[[This page continued from previous section]]
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 “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. Only 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
Puranas, nor anywhere else. But with simply 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 Puranas, in their Varshas, Dwipas, and zones. Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day 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 only to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans 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 Haeckel 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 the “Mysteries of the Kabiri,” — 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 — was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, of these scholars had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter. “We have no reason to think,” he writes, “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 teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge.” (Chap. I. p. 9). 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 Scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlanteans were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians.” (“A Dissertation on the Kabiri,” p. 284.)
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. (See “Lettres sur l’Atlantide.”) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French confrere, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah — that he “formerly inhabited the island Atlantis” (ibid). 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, to do which they had the same right 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?*
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 Hindu, the Egyptian, and the Phoenician empires.” In this, had
* This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that “the Noetic family also . . . bore the appellations of Atlanteans and Titans, and the great patriarch himself was called by way of eminence Atlas and Titan.” (Vol. II. p. 285). And if so, then, according to the Bible, Noah must have been the progeny of the Sons of God, the fallen angels, agreeably to the same authority, and of the “daughters of men who were fair,” (See Genesis, chap. vi.) And why not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his sons and daughters (who perished in the Deluge), as bad as the rest of mankind?
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 Hindus, Egyptians, and Phoenicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans 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 sunk last 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 saying so, 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 Aryan 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.* One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.
* In that wonderful volume of Donnelly’s “Atlantis, the Antediluvian World,” the author, speaking of the Aryan colonies from Atlantis, and of the arts and sciences — the legacy of our Fourth Race — bravely announces that “the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene age.” This is an enormous allowance for a modern scholar to make; but civilization dates still further back than the Miocene Atlanteans. “Secondary-period” man will be discovered, and with him his long forgotten civilization.
The third race fell — and created no longer: it begat its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “lords the gods” of the Bible, the “Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them 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* being mingled with Man† brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the essence of the Seven (Pitris, 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.” (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect. 16.)
Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,‡ “the Power of the
* Nature is the natural body, the shadow of the Progenitors; and —
† Man is the “Heavenly man,” as already stated.
‡ The “Pymander” of our museums and libraries is an abridgement of one of the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phoenician MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the “Genesis of Enoch.” But even its disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators and seven primitive men. As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their master’s names. This custom passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes (of whom Egyptologists count five) Enoch, etc., they are all inventors of letters; none of them dies but still lives, and they are the first Initiators into, and Founders of the Mysteries. The Genesis of Enoch disappeared only very lately among the Kabalists. Guillaume [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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 luminous 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, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow — Dyooknah — of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven; which 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 the former 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 (see Hesiod and Theogony). The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and having been universal* (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Eliphas Levi tells his readers.
* Uranos is a modified Varuna, “the Universal encompasser,” the all-embracer, and one of the oldest of the Vedic deities — Space, the maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the Leviathan — Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the signs of the Zodiac. Varuna, “without whom no creature can even wink,” was degraded like Uranos, and, like him, he fell into generation, his functions, “the grandest cosmical functions,” as Muir calls them, having been lowered down from heaven to earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same [[Footnote continued on next page]]
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 (Mythologie de la Grece Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, 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 those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves — as, later on, these men evolve their progeny — without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos,* time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism — matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial — 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 Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea — by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. — X., et seq., and also Berosus’ account of primeval creation.) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus — Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.† Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,‡ and varies from Zeus, the Great
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] Orientalist says, “The attributes ascribed to Varuna (in the Vedas) impart to his character a moral elevation and sanctity far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity.” But to understand correctly the reason of his fall, like that of Uranos, one has to see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and sinful work of man’s fancy, and also to study the mysteries which Varuna is said to have imparted to Vasishta. Only . . . “his secrets and those of Mitra are not to be revealed to the foolish.”
* Kronos is not only [[Chronos]], time, but also, as Breal showed in his Hercule et Cacus (p. 57), comes from the root Kar, “to make, to create.” Whether Breal and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in saying that in the Vedas Kronan is a creative god, we have our doubts. Breal probably meant Karma, or rather Visva-Karma, the creative god, the “Omnificent” and the “great Architect of the world.”
† The Titanic struggle, in theogony at least, is the fight for supremacy between the children of Uranos and Gaia (or Heaven and Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans, against the children of Kronos, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting struggle going on to this day between the spiritual inner man and the man of flesh, in one sense.
‡ Just as the “Lord God,” or Jehovah, is Cain esoterically, and the “tempting serpent” as well, the male portion of the androgynous Eve, before her “Fall;” the female portion of Adam Kadmon; the left side or Binah of the right side Chochmah in the first Sephirothal Triad.
“Father of the Gods.” He is the “disrespectful son” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “Heavenly man” (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 Kronos who precede him are found insufficient — may be found in Hesiod, who tells us that the Immortals have made men and created the Golden and the Silver age (First and Second Races); while Jupiter created the generations of Bronze (an admixture of two elements), of Heroes, and the men of the age of Iron. After this he sends his fatal present, by Pandora, to Epimetheus,* which present Hesiod calls “a fatal gift,” or the first woman. It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of divine creative fire.” Her apparition on earth is the signal of 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 Vendidad.
Two deluges may also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the theogonies save the Bible.† Everywhere the man of our race appears after a cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.‡ “Gods and mortals have one common origin” says Hesiod (ibid. v. 108); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah’s (see Apollod., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam. 1, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology (Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth. 1, 545), all men were drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the “master of all”) advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la Grece Antique — the four ages
* In the Egyptian legend, translated by M. Maspero (the ex-director of the Bulaq Museum), called the “two Brothers,” the original of Pandora is given. Noum, the famous heavenly artist, creates a marvellous beauty, a girl which he sends to Batoo, after which the happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is man, and the girl Eve, of course. (See Maspero’s Egyptian Legends, and also Decharme’s “Mythologie de la Grece Antique.”)
† Yima is not the “first man” in the Vendidad, but only in the theories of the Orientalists. — See further on.
‡ Boeotia, then ancient Athens, and Eleusis were submerged.
signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the races. “The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others,” he says, “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 purity . . . . qualifies the first race. . . . . The men of the second race, those of the age of Silver, are already 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” (Op. at D., 143-155). The fourth generation (race) is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes (see “The Seven Against Thebes,” by AEschylus), or under the walls of Troy.
Thus, the four races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the classics. But this is all “Mythology” and poetry. What can modern science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of the domain of that same science, 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 if that speck be not a figment of our opponents’ imagination.
40. Then the third and fourth (races) became tall with pride. We are the kings, we are the gods (a).
41. They took wives fair to look at. Wives from the “mindless,” the narrow-headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female. Also Khado (Dakini) with little minds (b).
42. They built temples for 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 Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, the
memory of whom lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and which 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. One who has read and studied the Commentaries on the archaic doctrine, will easily recognise in some Atlanteans, the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all these 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 leads us naturally to inquire into the religious ethics of these early races, mythical as these 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, as 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 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 had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.*
At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root Race had thus no beliefs that could be called religion. That is to say, he was equally as ignorant of “gay religions, full of pomp and gold” as 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 had a religion — and a most beautiful one — from the very beginning of their intellectual life. Had they not their bright gods of the elements around
* The name is used here in the sense of, and as a synonym of “sorcerers.” The Atlantean races were many, and lasted in their evolution for millions of years: all were not bad. They became so toward their end, as we (the fifth) are fast becoming now.
them, and even within themselves?* Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by those who had given them life 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 Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the noumenoi of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of nature — the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in what Science is pleased to call the “modes of motion” — the imponderable forces and what not — are the still higher noumenoi 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.” Since then, 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 far-away dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,† as the first anthropomorphists who worshipped form and matter. That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship, thence led to phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms 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
* The “Gods of the Elements” are by no means the Elementals. The latter are at best used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves. . . . .
† Cain was the sacrificer, as shown at first in chap. iv. of Genesis, of “the fruit of the ground,” of which he was first tiller, while Abel “brought of the firstlings of his flock” to the Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first male, Abel of the first female humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the third race. (See “The Mystery of Cain and Abel.”) The “murdering” is blood-shedding, but not taking life.
days” (Gen. vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Rakshasas 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 blended, so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean Continent); the Atlanteans, toward the Southern 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 this 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 angle-iron 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 considerable space is devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject. 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, has never had any being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten, nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; 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, 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 — it is evident that our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of the 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 those angels are identical with their “Fallen” Spirits, than the esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.* The divine man dwelt in the animal, and, therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution — when also “all the animal creation was untied,” and males were attracted to females — that race fell: not because they had eaten of the fruit of Knowledge and knew good from evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyan-Chohans had incarnated.† “When we have ascertained the extent of the Universe and learnt to know all that there is in it, we will multiply our race,” answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated ascetics will “multiply,” i.e., once more produce Mind-born immaculate Sons — in the Seventh Root-Race.
It is so stated in the Puranas; in Adi Parvan (p. 115) and Brahma Purana, etc. In one portion of the Pushkara Mahatmya, 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,
* It is, perhaps, with an eye to this degradation of the highest and purest Spirits, who broke through the intermediate planes of lower consciousness (the “Seven circles of fire” of Pymander), that St. James is made to say that “this Wisdom (psuche in the original) descended not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish”; and psuche is Manas, the “human soul,” the Spiritual Wisdom or Soul being Buddhi. Yet Buddhi per se, being so near the Absolute, is only latent consciousness.
† This is the “undying race” as it is called in Esotericism, and exoterically the fruitless generation of the first progeny of Daksha, who curses Narada, the divine Rishi, alleged to have dissuaded the Haryaswas and the Sabalaswas, the sons of Daksha, from procreating their species, by saying “Be born in the womb; there shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions”; after this Narada, the representative of that race of fruitless ascetics, is said, as soon as he dies in one body, to be reborn in another.
the Fourth Race, so called. In the Vishnu Purana it is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.
Happily for the human race the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races — save some 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 human gore shed, 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. 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* and 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 in the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. 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 Rakshasas of Lanka — the opponents conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments of attention.
* The traditions of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father Duran’s Historia Antigua de la Nueva Espana of 1885, in which a native of Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of Cholula, by saying as follows: “In the beginning, before the light of the Sun had been created, this land (Cholula) was in obscurity and darkness . . . . but immediately after the light of the Sun arose in the East, there appeared gigantic men . . . . who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered after that to all parts of the Earth.”
“A great deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient race of giants called Quinanes,” says the author of “Atlantis” (p. 204.)