But men, during the first
and the second races, were not physical beings, but merely rudiments
of the future men: The first race of men were, then, simply the
images, the astral doubles, of their Fathers, who were the pioneers,
or the most progressed Entities from a preceding though lower
sphere, the shell of which is now our Moon.
(a) The old (primitive) Race
merged in the second race, and became one with it.
(b) This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution
of mankind. The material of the first forms -- shadowy, ethereal,
and negative -- was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became the
complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary explains
this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed of
the astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course
neither astral nor physical bodies of their own -- this Race
never died. Its "men" melted gradually away, becoming
absorbed in the bodies of their own "sweat-born" progeny,
more solid than their own. The old form vanished and was absorbed
by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and physical.
What will be most contested
by scientific authorities is this a-sexual Race, the Second,
the fathers of the "Sweat-born" so-called, and perhaps
still more the Third Race, the "Egg-born" androgynes.
These two modes of procreation are the most difficult to comprehend,
especially for the Western mind.
Thus, as we shall find, for
the first three and a half Root-Races, up to the middle or turning
point, it is the astral shadows of the "progenitors,"
the lunar Pitris, which are the formative powers in the Races,
and which build and gradually force the evolution of the physical
form towards perfection -- this, at the cost of a proportionate
loss of spirituality. Then, from the turning point, it is the
Higher Ego, or incarnating principle, the nous or Mind, which
reigns over the animal Ego, and rules it whenever it is not carried
down by the latter. In short, Spirituality is on its ascending
arc, and the animal or physical impedes it from steadily progressing
on the path of its evolution only when the selfishness of the
personality has so strongly infected the real inner man with
its lethal virus, that the upward attraction has lost all its
power on the thinking reasonable man. In sober truth, vice and
wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this
period of our human evolution -- at least they ought to be so.
An impenetrable veil of secrecy
was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught, after
the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some
12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy,
and so desecrated. Of these sciences several have now become
exoteric -- such as Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical
and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas and tenets, being all
symbolised and left to the sole guardianship of parable and allegory,
have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted.
Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and
traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement
if the statement is only a fiction?
It is this secrecy which led
the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the re-establishment
of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be
taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and
symbolism.
After which come the Third
and Fourth Root-Races of mankind*** -- that is to say, Races
of men and women, or individuals of opposite sexes, no longer
sexless semi-spirits and androgynes, as were the two Races which
precede them.
After MAN of Genesis ch. i.
26 and Enos, Son of Man of ch. iv. v. 26, after Adam, the first
androgyne, after Adam Kadmon, the sexless (the first) Logos,
Adam and Eve once separated, come finally Jehovah-Eve and Cain-Jehovah.
These represent distinct Root-Races, for millions of years elapsed
between them.
Hence the Aryan and the Semitic
Theo-anthropographies are two leaves on the same stem; their
respective personifications and symbolic personages standing
in relation to each other in this way.
It is in the Third Race that
the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual,
Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally
the man-bearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost
imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings
in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to
distinct men and women.
It means that the First Root-Race,
the "Shadows" of the Progenitors, could not be injured,
or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal and so little human
in constitution, they could not be affected by any element --
flood or fire. But their "Sons," the Second Root-Race,
could be and were so destroyed. As the "progenitors"
merged wholly in their own astral bodies, which were their progeny;
so that progeny was absorbed in its descendants, the "Sweat-born."
These were the second Humanity -- composed of the most heterogeneous
gigantic semi-human monsters -- the first attempts of material
nature at building human bodies. The ever-blooming lands of the
Second Continent (Greenland, among others) were transformed,
in order, from Edens with their eternal spring, into hyperborean
Hades. This transformation was due to the displacement of the
great waters of the globe, to oceans changing their beds; and
the bulk of the Second Race perished in this first great throe
of the evolution and consolidation of the globe during the human
period. Of such great cataclysms there have already been four.*
And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time.
Here the seven Rishis stand
for the seven Races
All this goes to show that
the semi-universal deluge known to geology (first glacial period)
must have occurred just at the time allotted to it by the Secret
Doctrine: namely, 200,000 years (in round numbers) after the
commencement of our FIFTH RACE, or about the time assigned by
Messrs. Croll and Stockwell for the first glacial period: i.e.,
about 850,000 years ago. (footnote)
The mankind of the First Root-Race
is the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. To the
last it forms a cyclic and constant reincarnation of the Monads
belonging to the Dhyan Chohans of our Planetary chain.
Enough was said to show that
evolution in general, events, mankind, and everything else in
Nature proceed in cycles. We have spoken of seven Races, five
of which have nearly completed their earthly career, and have
claimed that every Root-Race, with its sub-races and innumerable
family divisions and tribes, was entirely distinct from its preceding
and succeeding race. This will be objected to, on the authority
of uniform experience in the question of Anthropology, and Ethnology.
Man was -- save in colour and type, and perhaps a difference
in facial peculiarities and cranial capacity -- ever the same
under every climate and in every part of the world, say the Naturalists:
ay, even in stature. This, while maintaining that man descends
from the same unknown ancestor as the ape, a claim that is logically
impossible without an infinite variation of stature and form,
from his first evolution into a biped. The very logical persons
who maintain both propositions are welcome to their paradoxical
views. Once more we address only those who, doubting the general
derivation of myths from "the contemplation of the visible
workings of external nature" . . . . think it, "less
hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demi-gods,
of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions,
are transformations, than to believe them to be inventions."
It is only such "transformations" in physical nature,
as much as in the memory and conceptions of our present mankind,
that the Secret Doctrine teaches. It confronts the purely speculative
hypotheses of modern Science, based upon the experience and exact
observations of barely a few centuries, with the unbroken tradition
and records of its Sanctuaries; and brushing away that tissue
of cobweb-like theories, spun in the darkness that covers a period
of hardly a few millenniums back, and which Europeans call their
"History," the Old Science says to us: Listen, now,
to my version of the memoirs of Humanity.
The human Races are born one
from the other, grow, develop, become old, and die. Their sub-races
and nations follow the same rule. If your all-denying modern
science and so-called philosophy do not contest that the human
family is composed of a variety of well-defined types and races,
it is only because the fact is undeniable, no one would say that
there was no external difference between an Englishman, an African
negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand it is formally
denied by most naturalists that mixed human races, i.e., the
seeds for entirely new races, are any longer formed in our days.
But this last is maintained on good grounds by de Quatrefages
and some others.
Nevertheless our general proposition
will not be accepted. It will be said that whatever forms man
has passed through in the long pre-historic Past there are no
more changes for him (save certain variations, as at present)
in the future. Hence that our Sixth and Seventh Root Races are
fictions.
To this it is again answered:
How do you know? Your experience is limited to a few thousand
years, to less than a day in the whole age of Humanity and to
the present types of the actual continents and isles of our Fifth
Race. How can you tell what will or will not be? Meanwhile, such
is the prophecy of the Secret Books and their no uncertain statements.
Since the beginning of the
Atlantean Race many million years have passed, yet we find the
last of the Atlanteans, still mixed up with the Aryan element,
11,000 years ago. This shows the enormous overlapping of one
race over the race which succeeds it, though in character and
external type the elder loses its characteristics, and assumes
the new features of the younger race. This is proved in all the
formations of mixed human races. Now, Occult philosophy teaches
that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are
preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation
will take place, and has already silently commenced.
Pure Anglo-Saxons hardly three
hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already
become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various
nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis,
not only mentally, but also physically. "Every mixed race,
when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a
primary race in fresh crossings," says de Quatrefages. "Mankind,
in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly, for the
greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of races
at present undetermined" ("The Human Species,"
p. 274.)
Thus the Americans have become
in only three centuries a "primary race," pro tem.,
before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all
other now existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the
Sixth sub-race, and in some few hundred years more, will become
most decidedly the pioneers of that race which must succeed to
the present European or fifth sub-race, in all its new characteristics.
After this, in about 25,000 years, they will launch into preparations
for the seventh sub-race; until, in consequence of cataclysms
-- the first series of those which must one day destroy Europe,
and still later the whole Aryan race (and thus affect both Americas),
as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines
of our continent and isles -- the Sixth Root-Race will have appeared
on the stage of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save
the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent
upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them.
All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so
silently, indeed, that for long millenniums shall its pioneers
-- the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and
women -- be regarded as anomalous lusus naturae, abnormal oddities
physically and mentally. Then, as they increase, and their numbers
become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find
themselves in a majority. It is the present men who will then
begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until these die
out in their turn in civilised lands; surviving only in small
groups on islands -- the mountain peaks of to-day -- where they
will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions
of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam and the
dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All
these are the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection
of whose existence has entirely died out of the remembrance of
the modern generations, just as we shall vanish from the memory
of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap the Sixth
Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it slower
than its new successor, still changing in stature, general physique,
and mentality, just as the Fourth overlapped our Aryan race,
and the Third had overlapped the Atlanteans.
This process of preparation
for the Sixth great Race must last throughout the whole sixth
and seventh sub-races (vide supra, the diagram of the Genealogical
Tree of the Fifth Race). But the last remnants of the Fifth Continent
will not disappear until some time after the birth of the new
Race; when another and new dwelling, the sixth continent, will
have appeared above the new waters on the face of the globe,
so as to receive the new stranger. To it also will emigrate and
settle all those who shall be fortunate enough to escape the
general disaster. When this shall be -- as just said -- it is
not for the writer to know. Only, as nature no more proceeds
by sudden jumps and starts, than man changes suddenly from a
child into a mature man, the final cataclysm will be preceded
by many smaller submersions and destructions both by wave and
volcanic fires. The exultant pulse will beat high in the heart
of the race now in the American zone, but there will be no more
Americans when the Sixth Race commences; no more, in fact, than
Europeans; for they will have now become a new race, and many
new nations. Yet the Fifth will not die, but survive for a while:
overlapping the new Race for many hundred thousands of years
to come, it will become transformed with it -- slower than its
new successor -- still getting entirely altered in mentality,
general physique, and stature. Mankind will not grow again into
giant bodies as in the case of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans;
because while the evolution of the Fourth race led the latter
down to the very bottom of materiality in its physical development,
the present Race is on its ascending arc; and the Sixth will
be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh.