected in the Abyss, as in a mirror, the image became instinct with life, and forth arose “Satan Serpent‐formed,” _Ophiomorphos_, the embodiment of envy and cunning.(561) This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead‐letter text of Chapter iii of _Genesis_. Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of _animals_ on Earth into a potential God, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence, also, the _curse_ pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah‐ Ilda‐baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never‐dying, singeing fire and flames of an inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a refined torture; a “Fire‐producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος (_Phósphoros_), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne _Phosphor_ kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a _conscious_, and hence a _responsible_ entity.(562) The curse of life is great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) _incorporeal_ Being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “Night’s” Rest. For, to quote from an able article by one(563) who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim thereto: Satan [or Lucifer] represents the _Active_, or, as [M. Jules] Baissac calls it, the “Centrifugal” Energy of the Universe [in a cosmic sense]. He is Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is _Pain_, which is the Reaction of the _Pleasure_ of Action, and _Death_—which is the Revolution of _Life_—Satan, burning in his own Hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum—the expansive disintegration of the Nebula which is to concentrate into New Worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the Eternal Inertia of the _Passive_ Energy of the Kosmos—the inexorable “_I am_”—the Flint from which the sparks are beaten out. And fitly ... are he and his adherents ... consigned to the “Sea of Fire”—because _it is_ the Sun [in one sense only in the cosmic allegory], the Fount of Life in _our_ system, where they are purified (meaning thereby disintegrated) and churned up to reärrange them for another life (the Resurrection)—that _Sun_ which, as the Origin of the Active Principle of our Earth, is at once the _Home_ and the _Source_ of the Mundane Satan.... Furthermore, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of Baissac’s general theory [in _Le Diable et Satan_] cold is known to have a “Centripetal” effect. Under the influence of Cold everything contracts.... Under it Life _hybernates_, or dies out, Thought congeals, and Fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own Fire‐Sea—it is only in the “Nifl‐Heim” [the cold Hell of the Scandinavian _Eddas_] of the “_I am_” that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of _Immortal_ Existence in Nifl‐Heim, and that Existence must be _Painless_ and _Peaceful_, because it is _Unconscious_ and _Inactive_. In the Kingdom of _Jehovah_ [if this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him] there is no misery, no war, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no _Individual Consciousness_.(564) All is absorbed in the spirit of the Most Powerful. _It is emphatically a Kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission, as that of the __“__Arch‐Rebel__”__ is one of War and Revolution...._ It [the former] is in fact what Theosophy calls Nirvâna. But then Theosophy teaches that Separation from the Primal Source _having once occurred_, Reünion can only be achieved by _Will‐Effort_—which is distinctly Satanic in the sense of this essay.(565) It _is_ “Satanic” from the standpoint of orthodox Romanism, for it is owing to the prototype of that which became in time the Christian Devil—to the Radiant Archangels, Dhyân Chohans, who refused to create, because they wanted Man _to become his own creator_ and an immortal God—that men can reach Nirvâna and the Haven of heavenly Divine Peace. To close this rather lengthy comment, the Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire‐Devas, the Rudras, and the Kumâras, the “Virgin‐Angels,” (to whom the Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, both belong,) the Divine “Rebels”—called by the all‐materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived”—preferred the _curse_ of _incarnation_ and the long cycles of terrestrial existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery, even if _unconscious_, of the beings who were evolved as Shadows out of their Brethren, through the semi‐passive energy of their _too spiritual_ Creators. If “man’s uses of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to _humanize_ Self,”(566) to do so, he must be born _human_ not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god‐like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was _Knowledge_ and _Love_, has been construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows “the Rebel Angels hurled down from Heaven into the darkness of Hell”—our Earth. Hindû Philosophy hints at the truth by teaching that the Asuras, hurled down by Shiva, are only in an _intermediate state_, in which they prepare for higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched condition; but Christian Theology—claiming to be based on the rock of the divine love, charity, and justice of him it appeals to as its Saviour—to paradoxically enforce that claim, has invented the dreary dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Roman Catholic philosophy. Whereas Rabbinical wisdom—than which there is none more positive, materialistic, or grossly terrestrial, as it brings everything down to physiological mysteries—calls these Beings, the “Evil One”; and the Kabalists—Nahash, “Deprived,” as just said, and the Souls that have, _after having been alienated in Heaven from the Holy One_, thrown themselves into an Abyss at the dawn of their very existence, and have anticipated the time when they are to descend on Earth.(567) And let me explain at once that our quarrel is not with the _Zohar_ or any other book of the _Kabalah_ in its right interpretation—for the latter is the same as our own—but only with the gross, _pseudo_‐esoteric explanations of the later, and especially of the Christian Kabalists. Says the Commentary: _Our earth and man [are] the products of the three Fires._ The names of these three answer, in Sanskrit, to the “Electric Fire,” the “Solar Fire,” and the “Fire produced by Friction.” Explained on the cosmic and human planes, these three Fires are Spirit, Soul, and Body, the three great Root Groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary with the Schools, and—according to their applications—become the Upâdhis and the Vehicles, or the Noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are personified by the “three sons of surpassing brilliancy and splendour” of Agni Abhimânin, the eldest son of Brahmâ, the Cosmic Logos, by Svâhâ, one of Daksha’s(568) daughters. In the metaphysical sense, the “Fire by Friction” means the union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the fifth “principle,” which thus are united or cemented together, the fifth merging partially into and becoming part of the Monad; in the physical, it relates to the “creative spark,” or germ, which fructifies and generates the human being. The three Fires, whose names are Pâvaka, Pavamâna and Shuchi, were condemned, it is said, by a curse of Vasishtha, the great Sage, “to be born over and over again.”(569) This is clear enough. Therefore, the Flames, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called indifferently Prajâpatis, Pitris, Manus, Asuras, Rishis, Kumâras,(570) etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root‐Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over again.” In the Esoteric Doctrine they are generally named Asuras, or the Asura Devatâ or Pitar Devatâ (Gods), for, as said, they were first Gods—and the highest—before they became “_No_‐Gods,” and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of Earth(571)—_exoterically_, note well, in orthodox dogma. No Theologian or Orientalist can ever understand the genealogies of the Prajâpatis, the Manus, and the Rishis, or the direct connection of these—their correlation rather—with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all nations originally had in common. All these Gods and Demi‐gods are found reborn on Earth, in various Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, _having his Karma distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause_. Before other Stanzas could be explained, it was, as may be seen, absolutely necessary to show that the Sons of “Dark Wisdom,” though identical with the Archangels which Theology has chosen to call the “Fallen,” are as divine and as pure, if not more pure, than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the Churches. The “Old Book” also goes into various details of Astral Life, which at this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It must, therefore, be left for later explanation, and the First and Second Races will now receive only bare notice. Not so the Third Race—the Root‐Race which separated into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason; men evolving _pari passu_ with the Globe, and the latter having “incrustated” more than a hundred millions of years before the first human sub‐race had yet begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it: _The Inner Man [the Conscious Entity] was not._ This “Conscious Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases _is_, the very essence and _esse_ of the high Intelligences, condemned, by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reïncarnate in this Manvantara. (_b_) Shloka 39 relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking, Esoteric Philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its Forefathers or “Creators” were all Divine Beings—though of different classes or degrees of perfection in their Hierarchy—it teaches that men were nevertheless born at seven different centres of the Continent of that period. Though all were of one common origin, yet, for reasons given, their potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.(572) As to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in _Linga Purâna_. The Kumâras—the Rudra Gods, so called—are described as incarnations of Shiva, the Destroyer (of _outward forms_), called also Vâmadeva. The latter, as a Kumâra, the “Eternal Celibate,” the chaste Virgin Youth, springs from Brahmâ in each great Manvantara, and “again becomes four”; a reference to the four great divisions of the human Races, as regards complexion and type—and the three chief variations of these. Thus in the twenty‐ninth Kalpa—in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of the human form, which Shiva ever destroys and remodels periodically down to the great Manvantaric turning point, about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race—in the twenty‐ninth Kalpa, Shiva, as Shvetalohita, the Root‐Kumâra, from moon‐coloured becomes _white_; in his next transformation, he is _red_ (and in this the exoteric version differs from the Esoteric Teaching); in the third, _yellow_; in the fourth, _black_. Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval Races—as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and a hardly objective, though colossal, form. The evolution of these Races, their formation and development, proceeded on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of these zones. The Esoteric Teaching names three great divisions, namely, the _red‐yellow_, the _black_, and the _brown‐ white_.(573) The Âryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red‐brown‐yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are nevertheless all of one and the same stock, the Fifth Root‐Race, and spring from one single Progenitor, called in Hindû _exotericism_ by the generic name of Vaivasvata Manu; the latter, remember, being that Generic Personage, the Sage, who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago—at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the Great Continent of Atlantis,(574) and who is said to live even now in his mankind.(575) The light yellow is the colour of the first _solid_ human race, which appeared after the middle of the Third Root‐Race—after its fall into generation, as just explained—bringing on the final changes. For, it is only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the Fourth Race; “Shiva” gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became “black with sin” into red‐yellow, of which the red Indians and the Mongolians are the descendants, and finally into brown‐white races—which now, together with the yellow races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The allegory in _Linga Purâna_ is curious, as showing the great ethnological knowledge of the ancients. When reading of the “last transformation,” which is said to have taken place 18,000,000 years ago, let the reader at this juncture, consider how many millions more it must have required to reach that final stage. And if Man, in his gradual consolidation, developed _pari passu_ with the Earth, how many millions of years must have elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race. For the Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last consolidated state. The Archaic Teachings, moreover, tell us that, during the middle period of the Lemuro‐Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after the Genesis of Man, the Earth, Man, and everything on the Globe, were of a still grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells were still in a semi‐gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that have intervened since then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps toward our “dematerialization,” as the Spiritualists would say. The Earth, ourselves, and all things have softened since then—aye, even our brains. But it has been objected by some Theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15 or 20,000,000 years ago, “does not square with Geology,” which teaches us that winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and accumulated, etc.; that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force, “in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest palæozoic rocks.” To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what is the date assigned by Geology to these “oldest palæozoic rocks”? And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves—of “carbonic acid” apparently, as Science seems to imply—break on the shore, on an Earth semi‐astral, _i.e._, viscid? The word “astral” does not necessarily, in Occult phraseology, mean as thin as smoke, but rather “starry,” shining or pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid state, as just observed. But it is further objected: “How could an astral Earth have affected the other Planets in this System? Would not the whole process get out of gear now if the attraction of one Planet were suddenly removed?” The objection is evidently invalid, since our System is composed of older and younger Planets, some dead—like the Moon—others in process of formation, for all that Astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we know, that all the bodies of our System have sprung into existence and developed simultaneously. The Cis‐Himâlayan Secret Teachings differ from those of India in this respect. Hindû Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu Humanity is 18,000,000 and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as _physical_ or approximately physical, Man is concerned, who dates from the close of the Third Root‐Race. Beyond that period _Man_, or his filmy image, may have existed for 300,000,000 years, for all we know; _since we are not taught figures_ which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly stated in _Esoteric Buddhism_. Moreover, whereas the Hindû _Purânas_ speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being a generic one. We must now say a few more words on the physical evolution of man. Archaic Teachings In The “Purânas” And “Genesis.” Physical Evolution. The writer cannot give too much proof that the system of Cosmogony and Anthropogony above described actually existed, that its records _are_ preserved, and that it is found mirrored even in the modern versions of ancient Scriptures. The _Purânas_ on the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same scheme of evolution, which, if read Esoterically and expressed in modern language, would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes is, that the _Purânas_, giving as much, and perhaps more, attention to causes than to effects, allude to the pre‐cosmic and pre‐genetic periods rather than to those of so‐called “creation,” whereas the _Bible_, after saying only a few words on the former period, plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while almost skipping the Pre‐Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race. Now, whatever the onslaught made on the “order of creation” in _Genesis_—and its dead‐letter account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism(576)—the Hindû _Purânas_, notwithstanding their allegorical exaggerations will be found quite in accordance with Physical Science. Even what, on the face of it, appears to be the perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahmâ assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds a perfectly scientific explanation in the Secret Commentaries, relating as it does to the many risings and sinkings, the constant alternation of water and land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our Globe; for Science teaches us now that nine‐ tenths of the stratified formations of the Earth’s crust have been gradually constructed beneath the water at the bottom of the seas. The ancient Âryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of Natural History, Geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand, proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the _Bible_, to have the merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism “earlier, and retained it more firmly, than any of the _less philosophical and more immoral religions_ (!!) of the ancient world.”(577) Only, while in biblical Esotericism, we find physiological sexual mysteries symbolized, and very little more, something for which _very little real Philosophy_ is requisite—in the _Purânas_ one can find the most scientific and philosophical “dawn of creation,” which, if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy‐tale‐like allegories, would show that modern Zoology, Geology, Astronomy, and nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in ancient Science, and were known to ancient Philosophers in their general features, if not in such detail as at present. Paurânic Astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of leading the profane off the real track, has been shown even by Bentley to be a real science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindû astronomical treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation of nebulæ, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the cyclic progress of asterisms for chronological and other purposes—far more correct than Europeans have even now—were known in India to perfection. If we turn to Geology and Zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless genealogies of the seven Prajâpatis, of their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus, and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Âryans—the authors of the most perfect philosophical system of transcendental Psychology, of codes of Ethics, of such a grammar as Pânini’s, of the Sânkhya and Vedânta systems, of a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Müller the most perfect on earth—were the Âryans such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing “fairy tales,” such as the _Purânas_ now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the “fable,” the genealogy and origin of Kashyapa, with his twelve wives by whom he had a numerous and diversified progeny of serpents (Nâgas), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of living things, who was thus the “father” of all kinds of animals, but a _veiled_ record of the order of evolution in _this_ Round? So far, we do not see that any Orientalist has ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed under the allegories and personifications. The _Shatapatha Brâhmana_, says one, gives “_a not very intelligible_ account” of Kashyapa’s origin. According to the _Mahâbhârata_, the _Râmâyana_, and the _Purânas_, he was the son of Marîchi, the son of Brahmâ, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind. According to the _Shatapatha Brahmâna_: Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he made (_akarot_); hence the word _kûrma_ (tortoise). Kashyapa means tortoise; hence men say, “All creatures are descendants of Kashyapa.”(578) He was all this; he was also the father of the bird Garuda, the “king of the feathered tribe,” who _descends from_, and is of one stock with _the reptiles_, the Nâgas, and who becomes their mortal enemy _subsequently_—as he is also a _cycle_, a period of time, when, in the course of evolution, the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life” and “survival of the fittest,” etc., turned in preference on those from whom they issued to devour them, perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room for other and more perfect species. In that admirable epitome, _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, a lesson in Natural History is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance of the _Bible_ with it. The author remarks that Geology traces the “dawn of creation” through a line of scientific research: Commencing with the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of the Laurentian, and continued in a chain, every link of which is firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life, and first indication of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians; the Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land animals began to appear; and finally the Tertiary, in which mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type and species to species, are gradually differentiated and specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, until we arrive at the Glacial and Prehistoric periods, and at positive proof of the existence of man.(579) The same order, _plus_ the description of animals unknown to Modern Science, is found in the Commentaries on the _Purânas_ in general, and in the _Book of Dzyan_ especially. The only difference—a grave one, no doubt, as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the _false personality_ and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox Psychology—is as follows. Having been in all the so‐called seven “creations,” which stand allegorically for the seven evolutionary changes, or sub‐races, as we may call them, of the First Root‐Race of Mankind—Man has been on Earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the Kingdoms of Nature in the previous _three_ Rounds,(580) his _physical_ frame—one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods—was ready to receive the Divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, _i.e._, 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid‐point of the Third Root‐Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the Two and then the Three made One; for though the lower animals, from the amœba to man, received _their_ Monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, these qualities have to remain dormant till the animal reaches its human form, before which stage Manas (mind) has no development in them. In the animals every principle is paralyzed, and in a fœtus‐like state, save the second, the Vital, and the third, the Astral, and the rudiments of the fourth, Kâma, which is desire, instinct—whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy‐tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it. As Commentary ix says: _Men are made complete only during their Third, toward the Fourth Cycle [Race]. They are made __“__Gods__”__ for good and evil, and responsible, only when the two arcs meet [after three and a half Rounds towards the Fifth Race]. They are made so by the Nirmânakâya [Spiritual or Astral remains] of the Rudra‐Kumâras, __“__cursed to be reborn on Earth again__”__ [meaning—doomed in their natural turn to reïncarnation in the higher ascending arc of the terrestrial Cycle]._ Now the writer is certain to be met with what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization—that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature: From the primitive speck of protoplasm, and the nucleated cell in which all life originates ... and “is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and, last of all, of the human type.”(581) This is perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against _that_; for it all relates to the _shell_ of man—his body, which, in its growth, is subject, of course, like every other once so‐called morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization—which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its so‐called _inorganic_ Upâdhi, or basis, as the formation of _cells_ to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man—it is not they who will reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal Deity in Nature, ever‐ present, and as ever invisible and unknowable, and of intra‐cosmic Gods, who were all once men.(582) But we would ask, what does Science and its exact discoveries and now axiomatic theories prove against _our_ Occult theory? Those who believe in the law of evolution and gradual progressive development from a cell—which from a vital became a morphological cell, until it finally awoke as protoplasm pure and simple—can surely never limit their belief to one line of evolution! The types of life are innumerable; and the progress of evolution, moreover, does not go at the same rate in every kind of species. The constitution of primordial matter in the Silurian age—we mean the “primordial” _matter_ of Science—was the same in every essential particular, save its degree of present grossness, as the primordial _living_ matter of to‐day. Nor do we find that which ought to be found, if the now orthodox theory of evolution were _quite_ correct, namely, a constant, ever‐flowing progress in every species of being. Instead of this, what does one see? While the intermediate groups of animal beings all tend toward a higher type, and while specializations, now of one type and now of another, develop through the geological ages, change forms, assume new shapes, appear and disappear with a kaleidoscopic rapidity, in the description of Palæontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely—_man_ and the _lower genera_ of being! Certain well‐marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, _but persisting comparatively unaltered_, while other forms of life have appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed “persistent types” of life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds.(583) Nevertheless, we are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds, amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., as off‐shoots of a moneric ancestry. Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the amphibia, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms—which they certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to Man, on every Globe, in the _three preceding_ Rounds; every Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be, the arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question, “What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination of pre‐mammalian organic species?”—is easily answered. One is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects which are destined to receive their final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The fish evolved into an amphibian—a frog—in the _shadows_ of ponds, and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round types contributed to the formation of the types in the present Round. On strict analogy, the cycle of seven Rounds in their work of the gradual formation of man through every Kingdom of Nature, is repeated on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of a future human being. Let the student think over and work out this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby, though quite ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of Mother‐Nature before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyâni, still more perfect than he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built Chain of Worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the Astral merges into Physical Evolution. Of this Science breathes not one word. Man has evolved with and from the monkey, it says. But now see the contradiction. Huxley proceeds to point out plants, ferns, club‐mosses, some of them generically identical with those now living, which are met with in the Carboniferous epoch, for: The cone of the oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species.... Sub‐kingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The Globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species of the same genus ... the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas.... The Arachnida, the highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus differing from its living congeners only in ... the eyes. [etc.] All of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter’s authoritative statement about the Foraminifera: There is no evidence of any fundamental modification or advance in the foraminiferous type from the palæozoic period to the present time.... The foraminiferous fauna of our own series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous period; but _there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher type_.(584) Now, as in the Foraminifera, Protozoa of the lowest type of life, mouthless and eyeless, there is no indication of change except their now greater variety—so man, who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his palæolithic ancestor being even found superior in some respects to his present frame. Where is, then, the uniformity of law which is claimed—the _absolute rule_ for one species shading off into another and thus, by insensible gradations, into higher types? We see Sir William Thomson admitting as much as 400,000,000 years for the time since the surface of the Globe became sufficiently cool to permit of the presence of living things;(585) and during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so‐called “Age of Reptiles,” we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching _its highest development_. We learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period: We find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from previously existing forms ... Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy denizens of the ancient forests and plains. And, subsequently, we are notified of: The gradual modification of one of the ramifications of the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval Man himself may claim to have been evolved.(586) He _may_; but no one, except a Materialist, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the quadrumanous order, than that primeval man—who has _remained stationary_ in his human specialization since the first fossil skeleton found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type—has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape. That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through stages indistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and _at last the human type_,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Hæckel, in his _Schöpfungsgeschichte_, shows a double drawing representing two embryos—that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, with the exception of a slight difference in the head, which is larger and wider about the brain in the man, are indistinguishable. In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal, and finally of man. If we take him up at the more advanced stage, where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form, we find that for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks’ growth _between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them_. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail, hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy.(587) Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile—a Nâga, instead of coupling man with the Quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the latter, if not more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to Æsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it from prehistoric times, it is no new discovery.(588) As the embryo of man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in itself _the totality of the kingdoms of nature_, and since it seems to be a “persistent type” of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern Philosophies believe in Evolution, which Manu and Kapila(589) give with far more clearness than any Scientist does at present. No need to repeat what has been fully debated in _Isis Unveiled_, as the reader may find all these arguments and the description of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rest, in our earlier volumes.(590) But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing forms, “from the structureless Amœba to man,” are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre‐Silurian epochs, in the sea or land‐ mud. The Occultists believe in an _Inherent Law of Progressive Development_.(591) Mr. Darwin never did, and says so himself; for we find him stating that, since _there can be no advantage_ “to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm ... to become highly organized,” therefore, “natural selection,” _not necessarily including progressive development_—leaves the animalcule and the worm, the “persistent types,” quiet.(592) There does not appear much _uniform_ law in such behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some _super_‐physical selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern Occultists would call the “Law of Retardation,” may have something to do with it. But there is every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance to his law as is now given to it by his atheistic followers. The knowledge of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive: First, on account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; secondly, on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to use—nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two‐ thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says: “For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; _of this history we possess the last volume alone_, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, _only here and there a short chapter has been preserved_; and of each page _only here and there a few lines_.”(593) It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride, or unreasonable belief in man’s representing even here on Earth—in _our_ period, perhaps—the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own; for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” which will prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palæontologists. Believing as we do that man has, during the preceding Rounds, evolved from, and passed through, the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on Earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the Orang Outang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would most irresistibly forward the Occult Doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man. One may even enquire how it is that Biologists and Anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape—how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory—unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a _non_‐precedent in Nature, quite a _special_ and unique case. And that is what all this leads Physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape, not man, which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance. The Pithecoid is _an accidental creation_, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process. The Occult Doctrine is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying Law in Nature, the latter having no personal “special design,” but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole Manvantaric period and deals with the land‐worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same Evolutionary Law, and both have to progress according to Karmic Law. Both have started from the same Neutral Centre of Life and both have to re‐merge into it at the consummation of the Cycle. It is not denied that in the preceding Round man _was_ a gigantic ape‐like creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only—the middle, or the transition, point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man during the first two and a half Root‐Races what he is now. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the Secondary period, as we claim. Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult Teaching, “a God on Earth who had fallen into Matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma, and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the _actual_ Man and his Inner Nature; the Fall mentioned above having left no “original sin” on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with. Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc—which is centrifugal for Spirit and centripetal for Matter—and those he is preparing to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces—viz., Matter will become centrifugal and Spirit centripetal—that all such transformations _are next in store for the anthropoid apes also_; all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round—for these will all be men in the Fifth Round, just as the present men inhabited ape‐like forms in the Third, the preceding Round. Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples—“blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it—of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub‐races of the Fourth Root‐Race during the period of what is called the “fall into generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an _accident_, a cross‐breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume, it is the speechless animal that first began sexual connection, for it was the first to separate into male and female. Nor was it intended by Nature that man should follow this bestial example—as is now shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in woman. The ape is, indeed, as remarked in _Isis Unveiled_: A transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family‐_a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter_.(594) The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the “Egos” of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the _latest_ Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human “Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam’s _first_ wife, whom the Talmud describes as a “charming” woman, “with long wavy hair,” _i.e._—a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael‐Lilith, or man‐animal united, a being called, in the _Zohar_, Hayo Bischat, the Beast or Evil Beast. It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals, or men of a lower order, in the Fifth Round, while the Adepts of a certain School hope that some of the “Egos” of the apes of a higher intelligence will reäppear at the close of the Sixth Root‐Race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Genera and species of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown—man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root‐Race likewise, as well as after every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in, the latter. In the Sixth Root‐Race, the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms—though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches—will develop from the “cast off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were no apes before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the Monads of the unprogressed men of our Race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated Baboon. This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on Earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation” or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant _ex nihilo_. This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter. A Panoramic View Of The Early Races. There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first “mindless” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later Lemurians; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period. As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are “productions of blind natural forces,” we are assured by some; “quite modern” we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by Sceptic and Materialist, and made subservient to the _Bible_ in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian Deluge theory, it is declared by the Christian clergy to be “the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed Continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of Modern Science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the Scientists as a dream. Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. But Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the _Purânas_, nor anywhere else. But with only one of the Esoteric keys in hand, it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless “Lands of the Gods,” Devas and Munis described in the _Purânas_, in their Varshas, Dvîpas, and Zones. Their Shveta‐dvîpa, during the early days of Lemuria, stood out like a giant‐peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis, after the disappearance of Lemuria, when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half‐sunk. It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three Races‐except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the First had no history of its own. Of Race the Second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans only, before the history of our own Race, the Fifth, can be attempted. What is known of other Continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early Races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of Materialistic Science is daubed with the contemptuous term “superstition.” The wise men of to‐day will believe nothing. Plato’s “winged” and “hermaphrodite” races, and his Golden Age, under the reign of Saturn and the Gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to their _new_ place in Nature; our Divine Races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of “sea slime”! Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber: The _fictions_ of ancient poetry ... will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth. However one‐sided the efforts of the learned author of _A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri_—efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old Paganism, “to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture”—time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that “truth” by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of Archaic Paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri—the most mysterious Gods of antiquity—has been thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all of these scholars, from first to last, had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter, as follows: We have no reason to think that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon _a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first_ [the Fourth in Esoteric Teaching] _race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge_.(595) To this, Faber adds: I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly indeed in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of the scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlantians were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phenicians, and the Egyptians.(596) In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the Giants.(597) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French _confrère_, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indicopleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah—that he “formerly inhabited the _island_ Atlantis.” This island, whether it was the “Poseidonis” mentioned in _Esoteric Buddhism_, or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian. No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, which they had the same right to do as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a Giant, as Faber shows; and if a Giant, then why is he not shown as such in _Genesis_?(598) Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and _post‐diluvian_ nation, which, however, as he says, certainly flourished before the foundation of the Hindû, Egyptian, and Phœnician empires. In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post‐diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was _sunk_ under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of Science, who will accept neither the tradition that several Continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric Cycle—it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindûs, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Âryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses—as every Initiate would—the two Continents, and assigns to the small island which last sunk, all the events pertaining to the two enormous Continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the _first couple_, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In so saying, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to “Earth,” he means Matter, as the Atlanteans were really the first purely _human_ and _terrestrial_ Race—those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid. Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated Adept, about the history of the Third Race after its “Fall,” though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations—all of which was based upon, and followed the early Âryan calculations—to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root‐Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.(599) It is only when the latter has reached its full human period that a beginning can be made, without the uninitiated reader finding himself hopelessly bewildered. The Third Race _fell_—and created no longer; it _begat_ its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation, it begat, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “Lords Gods” of the _Bible_, the “Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyân Chohans, had warned it to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature; but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness—we must not say sin—of what they had done, only when too late; after the Angelic Monads from higher Spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The Doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on Earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various “Fires” are latent, and in others they are active. The _Vital_ Fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher “principles” awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus _non‐existing_. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose Shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in Matter. But as said in _Pymander_: This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature(600) being mingled with Man(601) brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the _essence of the Seven_ [Pitris, or Governors] and her own; the _Fire_ and the _Spirit_ and _Nature_ [the Noumenon of Matter]; which [commingling] forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and positive] according to the essences of the Seven Governors.(602) Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,(603) the “Power of the Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World, “the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that: Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see. It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The “Fall of the Angels,” and the “War in Heaven” are repeated on every plane, the lower “mirror” disfiguring the image of the superior “mirror,” and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the _Desatir_: All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is the _shadow of something that is in the superior spheres_. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights. In the Kabalistic books, in the _Zohar_ prëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the “Shadow” (Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong. The Third Race was prëeminently the bright “Shadow,” at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “Fall,” when even mortal man was “created” by the Elements and was not born. The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. The _mutilation_ of Uranus by his son Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was universal(604) it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed, “a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme,(605) who, however, does not attempt to explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by _destroying all his children as soon as born_. Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space, or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial “men” from themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolve _their_ progeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus (_Chronos_) Time,(606) who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—‐in Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of evolution. This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again. As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create real _human_ “men.”(607) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.(608) Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,(609) and varies from Zeus, the great “Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly Man” in _Pymander_; and even in the _Bible_ he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “Sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely _human_ Atlantean Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be read in Hesiod, who tells us that: The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an admixture of _two_ elements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron Age.(610) After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.(611) Hesiod calls this present of the _first woman_ “a fatal gift.” It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of [divine creative] fire.” Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean _Vendidâd_. Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, the _Rig Veda_, the _Zend Avesta_, etc., but no _first_ man is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the _Bible_.(612) Everywhere the man of _our_ Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.(613) Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;(614) and Pindar echoes the statement.(615) Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah’s,(616) ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram’zimas, the “master of all,” advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.(617) As well understood by the author of _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says: The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever‐decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is extreme. “They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown.”(618) The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes,(619) or under the walls of Troy.(620) Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated in the classics. But this is all “mythology” and poetry. What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their own imagination. 40. THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH(621) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. “WE ARE THE KINGS;(622) WE ARE THE GODS” (_A_). 41. THEY TOOK WIVES FAIR TO LOOK UPON. WIVES FROM THE MINDLESS, THE NARROW‐HEADED. THEY BRED MONSTERS, WICKED DEMONS, MALE AND FEMALE, ALSO KHADO,(623) WITH LITTLE MINDS (_B_). 42. THEY BUILT TEMPLES FOR THE HUMAN BODY. MALE AND FEMALE THEY WORSHIPPED (_C_). THEN THE THIRD EYE ACTED NO LONGER (_D_). (_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.(624) 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?(625) 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,(626) 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,(627) 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.(628) 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.(629) “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_(630) 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.(631) 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.(632) 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_.(633) 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,(634) 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.(635) 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.(636) 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.(637) 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_.(638) 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.(639) 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_.”(640) 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_,(641) 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),(642) _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_!(643) “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._(645) 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,”(646) 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].”(647) 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_,(648) 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_.”(649) 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.(650) 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.(651) (_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_.”(652) 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.(653) 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.(654) As Ain Suph is “One, _notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him_,”(655) 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_.(656) The mystery of the _earthly_ man is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.(657) 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.(658) 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.(659) 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_.(660) 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_.(661) 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].(662) 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.(663) 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].(664) 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_.(665) 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!”(666) 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_.(667) 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).(668) 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.”(669) “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.(670) _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.(671) 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.(672) 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.(676) 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.(677) 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_(678) 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,(679) 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(680) 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.(681) 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. [Illustration: Evolution of Root‐Races in the Fourth Round] [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.(682) 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(683) 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.(684) 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(685)—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,(686) 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(687)—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(688); 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”(689) (_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,(690) 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].(691) 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.(692) 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.(693) 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,(694) or Vaishvânara, the Spirit of Humanity,(695) 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.(696) 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.(699) 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.(700) 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).(701) 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,(702) 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,(703) 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.(704) 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.(705) 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.”(706) This relates to the Races, their “garments,” or degree of materiality, and to the three “principles” of man in their three vehicles. Stanza XI. The Civilization And Destruction Of The Fourth And Fifth Races. 43. The Lemuro‐Atlanteans build cities and spread civilization. The incipient stage of anthropomorphism. 44. Statues, witnesses to the size of the Lemuro‐Atlanteans. 45. Lemuria destroyed by fire, Atlantis by water. The Flood. 46. The destruction of the Fourth Race and of the last antediluvian monster‐animals. 43. THEY(707) BUILT HUGE CITIES. OF RARE EARTHS AND METALS THEY BUILT. OUT OF THE FIRES(708) VOMITED, OUT OF THE WHITE STONE(709) OF THE MOUNTAINS AND OF THE BLACK STONE,(710) THEY CUT THEIR OWN IMAGES, IN THEIR SIZE AND LIKENESS, AND WORSHIPPED THEM. At this point, as the history of the first two _human_ races—the last of the Lemurians and the first of the future Atlanteans—proceeds, we have to blend the two, and speak of them for a time collectively. Here reference is also made to the _divine_ Dynasties, which were claimed by the Egyptians, Chaldæans, Greeks, etc., to have preceded their _human_ Kings. These are still believed in by the modern Hindûs, and are enumerated in their sacred books. Of these, however, we shall treat in their proper place. What remains to be shown is, that our modern Geologists are now being driven into admitting the demonstrable existence of submerged continents. But to confess the existence of the continents is quite a different thing from admitting that there were men on them during the early geological periods(711)—ay, men and civilized nations, not Palæolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of their _divine_ Rulers, built large cities, cultivated Arts and Sciences, and knew Astronomy, Architecture and Mathematics to perfection. The primeval civilization of the Lemurians did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological transformation. Between the final physiological evolution and the first city built, many hundred thousands of years had passed. Nevertheless, we find the Lemurians in their sixth sub‐race building their first rock‐cities out of stone and lava.(712) One of these great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow strip of sterile ground, and was totally destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions. The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the last sub‐races of the Lemurians; and an Occultist, therefore, shows no surprise on learning that the stone relics which were found on the small piece of land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are Very much like the walls of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia‐Huanaco in Peru,(713) and also that they are in the _Cyclopean style_. The first large cities, however, were built in that region of the Continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days as there are now. Evolution achieved its work of perfection on the former, and Karma—its work of destruction on the latter. The Australians and their like are the descendants of those, who, instead of vivifying the Spark projected into them by the “Flames,” extinguished it by long generations of bestiality.(714) Whereas the Âryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the “Sons of Wisdom” had personally incarnated.(715) It is with the advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements—his brothers, more favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which informed them, built cities, and cultivated Arts and Sciences. Nevertheless, notwithstanding civilization, while their pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, the “builders” could now obtain their powers only gradually; even those they did obtain being generally used for conquest over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes. Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one’s own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking. “There is no such thing as magic” philosophizes “She”—the author forgetting that “magic” in early days still meant the great Science of Wisdom, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the modern perversion of thought—“though,” she adds, “there is such a thing as knowledge of the Secrets of Nature.”(716) But they have become “Secrets” only in our Race, and were public property with the Third. Gradually, mankind decreased in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save only the Hierarchy of the “Elect,” the followers and disciples of the “Sons of Will and Yoga”—called later the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist.” Then came the Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth sub‐race. But, as said in the Commentary: _The last survivors of the fair child of the White Island [the primitive Shveta‐dvîpa] had perished ages before. Their [Lemuria’s] Elect, had taken shelter on the Sacred Island [now the __“__fabled__”__ Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert], while some of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the jungles and underground [__“__cave‐men__”__], when the golden yellow Race [the Fourth] became in its turn __“__black with sin.__”__ From pole to pole the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited by the Sons of Shveta‐dvîpa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya [?], east and west, the first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted.... The Demi‐Gods of the Third had made room for the Semi‐Demons of the Fourth Race. Shveta‐dvîpa,_(_717_)_ the White Island, had veiled her face. Her children now lived on the Black Land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dvîpa (Pushkara) and Râkshasas from the seventh climate replaced the Sâdhus and the Ascetics of the Third Age, who had descended to them from other and higher regions...._ In their dead letter, the _Purânas_, in general, read like an absurd tissue of fairy tales and no better. And if one were to read the first three chapters of Book II of _Vishnu Purâna_ and accept _verbatim_ the geography, geodesy, and ethnology in the account of Priyavrata’s seven sons among whom their father divides the seven Dvîpas (Islands or Continents); and then proceed to study how his eldest son, Agnîdhra, the King of Jambu‐dvîpa, apportioned Jambu‐dvîpa among his nine sons; and then how Nâbhi, _his_ son, had a hundred sons and apportioned lands to all these in his turn—he would most likely throw the book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the student of Esotericism will understand that, when the _Purânas_ were written, their true meaning was intended to be clear only to the Initiated Brâhmans, and so the compilers wrote these works allegorically and would not give the _whole_ truth to the masses. And he will, further, explain to the Orientalists—who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor Weber, have made and still are making such a mess of it—that the first three chapters purposely confuse the following subjects and events: