F. The Seven Souls Of The Egyptologists…

F. The Seven Souls Of The Egyptologists

If one turns to those wells of information, The Natural Genesis and the Lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey, the proofs of the antiquity of the doctrine under analysis become positively overwhelming. That the belief of the author differs from ours can hardly invalidate the facts. He views the symbol from a purely natural standpoint, one perhaps a trifle too materialistic, because too much that of an ardent Evolutionist and follower of the modern Darwinian dogmas. Thus he shows that:

The student of Böhme’s books finds much in them concerning these Seven “Fountain Spirits,” and primary powers, treated as seven properties of Nature in the alchemistic and astrological phase of the mediæval mysteries....

The followers of Böhme look on such matter as the divine revelation of his inspired Seership. They know nothing of the natural genesis, the history and persistence of the “Wisdom”(1522) of the past (or of the broken links), and are unable to recognize the physical features of the ancient “Seven Spirits” beneath their modern metaphysical or alchemist mask. A second connecting link between the theosophy of Böhme and the physical origins of Egyptian thought, is extant in the fragments of Hermes Trismegistus.(1523) No matter whether these teachings are called Illuminatist, Buddhist, Kabalist, Gnostic, Masonic, or Christian, the elemental types can only be truly known in their beginnings.(1524) When the prophets or visionary showmen of cloudland come to us claiming original inspiration, and utter something new, we judge of its value by what it is in itself. But if we find they bring us the ancient matter which they cannot account for, and we can, it is natural that we should judge it by the primary significations rather than the latest pretensions.(1525) It is useless for us to read our later thought into the earliest types of expression, and then say the ancients meant that!(1526) Subtilized interpretations which have become doctrines and dogmas in theosophy have now to be tested by their genesis in physical phenomena, in order that we may explode their false pretensions to supernatural origin or supernatural knowledge.(1527)

But the able author of The Book of the Beginnings and of The Natural Genesis does—very fortunately, for us—quite the reverse. He demonstrates most triumphantly our Esoteric (Buddhist) teachings, by showing them identical with those of Egypt. Let the reader judge from his learned lecture on “The Seven Souls of Man.”(1528) Says the author:

The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.(1529)

Just so, for the Hindûs place their seven primitive Rishis in the Great Bear, and call this constellation the abode of the Saptarshi, Riksha and Chitra‐shikhandinas. And their Adepts claim to know whether it is only an astronomical myth, or a primordial mystery having a deeper meaning than it bears on its surface. We are also told that:

The Egyptians divided the face of the sky by night into seven parts. The primary Heaven was sevenfold.(1530)

So it was with the Âryans. One has but to read the Purânas about the beginnings of Brahmâ and his Egg, to see this. Have the Âryans then, taken the idea from the Egyptians? But, as the lecturer proceeds:

The earliest forces recognized in Nature were reckoned as seven in number. These became Seven Elementals, devils [?], or later divinities. Seven properties were assigned to Nature—as matter, cohesion, fluxion, coagulation, accumulation, station, and division—and seven elements or souls to man.(1531)

All this was taught in the Esoteric Doctrine, but it was interpreted and its mysteries unlocked, as already stated, with seven, not two or, at the utmost, three keys; hence the causes and their effects worked in invisible or mystic as well as in psychic Nature, and were made referable to Metaphysics and Psychology as much as to Physiology. As the author says:

A principle of sevening, so to say, was introduced, and the number seven supplied a sacred type that could be used for manifold purposes.(1532)

And it was so used. For:

The seven souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts.... Seven souls, or principles in man were identified by our British Druids.... The Rabbins also ran the number of souls up to seven: so, likewise, do the Karens of India.(1533)

And then, the author, with several misspellings, tabulates the two teachings—the Esoteric and the Egyptian—and shows that the latter had the same series and in the same order.

[Esoteric] Indian. Egyptian. 1. Rûpa, body or element of 1. Kha, body. form. 2. Prâna, the breath of life. 2. Ba, the soul of breath. 3. Astral body. 3. Khaba, the shade. 4. Manas, or 4. Akhu, intelligence or intelligence.(1534) perception. 5. Kâma Rûpa, or animal soul. 5. Seb, ancestral soul. 6. Buddhi, or spiritual soul. 6. Putah, the first intellectual father. 7. Âtmâ, pure spirit. 7. Atmu, a divine, or eternal soul.(1535)

Further on, the lecturer formulates these seven (Egyptian) Souls, as (1) The Soul of Blood—the formative; (2) The Soul of Breath—that breathes; (3) The Shade or Covering Soul—that envelopes; (4) The Soul of Perception—that perceives; (5) The Soul of Pubescence—that procreates; (6) The Intellectual Soul—that reproduces intellectually; and (7) The Spiritual Soul—that is perpetuated permanently.

From the exoteric and physiological standpoint this may be very correct; it becomes less so from the Esoteric point of view. To maintain this, does not at all mean that the “Esoteric Buddhists” resolve men into a number of elementary spirits, as Mr. G. Massey, in the same lecture, accuses them of maintaining. No “Esoteric Buddhist” has ever been guilty of any such absurdity. Nor has it been ever imagined that these shadows “become spiritual beings in another world,” or “seven potential spirits or elementaries of another life.” What is maintained is simply that every time the immortal Ego incarnates it becomes, as a total, a compound unit of Matter and Spirit, which together act on seven different planes of being and consciousness. Elsewhere, Mr. Gerald Massey adds:

The seven souls [our “principles”] ... are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. The moon‐god, Taht‐Esmun, or the later sun‐god, expressed the seven nature‐powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls [we say “principles”].... The seven stars in the hand of the Christ in Revelation, have the same significance.(1536)

And a still greater one, as these stars represent also the seven keys of the Seven Churches or the Sodalian Mysteries, kabalistically. However, we will not stop to discuss, but add that other Egyptologists have also discovered that the septenary constitution of man was a cardinal doctrine with the old Egyptians. In a series of remarkable articles in the Sphinx, of Munich, Herr Franz Lambert gives incontrovertible proof of his conclusions from the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian records. For details the reader must be referred to the articles themselves.

Böhme, the prince of all the mediæval seers, says:

We find seven especial properties in nature whereby this only Mother works all things [which he calls fire, light, sound (the upper three) and desire, bitterness, anguish, and substantiality, thus analyzing the lower in his own mystic way]; whatever the six forms are spiritually, that the seventh [the body or substantiality], is essentially. These are the seven forms of the Mother of all Beings, from whence all that is in this world is generated.(1537)

And again:

The Creator hath, in the body of this world, generated himself as it were creaturely in his qualifying or Fountain Spirits, and all the stars are ... God’s powers, and the whole body of the world consisteth in the seven qualifying or fountain spirits.(1538)

This is rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine. But how can we agree with Mr. Gerald Massey when he states that:

The Seven Races of Men that have been sublimated and made Planetary [?] by Esoteric Buddhism,(1539) may be met with in the Bundahish as (1) the earth‐men; (2) water‐men; (3) breast‐eared men; (4) breast‐eyed men; (5) one‐legged men; (6) bat‐winged men; (7) men with tails.(1540)

Each of these descriptions, allegorical and even perverted in their later form, is, nevertheless, an echo of the Secret Doctrine teaching. They all refer to the pre‐human evolution of the “Water‐men terrible and bad” by unaided Nature through millions of years, as previously described. But we deny point‐blank the assertion that “these were never real races,” and point to the Archaic Stanzas for our answer. It is easy to infer and to say that our “instructors have mistaken these shadows of the Past, for things human and spiritual”; but that “they are neither, and never were either,” it is less easy to prove. The assertion must ever remain on a par with the Darwinian claim that man and the ape had a common pithecoid ancestor. What the lecturer takes for a “mode of expression” and nothing more, in the Egyptian Ritual, we take as having quite another and an important meaning. Here is one instance. Says the Ritual, the Book of the Dead:

“I am the mouse.” “I am the hawk.” “I am the ape.”... “I am the crocodile whose soul comes from MEN.”... “I am the soul of the gods.”(1541)

The last sentence but one is explained by the lecturer, who says parenthetically, “that is, as a type of intelligence,” and the last as meaning, “the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of all.”

The Occult Teaching answers: It means far more.

It gives first of all a corroboration of the teaching that, while the human Monad has passed on Globe A and others, in the First Round, through all the three kingdoms—the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal—in this our Fourth Round, every mammal has sprung from Man, if the semi‐ethereal, many‐shaped creature with the human Monad in it, of the first two Races, can be regarded as Man. But it must be so called; for, in the Esoteric language, it is not the form of flesh, blood, and bones, now referred to as man, which is in any way the Man, but the inner divine Monad with its manifold principles or aspects.

The lecture referred to, however, much as it opposes Esoteric Buddhism and its teachings, is an eloquent answer to those who have tried to represent the whole as a new‐fangled doctrine. And there are many such, in Europe, America, and even India. Yet, between the Esotericism of the old Arhats, and that which has now survived in India among the few Brâhmans who have seriously studied their Secret Philosophy, the difference does not appear so very great. It seems centred in, and limited to, the question of the order of the evolution of cosmic and other principles, more than anything else. At all events it is no greater divergence than the everlasting question of the filioque dogma, which since the eighth century has separated the Roman Catholic from the older Greek Eastern Church. Yet, whatever the differences in the forms in which the septenary dogma is presented, the substance is there, and its presence and importance in the Brâhmanical system may be judged by what one of India’s learned meta‐physicians and Vedântic scholars says of it:

The real esoteric seven‐fold classification is one of the most important, if not the most important classification, which has received its arrangement from the mysterious constitution of this eternal type. I may also mention in this connection that the four‐ fold classification claims the same origin. The light of life, as it were, seems to be refracted by the treble‐faced prism of Prakriti, having the three Gunams for its three faces, and divided into seven rays, which develop in course of time the seven principles of this classification. The progress of development presents some points of similarity to the gradual development of the rays of the spectrum. While the four‐fold classification is amply sufficient for all practical purposes, this real seven‐fold classification is of great theoretical and scientific importance. It will be necessary to adopt it to explain certain classes of phenomena noticed by occultists; and it is perhaps better fitted to be the basis of a perfect system of psychology. It is not the peculiar property of the “Trans‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine.” In fact, it has a closer connection with the Brâhmanical Logos than with the Buddhist Logos. In order to make my meaning clear I may point out here that the Logos has seven forms. In other words, there are seven kinds of Logoi in the Cosmos. Each of these has became the central figure of one of the seven main branches of the ancient Wisdom‐Religion. This classification is not the seven‐fold classification we have adopted. I make this assertion without the slightest fear of contradiction. The real classification has all the requisites of a scientific classification. It has seven distinct principles, which correspond with seven distinct states of Prajñâ or consciousness. It bridges the gulf between the objective and subjective, and indicates the mysterious circuit through which ideation passes. The seven principles are allied to seven states of matter, and to seven forms of force. These principles are harmoniously arranged between two poles, which define the limits of human consciousness.(1542)

The above is perfectly correct, save, perhaps, on one point. The “seven‐ fold classification” in the Esoteric System has never (to the writer’s knowledge) been claimed by any one belonging to it, as “the peculiar property of the ‘Trans‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine’ ”; but only as having survived in that old School alone. It is no more the property of the Trans‐, than it is of the Cis‐Himâlayan Esoteric Doctrine, but is simply the common inheritance of all such Schools, left to the Sages of the Fifth Root‐Race by the great Siddhas(1543) of the Fourth. Let us remember that the Atlanteans became the terrible sorcerers, now celebrated in so many of the oldest MSS. of India, only toward their “Fall,” whereby the submersion of their Continent was brought on. What is claimed is simply that the Wisdom imparted by the “Divine Ones”—born through the Kriyâshaktic powers of the Third Race before its Fall and separation into sexes—to the Adepts of the early Fourth Race, has remained in all its pristine purity in a certain Brotherhood. The said School or Fraternity being closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea—believed in by both Hindûs and Buddhists, but called “mythical” by Geographers and Orientalists—the less one talks of it, the wiser he will be. Nor can one accept the said “seven‐ fold classification” as having “a closer connection with the Brâhmanical Logos than with the Buddhist Logos,” since both are identical, whether the one Logos is called Îshvara or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmâ or Padmapâni. These are, however, very small differences, more fanciful than real, in fact. Brâhmanism and Buddhism, both viewed from their orthodox aspects, are as inimical and as irreconcilable as water and oil. Each of these great bodies, however, has a vulnerable place in its constitution. While even in their esoteric interpretation both can agree but to disagree, once that their respective vulnerable points are confronted, every disagreement must fall, for the two will find themselves on common ground. The “Achilles’ heel” of orthodox Brâhmanism is the Advaita philosophy, whose followers are called by the pious “Buddhists in disguise”; as that of orthodox Buddhism is Northern Mysticism, as represented by the disciples of the philosophies of the Yogâchârya School of Âryâsangha and the Mahâyâna, who are twitted in their turn by their co‐religionists as “Vedântins in disguise.” The Esoteric Philosophy of both these can be but one if carefully analyzed and compared, as Gautama Buddha and Shankarâchârya are most closely connected, if one believes tradition and certain Esoteric Teachings. Thus every difference between the two will be found one of form rather than of substance.

A most mystic discourse, full of septenary symbology, may be found in the Anugita(1544) There the Brâhmana narrates the bliss of having crossed beyond the regions of illusion:

In which fancies are the gadflies and mosquitoes, in which grief and joy are cold and heat, in which delusion is the blinding darkness, in which avarice is the beasts of prey and reptiles, in which desire and anger are the obstructors.

The sage describes the entrance into and exit from the forest—a symbol for man’s life‐time—and also that forest itself:(1545)

In that forest are seven large trees [the senses, mind and understanding, or Manas and Buddhi, included], seven fruits, and seven guests; seven hermitages, seven (forms of) concentration, and seven (forms of) initiation. This is the description of the forest. That forest is filled with trees producing splendid flowers and fruits of five colours.

The senses, says the commentator:

Are called trees, as being producers of the fruits ... pleasures and pains ...; the guests are the powers of each sense personified—they receive the fruits above described; the hermitages are the trees ... in which the guests take shelter; the seven forms of concentration are the exclusion from the self of the seven functions of the seven senses, etc., already referred to; the seven forms of initiation refer to the initiation into the higher life, by repudiating as not one’s own the actions of each member out of the group of seven.(1546)

The explanation is harmless, if unsatisfactory. Says the Brâhmana, continuing his description:

That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of four colours. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of three colours, and mixed. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of two colours, and of beautiful colours. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of one colour, and fragrant. That forest is filled [instead of with seven] with two large trees producing numerous flowers and fruits of undistinguished colours [mind and understanding—the two higher senses, or theosophically, Manas and Buddhi]. There is one fire [the Self] here, connected with the Brahman,(1547) and having a good mind [or true knowledge, according to Arjuna Mishra]. And there is fuel here, (namely) the five senses [or human passions]. The seven (forms of) emancipation from them are the seven (forms of) initiation. The qualities are the fruits.... There ... the great sages receive hospitality. And when they have been worshipped and have disappeared, another forest shines forth, in which intelligence is the tree, and emancipation the fruit, and which possesses shade (in the form of) tranquillity, which depends on knowledge, which has contentment for its water, and which has the Kshetrajña(1548) within for the sun.

Now, all the above is very plain, and no Theosophist, even among the least learned, can fail to understand the allegory. And yet, we see great Orientalists making a perfect mess of it in their explanations. The “great sages” who “receive hospitality” are explained as meaning the senses, “which, having worked as unconnected with the self are finally absorbed into it.” But one fails to understand, if the senses are “unconnected” with the “Higher Self,” in what manner they can be “absorbed into it.” One would think, on the contrary, that it is just because the personal senses gravitate and strive to be connected with the impersonal Self, that the latter, which is Fire, burns the lower five and purifies thereby the higher two, “mind and understanding,” or the higher aspects of Manas(1549) and Buddhi. This is quite apparent from the text. The “great sages” disappear after having “been worshipped.” Worshipped by whom if they (the presumed senses) are “unconnected with the self”? By Mind, of course; by Manas (in this case merged in the sixth sense) which is not, and cannot be, the Brahman, the Self, or Kshetrajña—the Soul’s Spiritual Sun. Into the latter, in time, Manas itself must be absorbed. It has worshipped “great sages” and given hospitality to terrestrial wisdom; but once that “another forest shone forth” upon it, it is Intelligence (Buddhi, the seventh sense, but sixth principle) which is transformed into the Tree—that Tree whose fruit is emancipation—which finally destroys the very roots of the Ashvattha tree, the symbol of life and of its illusive joys and pleasures. And therefore, those who attain to that state of emancipation have, in the words of the above‐cited Sage, “no fear afterwards.” In this state “the end cannot be perceived because it extends on all sides.”

“There always dwell seven females there,” he goes on to say, carrying out the imagery. These females—who, according to Arjuna Mishra, are the Mahat, Ahamkâra and five Tanmâtras—have always their faces turned downwards, as they are obstacles in the way of spiritual ascension.

In that same [Brahman, the Self] the seven perfect sages, together with their chiefs, ... abide, and again emerge from the same. Glory, brilliance and greatness, enlightenment, victory, perfection and power—these seven rays follow after this same sun [Kshetrajña, the Higher Self].... Those whose wishes are reduced [the unselfish]; ... whose sins [passions] are burnt up by penance, merging the self in the self,(1550) devote themselves to Brahman. Those people who understand the forest of knowledge [Brahman, or the Self], praise tranquillity. And aspiring to that forest, they are [re‐] born so as not to lose courage. Such, indeed, is this holy forest.... And understanding it, they [the sages] act (accordingly), being directed by the Kshetrajña.

No translator among the Western Orientalists has yet perceived in the foregoing allegory anything higher than mysteries connected with sacrificial ritualism, penance, or ascetic ceremonies, and Hatha Yoga. But he who understands symbolical imagery, and hears the voice of Self within Self, will see in this something far higher than mere ritualism, however often he may err in minor details of the Philosophy.

And here we must be allowed a last remark. No true Theosophist, from the most ignorant up to the most learned, ought to claim infallibility for anything he may say or write upon Occult matters. The chief point is to admit that, in many a way, in the classification of either cosmic or human principles, in addition to mistakes in the order of evolution, and especially on metaphysical questions, those of us who pretend to teach others more ignorant than ourselves—are all liable to err. Thus mistakes have been made in Isis Unveiled, in Esoteric Buddhism, in Man, in Magic: White and Black, etc., and more than one mistake is likely to be found in the present work. This cannot be helped. For a large or even a small work on such abstruse subjects to be entirely exempt from error and blunder, it would have to be written from its first to its last page by a great Adept, if not by an Avatâra. Then only should we say, “This is verily a work without sin or blemish in it!” But so long as the artist is imperfect, how can his work be perfect? “Endless is the search for truth!” Let us love it and aspire to it for its own sake, and not for the glory or benefit a minute portion of its revelation may confer on us. For who of us can presume to have the whole truth at his fingers’ ends, even upon one minor teaching of Occultism?

Our chief point in the present subject, however, has been to show that the septenary doctrine, or division of the constitution of man, was a very ancient one, and was not invented by us. This has been successfully done, for we are supported in this, consciously and unconsciously, by a number of ancient, mediæval, and modern writers. What the former said, was well said; what the latter repeated, has generally been distorted. An instance: Read the Pythagorean Fragments, and study the septenary man as given by the Rev. G. Oliver, the learned Mason, in his Pythagorean Triangle, who speaks as follows:

The Theosophic Philosophy ... counted seven properties [or principles] in man—viz.:

(1) The divine golden man.

(2) The inward holy body from fire and light, like pure silver.

(3) The elemental man.

(4) The mercurial ... paradisiacal man.

(5) The martial soul‐like man.

(6) The venerine, ascending to the outward desire.

(7) The solar man, [a witness to and] an inspector of the wonders of God [the Universe].

They had also seven fountain spirits or powers of nature.(1551)

Compare this jumbled account and distribution of Western Theosophic Philosophy with the latest Theosophic explanations by the Eastern School of Theosophy, and then decide which is the more correct. Verily:

Wisdom hath builded her house, She hath hewn out her seven pillars.(1552)

As to the charge that our School has not adopted the sevenfold classification of the Brâhmans, but has confused it, this is quite unjust. To begin with, the “School” is one thing, its exponents (to Europeans) quite another. The latter have first to learn the A B C of practical Eastern Occultism, before they can be made to understand correctly the tremendously abstruse classification based on the seven distinct states of Prajñâ or Consciousness; and, above all, to realize thoroughly what Prajñâ is, in Eastern metaphysics. To give a Western student that classification is to try to make him suppose that he can account for the origin of consciousness, by accounting for the process by which a certain knowledge, though only one of the states of that consciousness, came to him; in other words, it is to make him account for something he knows on this plane, by something he knows nothing about on the other planes; i.e., to lead him from the spiritual and the psychological, direct to the ontological. This is why the primary, old classification was adopted by the Theosophists—of which classifications in truth there are many.

To busy oneself, after such a tremendous number of independent witnesses and proofs have been brought before the public, with an additional enumeration from theological sources, would be quite useless. The seven capital sins and seven virtues of the Christian scheme are far less philosophical than even the seven liberal and the seven accursed sciences—or the seven arts of enchantment of the Gnostics. For one of the latter is now before the public, pregnant with danger in the present as for the future. The modern name for it is Hypnotism; used as it is by scientific and ignorant Materialists, in the general ignorance of the seven principles, it will soon become Satanism in the full acceptation of the term.

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III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED

The knowledge of this nether world— Say, friend, what is it, false or true? The false, what mortal cares to know? The true, what mortal ever knew?

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Section I. Archaic, or Modern Anthropology?

Whenever the question of the Origin of Man is offered seriously to an unbiassed, honest, and earnest man of Science, the answer comes invariably: “We do not know.” De Quatrefages with his agnostic attitude is one of such Anthropologists.

This does not imply that the rest of the men of Science are neither fair‐ minded nor honest, as such a remark would be questionably discreet. But it is estimated that 75 per cent. of European Scientists are Evolutionists. Are these representatives of Modern Thought all guilty of flagrant misrepresentation of the facts? No one says this—but there are a few very exceptional cases. However, the Scientists, in their anti‐clerical enthusiasm and in despair of any alternative theory to Darwinism except that of “special creation,” are unconsciously insincere in “forcing” a hypothesis the elasticity of which is inadequate, and which resents the severe strain to which it is now subjected. Insincerity on the same subject is, however, patent in ecclesiastical circles. Bishop Temple has come forward as a thorough‐going supporter of Darwinism in his Religion and Science. This clerical writer goes so far as to regard Matter—after it has received its “primal impress”—as the unaided evolver of all cosmic phenomena. This view only differs from that of Hæckel, in postulating a hypothetical Deity at “the back of beyont,” a Deity which stands entirely aloof from the interplay of forces. Such a metaphysical entity is no more the Theological God than is that of Kant. Bishop Temple’s truce with materialistic Science is, in our opinion, impolitic—apart from the fact that it involves a total rejection of the biblical cosmogony. In the presence of this display of flunkeyism before the materialism of our “learned” age, we Occultists can but smile. But how about loyalty to the Master such theological truants profess to serve—Christ, and Christendom at large?

However, we have no desire, for the present, to throw down the gauntlet to the clergy, our business being now with materialistic Science alone. The latter, in the person of its best representatives, answers to our question, “We do not know;” yet the majority of them act as though Omniscience were their heirloom, and they knew all things.

For, indeed, this negative reply has not prevented the majority of Scientists from speculating on the question, each seeking to have his own special theory accepted to the exclusion of all others. Thus, from Maillet in 1748, down to Hæckel in 1870, theories on the origin of the human race have differed as much as the personalities of their inventors themselves. Buffon, Bory de St. Vincent, Lamarck, E. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Gaudry, Naudin, Wallace, Darwin, Owen, Hæckel, Filippi, Vogt, Huxley, Agassiz, etc., each has evolved a more or less scientific hypothesis of genesis. De Quatrefages arranges these theories in two principal groups—one based on a rapid, and the other on a very gradual transmutation; the former favouring a new type (man) produced by a being entirely different, the latter teaching the evolution of man by progressive differentiations.

Strangely enough, it is from the most scientific of these authorities that has emanated the most unscientific of all the theories upon the subject of the Origin of Man. This is now so evident, that the hour is rapidly approaching when the current teaching about the descent of man from an ape‐like mammal will be regarded with less respect than the formation of Adam out of clay, and of Eve out of Adam’s rib. For

It is evident, especially after the most fundamental principles of Darwinism, that an organized being cannot be a descendant of another whose development is in an inverse order to its own. Consequently, in accordance with these principles, man cannot be considered as the descendant of any simian type whatever.(1553)

Lucae’s argument versus the Ape‐theory, based on the different flexures of the bones constituting the axis of the skull in the cases of man and the anthropoids, is fairly discussed by Schmidt. He admits that:

The ape as he grows becomes more bestial; man ... more human—

and seems, indeed, to hesitate a moment before he passes on:

This flexure of the cranial axis may, therefore, still be emphasized as a human character, in contradistinction to the apes; the peculiar characteristic of an order can scarcely be elicited from it; and especially as to the doctrine of descent, this circumstance seems in no way decisive.(1554)

The writer is evidently not a little disquieted by his own argument. He assures us that it upsets any possibility of the present apes having been the progenitors of mankind. But does it not also negative the bare possibility of the man and the anthropoid having had a common—though, so far, an absolutely theoretical—ancestor?

Even “Natural Selection” itself is with every day more threatened. The deserters from the Darwinian camp are many, and those who were at one time its most ardent disciples are, owing to new discoveries, slowly but steadily preparing to turn over a new leaf. In the Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society for October, 1886, we may read as follows:

PHYSIOLOGICAL SELECTION.—Mr. G. J. Romanes finds certain difficulties in regarding natural selection as a theory for the origin of species, as it is rather a theory of the origin of adaptive structures. He proposes to replace it by what he calls physiological selection, or segregation of the fit. His view is based on the extreme sensitiveness of the reproductive system to small changes in the conditions of life, and he thinks that variations in the direction of greater or less sterility must frequently occur in wild species. If the variation be such that the reproductive system, while showing some degree of sterility with the parent form, continues to be fertile within the limits of the varietal form, the variation would neither be swamped by intercrossing nor die out on account of sterility. When a variation of this kind occurs, the physiological barrier must divide the species into two parts. The author, in fine, regards mutual sterility, not as one of the effects of specific differentiation, but as the cause of it.(1555)

An attempt is made to show the above to be a complement of, and sequence to, the Darwinian theory. This is a clumsy attempt at best. The public will soon be asked to believe that Mr. C. Dixon’s Evolution without Natural Selection is also Darwinism—expanded, as the author certainly claims it to be!

But it is like splitting the body of a man into three pieces, and then maintaining that each piece is the identical man he was before, only—expanded. Yet the author states:

Let it be clearly understood that not one single syllable in the foregoing pages has been written antagonistic to Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. All I have done is to explain certain phenomena ... the more one studies Darwin’s works, the more one is convinced of the truth of his hypothesis [! !].(1556)

And before this, he alludes to:

The overwhelming array of facts which Darwin gave in support of his hypothesis, and which triumphantly carried the theory of Natural Selection over all obstacles and objections.(1557)

This does not prevent the learned author, however, from upsetting this theory as “triumphantly,” and from even openly calling his work Evolution without Natural Selection, or, in so many words, with Darwin’s fundamental idea knocked to atoms in it.

As to Natural Selection itself, the utmost misconception prevails among many present‐day thinkers, who tacitly accept the conclusions of Darwinism. It is, for instance, a mere device of rhetoric to credit Natural Selection with the power of originating species. Natural Selection is no entity; it is merely a convenient phrase for describing the mode in which the survival of the fit and the elimination of the unfit among organisms are brought about by the Struggle for Existence. Every group of organisms tends to multiply beyond the means of subsistence; the constant battle for life—the “struggle to obtain enough to eat and to escape being eaten” added to the environmental conditions—necessitates a perpetual weeding out of the unfit. The élite of any stock, thus sorted out, propagate the species and transmit their organic characteristics to their descendants. All useful variations are thus perpetuated, and a progressive improvement is effected. But Natural Selection—in the writer’s humble opinion, “Selection, as a Power”—is in reality a pure myth; especially when it is resorted to as an explanation of the Origin of Species. It is merely a representative term expressive of the manner in which “useful variations” are stereotyped when produced. Of itself, “it” can produce—nothing, and only operates on the rough material presented to “it.” The real question at issue is: What cause—combined with other secondary causes—produces the “variations” in the organisms themselves? Many of these secondary causes are purely physical—climatic, dietary, etc. Very well. But beyond the secondary aspects of organic evolution, a deeper principle has to be sought for. The Materialist’s “spontaneous variations,” and “accidental divergencies” are self‐contradictory terms in a universe of “Matter, Force and Necessity.” Mere variability of type, apart from the supervisory presence of a quasi‐intelligent impulse, is powerless to account for the stupendous complexities and marvels of the human body, for instance. The insufficiency of the Darwinists’ mechanical theory has been exposed at length by Dr. Von Hartmann among other purely negative thinkers. It is an abuse of the reader’s intelligence to write, as does Hæckel, of blind indifferent cells, “arranging themselves into organs.” The Esoteric solution of the origin of animal species is given elsewhere.

Those purely secondary causes of differentiation, grouped under the head of sexual selection, natural selection, climate, isolation, etc., mislead the Western Evolutionist and offer no real explanation whatever of the “whence” of the “ancestral types” which served as the starting point for physical development. The truth is that the differentiating “causes” known to Modern Science only come into operation after the physicalization of the primeval animal root‐types out of the astral. Darwinism only meets Evolution at its midway point—that is to say, when astral evolution has given place to the play of the ordinary physical forces with which our present senses acquaint us. But even here the Darwinian Theory, even with the “expansions” recently attempted, is inadequate to meet the facts of the case. The cause underlying physiological variation in species—one to which all other laws are subordinate and secondary—is a sub‐conscious intelligence pervading matter, ultimately traceable to a reflection of the Divine and Dhyân‐Chohanic wisdom.(1558) A not altogether dissimilar conclusion has been arrived at by so well known a thinker as Ed. von Hartmann, who, despairing of the efficacy of unaided Natural Selection, regards Evolution as being intelligently guided by the Unconscious—the Cosmic Logos of Occultism. But the latter acts only mediately through Fohat, or Dhyân‐Chohanic energy, and not quite in the direct manner which the great pessimist describes.

It is this divergence among men of Science, their mutual, and often their self‐contradictions, that gives the writer of the present volumes the courage to bring to light other and older teachings—if only as hypotheses for future scientific appreciation. So evident, even to the humble recorder of this archaic teaching, though not in any way very learned in Modern Sciences, are the scientific fallacies and gaps, that she has determined to touch upon all these, in order to place the two teachings on parallel lines. For Occultism, it is a question of self‐defence, and nothing more.

So far, The Secret Doctrine has concerned itself with metaphysics, pure and simple. It has now landed on Earth, and finds itself within the domain of physical Science and practical Anthropology, or those branches of study which materialistic Naturalists claim as their rightful domain, coolly asserting, furthermore, that the higher and more perfect the working of the Soul, the more amenable it is to the analysis and explanations of the Zoologist and the Physiologist alone.(1559) This stupendous pretension comes from one, who, to prove his pithecoid descent, has not hesitated to include the Lemuridæ among the ancestors of man; these have been promoted by him to the rank of Prosimiæ, indeciduate mammals, to which he very incorrectly contributes a decidua and a discoidal placenta.(1560) For this Hæckel was taken severely to task by de Quatrefages, and criticised by his own brother Materialists and Agnostics—Virchow and du Bois‐Reymond, as great, if not greater authorities than himself.(1561)

Such opposition notwithstanding, Hæckel’s wild theories are, to this day, still called by some scientific and logical. The mysterious nature of Consciousness, of Soul, of Spirit in Man being now explained as a mere advance on the functions of the protoplasmic molecules of the lively Protista, and the gradual evolution and growth of human mind and “social instincts” toward civilization having to be traced back to their origin in the civilization of ants, bees, and other creatures—the chances left for an impartial hearing of the doctrines of Archaic Wisdom are few indeed. The educated profane are told that:

The social instincts of the lower animals have, of late, been regarded for various reasons as clearly the origin of morals, even of those of man [?], ...

—and that our divine consciousness, our soul, intellect, and aspirations have worked their “way up from the lower stages of the simple cell‐soul” of the gelatinous Bathybius—(1562) and they seem to believe it. For such men, the Metaphysics of Occultism must produce the effect that our grandest oratorios produce on the Chinaman—sounds that jar upon their nerves.

Yet, are our Esoteric teachings about “Angels,” the first three pre‐animal human Races, and the downfall of the Fourth, on a lower level of fiction and self‐delusion than the Hæckelian “plastidular,” or the inorganic “molecular souls of the Protista”? Between the evolution of the spiritual nature of man from the above amœbian souls, and the alleged development of his physical frame from the protoplastic dweller in the ocean slime, there is an abyss which will not easily be crossed by any man in the full possession of his intellectual faculties. Physical Evolution, as Modern Science teaches it, is a subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral development on the same lines is the insane dream of a crass Materialism.

Furthermore, past as well as present daily experience teaches that no truth has ever been accepted by learned bodies unless it has dovetailed with the habitually preconceived ideas of their professors. “The crown of the innovator is a crown of thorns”—said Geoffroy St. Hilaire. It is only that which fits in with popular hobbies and accepted notions that as a general rule gains ground. Hence the triumph of the Hæckelian ideas, notwithstanding that they are proclaimed by Virchow, du Bois‐Reymond, and others as the “testimonium paupertatis of Natural Science.”

Diametrically opposed as may be the materialism of the German Evolutionists to the spiritual conceptions of Esoteric Philosophy, radically inconsistent as is their accepted anthropological system with the real facts of Nature—the pseudo‐idealistic bias now colouring English thought is almost more pernicious. The pure Materialistic Doctrine admits of a direct refutation and an appeal to the logic of facts. The Idealism of the present day, not only contrives to absorb, on the one hand, the basic negations of Atheism, but lands its votaries in a tangle of unreality, which culminates in a practical Nihilism. Argument with such writers is almost out of the question. Idealists, therefore, will be still more antagonistic than even the Materialists to the Occult teachings now given. But as no worse fate can befall the exponents of Esoteric Anthropogenesis at the hands of their foes than being openly called by their old and time‐honoured names of “lunatics” and “ignoramuses,” the present archaic theories may be safely added to the many modern speculations, and bide their time for their full or even partial recognition. Only, as the very existence of these archaic theories will probably be denied, we have to give our best proofs and stand by them to the bitter end.

In our race and generation the one “temple in the universe” is in rare cases—within us; but our body and mind have been too defiled by both “sin” and “science” to be outwardly anything better now than a fane of iniquity and error. And here our mutual position—that of Occultism and Modern Science—ought to be once for all defined.

We, Theosophists, are willing to bow before such men of learning as the late Prof. Balfour Stewart, Messrs. Crookes, de Quatrefages, Wallace, Agassiz, Butlerof, and others, though, from the stand‐point of the Esoteric Philosophy, we may not agree with all they say. But nothing will make us consent to even a show of respect for the opinions of such other men of Science as Hæckel, Carl Vogt, or Ludwig Büchner, in Germany, or even Mr. Huxley and his co‐thinkers in Materialism in England—the colossal erudition of the first named, notwithstanding. Such men are simply the intellectual and moral murderers of future generations; especially Hæckel, whose crass Materialism often rises to the height of idiotic naivetés in his reasonings. One has but to read his Pedigree of Man, and Other Essays (Aveling’s Translation) to feel a desire that, in the words of Job, his remembrance should perish from the Earth, and that he “shall have no name in the streets.” Hear the creator of the mythical Sozura deriding the idea of the origin of the human race “as a supernatural [?] phenomenon,” as one—

That could not result from simple mechanical causes, from physical and chemical forces, but requires the direct intervention of a creative personality.... Now the central point of Darwin’s teaching ... lies in this, that it demonstrates the simplest mechanical causes, purely physico‐chemical phenomena of nature, as wholly sufficient to explain the highest and most difficult problems. Darwin puts in the place of a conscious creative force, building and arranging the organic bodies of animals and plants on a designed plan, a series of natural forces working blindly (as we say) without aim, without design. In place of an arbitrary act of operation, we have a necessary law of Evolution.... [So had Manu and Kapila, and, at the same time, guiding, conscious and intelligent Powers]. Darwin very wisely ... had put on one side the question as to the first appearance of life. But very soon that consequence, so full of meaning, so wide‐reaching, was openly discussed by able and brave scientific men, such as Huxley, Carl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner. A mechanical origin of the earliest living form was held as the necessary sequence to Darwin’s teaching ... we are at present only concerned with a single consequence of the theory, the natural origin of the human race through almighty Evolution.(1563)

To this, unabashed by such a scientific farrago, Occultism replies: In the course of Evolution, when the physical triumphed over the spiritual and mental evolution, and nearly crushed it under its weight, the great gift of Kriyâshakti remained the heirloom of only a few elect men in every age. Spirit strove vainly to manifest itself in its fulness in purely organic forms (as has been explained in Part I of this Volume), and the faculty, which had been a natural attribute in the early humanity of the Third Race, became one of the class regarded as simply phenomenal by Spiritualists and Occultists, and as scientifically impossible by Materialists.

In our modern day the mere assertion that there exists a power which can create human forms—ready‐made Sheaths within which can incarnate the conscious Monads or Nirmânakâyas of past Manvantaras—is, of course, absurd, ridiculous! That which is regarded as quite natural, on the other hand, is the production of a Frankenstein’s monster, plus moral consciousness, religious aspirations, genius, and a feeling of his own immortal nature within himself—by “physico‐chemical forces,” guided by blind “Almighty Evolution.” As to the origin of that man, not ex nihilo, cemented by a little red clay, but from a living divine Entity consolidating the Astral Body with surrounding materials—such a conception is too absurd even to be mentioned, in the opinion of the Materialists. Nevertheless, Occultists and Theosophists are ready to have their claims and theories compared as to their intrinsic value and probability with those of the modern Evolutionists—however unscientific and superstitious these theories may at the first glance appear. Hence the Esoteric teaching is absolutely opposed to the Darwinian evolution, as applied to man, and partially so with regard to other species.

It would be interesting to obtain a glimpse of the mental representation of Evolution in the scientific brain of a Materialist. What is Evolution? If asked to define the full and complete meaning of the term, neither Huxley nor Hæckel will be able to do so any better than does Webster:

The act of unfolding; the process of growth, development; as the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg.

Yet the bud must be traced through its parent‐plant to the seed, and the egg to the animal or bird that laid it; or at any rate to the speck of protoplasm from which it expanded and grew. And both the seed and the speck must have the latent potentialities in them for the reproduction and gradual development, the unfolding of the thousand and one forms or phases of evolution, through which they must pass before the flower or the animal is fully developed? Hence, the future plan—if not a design—must be there. Moreover, that seed has to be traced, and its nature ascertained. Have the Darwinians been successful in this? Or will the Moneron be cast in our teeth? But this atom of the Watery Abysses is not homogeneous matter; and there must be something or somebody that had moulded and cast it into being.

Here Science is once more silent. But since there is no self‐consciousness as yet in speck, seed, or germ, according to both Materialists and Psychologists of the modern school—Occultists agreeing in this for once with their natural enemies—what is it that guides the force or forces so unerringly in this process of Evolution? “Blind force”? As well call “blind” the brain which evolved in Hæckel his Pedigree of Man and other lucubrations. We can easily conceive that the said brain lacks an important centre or two; for whoever knows anything of the anatomy of the human, or even of any animal, body, and is still an Atheist and a Materialist, must be “hopelessly insane,” according to Lord Herbert, who rightly sees in the frame of man’s body and the coherence of its parts, something so strange and paradoxical that he holds it to be the “greatest miracle of nature.” Blind forces and “no design” in anything under the Sun! When no sane man of Science would hesitate to say that, even from the little he knows and has hitherto discovered of the forces at work in Kosmos, he sees very plainly that every part, every speck and atom, are in harmony with their fellow atoms, and these with the whole, each having its distinct mission throughout the life‐cycle. But, fortunately, the greatest, the most eminent Thinkers and Scientists of the day are now beginning to rise against this “Pedigree,” and even against Darwin’s Natural Selection theory, though its author had never, probably, contemplated such widely stretched conclusions. The Russian scientist N. T. Danilevsky, in his remarkable work, Darwinism, a Critical Investigation of the Theory, upsets such Darwinism completely and without appeal, and so does de Quatrefages in his last work. Our readers are recommended to examine the learned paper by Dr. Bourges, a member of the Paris Anthropological Society, read by its author at a recent meeting of that society and called “Evolutionary Psychology; the Evolution of Spirit, etc.” In it he completely reconciles the two teachings—namely of physical and spiritual evolution. He explains the origin of the variety of organic forms—which are made to fit their environments with such evidently intelligent design—by the existence and the mutual help and interaction of two Principles in manifested Nature, the inner conscious Principle adapting itself to physical Nature and the innate potentialities of the latter. Thus the French scientist has to return to our old friend Archæus, or the Life‐Principle—without naming it—as Dr. Richardson has done in England in his Nerve‐Force. The same idea was recently developed in Germany by Baron Hellenbach, in his remarkable work, Individuality in the Light of Biology and Modern Philosophy.

We find the same conclusions arrived at in yet another excellent volume by a deep thinking Russian, N. N. Strachof, who says in his Fundamental Conceptions of Psychology and Physiology:

The most clear, as the most familiar, type of development may be found in our own mental or physical evolution, which has served others as a model to follow.... If organisms are entities ... then it is only just to conclude and assert that the organic life strives to beget psychic life; but it would be still more correct and in accordance with the spirit of these two categories of evolution to say, that the true cause of organic life is the tendency of spirit to manifest in substantial forms, to clothe itself in substantial reality. It is the highest form which contains the complete explanation of the lowest, never the reverse.

This is admitting, as Bourges does in the Mémoire above mentioned, the identity of this mysterious, integrally acting and organizing Principle with the Self‐Conscious and Inner Subject, which we call the Ego and the world at large the Soul. Thus all the best Scientists and Thinkers are gradually approaching the Occultists in their general conclusions.

But such metaphysically inclined men of Science are out of court and will hardly be listened to. Schiller, in his magnificent poem on the Veil of Isis, makes the mortal youth who dared to lift the impenetrable covering fall down dead, after beholding the naked Truth in the face of the stern Goddess. Have some of our Darwinians, so tenderly united in natural selection and affinity, also gazed at the Saïtic Mother bereft of her veils? One might almost suspect it after reading their theories. Their great intellects must have collapsed while gauging too closely the uncovered face of Nature, leaving only the grey matter and ganglia in their brains to respond to “blind” physico‐chemical forces. At any rate Shakspere’s lines apply admirably to our modern Evolutionist, who symbolizes that “proud man,” who—

Drest in a little brief authority; Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep!(1564)

These have nought to do with the “Angels.” Their only concern is with the human ancestor, the pithecoid Noah who gave birth to three sons—the tailed Cynocephalus, the tailless Ape, and the “arboreal” Palæolithic man. On this point, they will not be contradicted. Every doubt expressed is immediately set down as an attempt to cripple scientific enquiry. The insuperable difficulty at the very foundation of the Evolution theory, namely, that no Darwinian is able to give even an approximate definition of the period at which, and the form in which, the first man appeared, is smoothed down to a trifling impediment, which is “really of no account.” Every branch of knowledge is in the same predicament, we are informed. The Chemist bases his most abstruse calculations simply

Upon a hypothesis of atoms and molecules, of which not one has ever been seen, isolated, weighed, or defined. The electrician speaks of magnetic fluids which have never tangibly revealed themselves. No definite origin can be assigned either to molecules or magnetism. Science cannot and does not pretend to any knowledge of the beginnings of law, matter, or life.(1565)

And, withal, to reject a scientific hypothesis, however absurd, is to commit the one unpardonable sin! We risk it.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Section II. The Ancestors Mankind is Offered by Science

The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in Nature, and of his relations to the universe of things.(1566)

The world stands divided this day and hesitates between Divine Progenitors—be they Adam and Eve or the Lunar Pitris—and Bathybius Hæckelii, the gelatinous hermit of the briny deep. Having explained the Occult theory, it may now be compared with that of Modern Materialism. The reader is invited to choose between the two after having judged them on their respective merits.

We may derive some consolation for the rejection of our Divine Ancestors, in finding that the Hæckelian speculations receive no better treatment at the hands of strictly exact Science than do our own. Hæckel’s Phylogenesis is no less laughed at by the foes of his fantastic evolution, by other and greater Scientists, than our primeval Races will be. As du Bois‐Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily when he says that the

Ancestral trees of our race sketched in the Schöpfungsgeschichte are of about as much value as are the pedigrees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of the historical critic.

This settled, everyone will see that one hypothesis is as good as another. And as we find Hæckel himself confessing that neither Geology in its history of the past nor the ancestral history of organisms will ever “rise to the position of a real ‘exact’ science,”(1567) a large margin is thus left to Occult Science to make its annotations and lodge its protests. The world is left to choose between the teachings of Paracelsus, the “father of modern chemistry,” and those of Hæckel, the “father of the mythical Sozura.” We demand no more.

Without presuming to take part in the quarrel of such very learned Naturalists as du Bois‐Reymond and Hæckel à propos of our blood relationship to

Those ancestors [of ours] which have led up from the unicellular classes, Vermes, Acrania, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia to the Aves

—we may put a brief question or two, for the information of our readers. Availing ourselves of the opportunity, and bearing in mind Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection, etc., we would ask Science—with regard to the origin of the human and animal species—which theory of Evolution of the two herewith described is the more scientific, or the more unscientific, if so preferred.

(1) Is it that of an Evolution which starts from the beginning with sexual propagation?

(2) Or that teaching which shows the gradual development of organs; their solidification, and the procreation of each species, at first by simple easy separation from one into two or even several individuals; then a fresh development—the first step to a species of separate distinct sexes—the hermaphrodite condition; then again, a kind of parthenogenesis, “virginal reproduction,” when the egg‐cells are formed within the body, issuing from it in atomic emanations and becoming matured outside of it; until, finally, after a definite separation into sexes, the human beings begin procreating through sexual connection?

Of these two, the first “theory”—or rather, a “revealed fact”—is enunciated by all the exoteric Bibles, except the Purânas, preëminently by the Jewish Cosmogony. The second is that which is taught by the Occult Philosophy, as has been explained.

An answer is found to our question in a volume just published by Mr. Samuel Laing—the best lay exponent of Modern Science.(1568) In Chapter viii of his latest work, A Modern Zoroastrian, the author begins by twitting “all ancient religions and philosophies” for “assuming a male and female principle for their gods.” At first sight, he says:

This distinction of sex appears as fundamental as that of plant and animal.... The Spirit of God brooding over Chaos and producing the world is only a later edition, revised according to monotheistic ideas, of the far older Chaldean legend which describes the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos by the coöperation of great gods, male and female.... Thus, in the orthodox Christian creed we are taught to repeat “begotten, not made,” a phrase which is absolute nonsense, or non‐sense—that is, an instance of using words like counterfeit notes, which have no solid value of an idea behind them. For “begotten” is a very definite term, which implies the conjunction of two opposite sexes to produce a new individual.(1569)

However we may agree with the learned author as to the inadvisability of using wrong words, and the terrible anthropomorphic and phallic element in the old Scriptures—especially in the orthodox Christian Bible—nevertheless, there may be two extenuating circumstances in the case. Firstly, all these “ancient philosophies” and “modern religions” are—as has been sufficiently shown in these two Volumes—an exoteric veil thrown over the face of Esoteric Truth; and—as the direct result of this—they are allegorical, i.e., mythological in form; but still they are immensely more philosophical in essence than any of the new scientific theories, so‐called. Secondly, from the Orphic Theogony down to Ezra’s last remodelling of the Pentateuch, every old Scripture, having in its origin borrowed its facts from the East, has been subjected to constant alterations by friend and foe, until of the original version there has remained but the name, a dead shell from which the spirit had been gradually eliminated.

This alone ought to show that no religious work now extant can be understood without the help of the Archaic Wisdom, the primitive foundation on which they were all built.

But to return to the direct answer expected from Science to our direct question. It is given by the same author, when, following his train of thought on the unscientific euhemerization of the powers of Nature in ancient creeds, he pronounces a condemnatory verdict upon them in the following terms:

Science, however, makes sad havoc with this impression of sexual generation being the original and only mode of reproduction, and the microscope and dissecting knife of the naturalist introduce us to new and altogether unsuspected [?] worlds of life.

So little “unsuspected,” indeed, that the original a‐sexual “modes of reproduction” must have been known to the ancient Hindûs, at any rate—Mr. Laing’s assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. In view of the statement in the Vishnu Purâna, quoted by us elsewhere, that Daksha “established sexual intercourse as the means of multiplication,” only after a series of other “modes,” which are all enumerated therein,(1570) it becomes difficult to deny the fact. This assertion, moreover, is found, note well, in an exoteric work. Next, Mr. Laing goes on to tell us that:

By far the larger proportion of living forms, in number at any rate if not in size, have come into existence, without the aid of sexual propagation.

He then instances Hæckel’s Moneron, “multiplying by self‐division.” The next stage the author shows in the nucleated cell, “which does exactly the same thing.” The following stage is that in

Which the organism does not divide into two equal parts, but a small portion of it swells out ... and finally parts company and starts on a separate existence, which grows to the size of the parent by its inherent faculty of manufacturing fresh protoplasm from surrounding inorganic materials.(1571)

This is followed by a many‐celled organism which is formed by

Germ‐buds reduced to spores, or single cells, which are emitted from the parent.... We are now at the threshold of that system of sexual propagation, which has [now] become the rule in all the higher families of animals.... This organism, having advantages in the struggle for life, established itself permanently ... and special organs developed to meet the altered conditions. Thus at length the distinction would be firmly established of a female organ or ovary containing the egg or primitive cell from which the new being was to be developed, and a male organ supplying the fertilizing spore or cell.... This is confirmed by a study of embryology, which shows that in the human and higher animal species the distinction of sex is not developed until a considerable progress has been made in the growth of the embryo.... In the great majority of plants, and in some of the lower families of animals ... the male and female organs are developed within the same being, and they are what is called hermaphrodites. Another transition form is Parthenogenesis, or virginal reproduction, in which germ‐cells, apparently similar in all respects to egg‐cells, develop themselves into new individuals, without any fructifying element.(1572)

Of all this we are as perfectly well aware as we are aware that the above was never applied by the very learned English popularizer of Huxley‐ Hæckelian theories to the genus homo. He limits this to specks of protoplasm, plants, bees, snails, and so on. But if he would be true to the theory of descent, he must be as true to ontogenesis, in which the fundamental biogenetic law, we are told, runs as follows:

The development of the embryo (ontogeny) is a condensed and abbreviated repetition of the evolution of the race (phylogeny). This repetition is the more complete, the more the true original order of evolution (palingenesis) has been retained by continual heredity. On the other hand, this repetition is the less complete, the more by varying adaptations the later spurious development (cænogenesis) has obtained.(1573)

This shows us that every living creature and thing on Earth, including man, evolved from one common primal form. Physical man must have passed through the same stages of the evolutionary process in the various modes of procreation as other animals have done; he must have divided himself; then, hermaphrodite, have given birth parthenogenetically (on the immaculate principle) to his young ones; the next stage would be the oviparous—at first “without any fructifying element,” then “with the help of the fertilitary spore”; and only after the final and definite evolution of both sexes, would he become a distinct “male and female,” when reproduction through sexual union would grow into universal law. So far, all this is scientifically proven. There remains but one thing to be ascertained; viz., the plain and comprehensively described processes of such ante‐sexual reproduction. This is done in the Occult books, a slight outline of which has been attempted by the writer in Part I of this Volume.

Either this, or—man is a distinct being. Occult Philosophy may call him that, because of his distinctly dual nature. Science cannot do so, once that it rejects every interference save mechanical laws, and admits of no principle outside Matter. The former—Archaic Science—allows the human physical frame to have passed through every form, from the lowest to the very highest, its present one, or from the simple to the complex—to use the accepted terms. But it claims that in this Cycle, the Fourth, the frame having already existed among the types and models of Nature from the preceding Rounds—it was quite ready for man from the beginning of this Round.(1574) The Monad had but to step into the Astral Body of the Progenitors, in order that the work of physical consolidation should begin around the shadowy prototype.(1575)

What would Science say to this? It would answer, of course, that as man appeared on Earth as the latest of the mammalians, he had no need, any more than these mammals, to pass through the primitive stages of procreation as above described. His mode of procreation was already established on Earth when he appeared. In this case, we may reply: Since to this day not the remotest sign of a link between man and the animal has yet been found, then (if the Occult Doctrine is to be repudiated) he must have sprung miraculously in Nature, like a fully armed Minerva from Jupiter’s brain; and in such case the Bible is right, along with other national “revelations.” Hence the scientific scorn, so freely lavished by the author of A Modern Zoroastrian upon ancient philosophies and exoteric creeds, becomes premature and uncalled for. Nor would the sudden discovery of a “missing‐link”‐like fossil mend matters at all. For neither one such solitary specimen nor the scientific inductions therefrom, could insure its being the long‐sought‐for relic, i.e., that of an undeveloped, still a once‐speaking, Man. Something more would be required as a final proof. Besides this, even Genesis takes up man, her Adam of dust, only where the Secret Doctrine leaves her “Sons of God and Wisdom” and picks up the physical man of the Third Race. Eve is not “begotten,” but is extracted out of Adam in the manner of “Amœba A,” contracting in the middle and splitting into Amœba B—by division.(1576)

Nor has human speech developed from the various animal sounds. Hæckel’s theory that “speech arose gradually from a few simple, crude animal sounds,” as such “speech still remains amongst a few races of lowest rank,”(1577) is altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Müller, among others. He contends that no plausible explanation has yet been given as to how the “roots” of language came into existence. A human brain is necessary for human speech. And figures relating to the size of the respective brains of man and ape show how deep is the gulf which separates the two. Vogt says that the brain of the largest ape, the gorilla, measures no more than 30·51 cubic inches; while the average brains of the flat‐headed Australian natives—the lowest now of the human races—amount to 99·35 cubic inches! Figures are awkward witnesses and cannot lie. Therefore, as truly observed by Dr. F. Pfaff, whose premises are as sound and correct as his biblical conclusions are silly:

The brain of the apes most like man does not amount to quite a third of the brain of the lowest races of men: it is not half the size of the brain of a new‐born child.(1578)

From the foregoing it is thus very easy to perceive that in order to prove the Huxley‐Hæckelian theories of the descent of man, it is not one, but a great number of “missing links”—a true ladder of progressive evolutionary steps—that would have to be first found and then presented by Science to thinking and reasoning humanity, before it would abandon belief in Gods and the immortal Soul for the worship of quadrumanic ancestors. Mere myths are now greeted as “axiomatic truths.” Even Alfred Russel Wallace maintains with Hæckel that primitive man was a speechless ape‐creature. To this Prof. Joly answers:

Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus alalus whose portrait Hæckel has drawn as if he had seen and known him, whose singular and completely hypothetical genealogy he has even given, from the mere mass of living protoplasm to the man endowed with speech and a civilization analogous to that of the Australians and Papuans.(1579)

Hæckel, among other things, often comes into direct conflict with the “science of languages.” In the course of his attack on Evolutionism(1580) Prof. Max Müller stigmatized the Darwinian theory as “vulnerable at the beginning and at the end.” The fact is, that only the partial truth of many of the secondary “laws” of Darwinism is beyond question—M. de Quatrefages evidently accepting natural selection, the struggle for existence, and transformation within species, as proven not once and for ever, but only pro tempore. But it may not be amiss, perhaps, to condense the linguistic case against the “ape ancestor” theory:

Languages have their phases of growth, etc., like all else in Nature. It is almost certain that the great linguistic families pass through three stages.

(1) All words are roots and are merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical languages).

(2) One root defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element (Agglutinative).

(3) The determinative element (the determinating meaning of which has long lapsed) unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).

The problem then is: Whence these roots? Prof. Max Müller argues that the existence of these ready‐made materials of speech is a proof that man cannot be the crown of a long organic series. This potentiality of forming roots is the great crux which Materialists almost invariably avoid.

Von Hartmann explains it as a manifestation of the “Unconscious,” and admits its cogency versus mechanical Atheism. Hartmann is a fair representative of the Metaphysician and Idealist of the present age.

The argument has never been met by the non‐pantheistic Evolutionists. To say with Schmidt: “Forsooth we are to halt before the origin of language!”—is an avowal of dogmatism and of speedy defeat.(1581)

We respect those men of Science who, wise in their generation, say: The Prehistoric Past being utterly beyond our powers of direct observation, we are too honest, too devoted to the truth—or what we regard as truth—to speculate upon the unknown, giving out our unproven theories along with facts absolutely established in Modern Science.

The borderland of [metaphysical] knowledge is, therefore, best left to time, which is the best test as to truth.(1582)

This is a wise and an honest sentence in the mouth of a Materialist. But when a Hæckel, after just saying that “historical events of past time,” having “occurred many millions of years ago,(1583) ... are for ever removed from direct observation,” and that neither Geology nor Phylogeny(1584) can or will “rise to the position of a real ‘exact’ science,” then insists on the development of all organisms—“from the lowest vertebrate to the highest, from amphioxus to man”—we ask for a weightier proof than he can give. Mere “empirical sources of knowledge,” so extolled by the author of Anthropogeny—when he has to be satisfied with the qualification for his own views—are not competent to settle problems lying beyond their domain; nor is it the province of exact Science to place any reliance on them.(1585) If “empirical”—and Hæckel himself declares so repeatedly—then they are no better, nor any more reliable, in the sight of exact research, when extended into the remote past, than are our Occult teachings of the East, both having to be placed on the same level. Nor are his phylogenetic and palingenetic speculations treated any more favourably by the real Scientists, than are our cyclic repetitions of the evolution of the great in the minor races, and the original order of Evolution. For the province of exact, real Science, materialistic though it be, is to carefully avoid anything like guess‐ work, speculation which cannot be verified; in short, all suppressio veri and all suggestio falsi. The business of the men of exact Science is to observe, each in his chosen department, the phenomena of Nature; to record, tabulate, compare and classify the facts, down to the smallest minutiæ which are presented to the observation of the senses with the help of all the exquisite mechanism that modern invention supplies, not by the aid of metaphysical flights of fancy. All that he has a legitimate right to do, is to correct by the assistance of physical instruments the defects or illusions of his own coarser vision, auditory powers, and other senses. He has no right to trespass on the grounds of Metaphysics and Psychology. His duty is to verify and to rectify all the facts that fall under his direct observation; to profit by the experiences and mistakes of the Past in endeavouring to trace the working of a certain concatenation of cause and effect, which—but only by its constant and unvarying repetition—may be called a Law. This it is which a man of Science is expected to do, if he would become a teacher of men and remain true to his original programme of natural or physical Sciences. Any side path from this royal road becomes speculation.

Instead of keeping to this, what does many a so‐called man of Science do in these days? He rushes into the domain of pure Metaphysics, while deriding them. He delights in rash conclusions and calls them “a deductive law from the inductive law” of a theory based upon and drawn out of the depths of his own consciousness—that consciousness being perverted by, and honeycombed with, one‐sided Materialism. He attempts to explain the “origin” of things, which are yet embosomed only in his own conceptions. He attacks spiritual beliefs and religious traditions millenniums old, and denounces everything, save his own hobbies, as superstition. He suggests theories of the Universe, a cosmogony developed by blind, mechanical forces of Nature alone, far more miraculous and impossible than even one based upon the assumption of fiat lux ex nihilo—and tries to astonish the world by his wild theory; and this theory, being known to emanate from a scientific brain, is taken, on blind faith, as very scientific and as the outcome of Science.

Are these the opponents Occultism should dread? Most decidedly not. For such theories are treated no better by real Science than are our own by empirical Science. Hæckel, hurt in his vanity by du Bois‐Reymond, is never tired of publicly complaining of the latter’s onslaught on his fantastic theory of descent. Rhapsodizing on “the exceedingly rich storehouse of empirical evidence,” he calls those “recognized Physiologists” who oppose every speculation of his drawn from the said “storehouse”—ignorant men, and declares:

If many men, and among them even some Scientists of repute—hold that the whole of phylogeny is a castle in the air, and genealogical trees [from monkeys?] are empty plays of phantasy, they only in speaking thus demonstrate their ignorance of that wealth of empirical sources of knowledge to which reference has already been made.(1586)

We open Webster’s Dictionary and read the definitions of the word “empirical”:

Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to modern science and theory.

This applies to the Occultists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc. Again:

An empiric; one who confines himself to applying the results of his own observations only [which is Hæckel’s case]; one wanting science ... an ignorant and unlicensed practitioner; a quack; a charlatan.

No Occultist or “Magician,” has ever been treated to any worse epithets. Yet the Occultist remains on his own metaphysical grounds, and does not endeavour to rank his knowledge, the fruits of his personal observation and experience, among the exact Sciences of modern learning. He keeps within his legitimate sphere, where he is master. But what is one to think of a rank Materialist, whose duty is clearly traced before him, who uses such an expression as this:

The origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine ape, is a deductive law, that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the Theory of Descent.(1587)

A “theory” is simply a hypothesis, a speculation, and not a law. To say otherwise is one of the many liberties taken now‐a‐days by Scientists. They enunciate an absurdity, and then hide it behind the shield of Science. A deduction from theoretical speculation is nothing more than a speculation on a speculation. Sir William Hamilton has already shown that the word theory is now used

In a very loose and improper sense ... that it is convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is commonly used as another term for conjecture, whereas the terms “theory” and “theoretical” are properly used in opposition to the terms practice and practical.

But Modern Science puts an extinguisher on the latter statement, and mocks at the idea. Materialistic Philosophers and Idealists of Europe and America may be agreed with the Evolutionists as to the physical origin of man, yet it will never become a general truth with the true Metaphysician; and the latter defies the Materialists to make good their arbitrary assumptions. That the ape‐theory theme(1588) of Vogt and Darwin, on which the Huxley‐Hæckelians have of late composed such extraordinary variations, is far less scientific—because clashing with the fundamental laws of that theme itself—than ours can ever be shown to be, is very easy of demonstration. Let the reader only turn to the excellent work on Human Species by the great French Naturalist de Quatrefages, and our statement will at once be verified.

Moreover, between the Esoteric teaching concerning the Origin of Man and Darwin’s speculations, no man, unless he is a rank Materialist, will hesitate. This is the description given by Mr. Darwin of “the early progenitors of man.”

They must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles. Their limbs and bodies were also acted on by many muscles which now only occasionally reäppear, but are normally present in the Quadrumana.... The foot was then prehensile, judging from the condition of the great toe in the fœtus; and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, and frequented some warm forest‐clad land. The males had great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.(1589)

Darwin connects man with the type of the tailed catarrhines:

And consequently removes him a stage backward in the scale of evolution. The English naturalist is not satisfied to take his stand upon the ground of his own doctrines, and, like Hæckel, on this point places himself in direct variance with one of the fundamental laws which constitute the principal charm of Darwinism.

And then the learned French Naturalist proceeds to show how this fundamental law is broken. He says:

In fact, in the theory of Darwin, transmutations do not take place, either by chance or in every direction. They are ruled by certain laws which are due to the organization itself. If an organism is once modified in a given direction, it can undergo secondary or tertiary transmutations, but will still preserve the impress of the original. It is the law of permanent characterization, which alone permits Darwin to explain the filiation of groups, their characteristics, and their numerous relations. It is by virtue of this law that all the descendants of the first mollusc have been molluscs; all the descendants of the first vertebrate have been vertebrates. It is clear that this constitutes one of the foundations of the doctrine. It follows that two beings belonging to two distinct types can be referred to a common ancestor, but the one cannot be the descendant of the other.

Now man and apes present a very striking contrast in respect to type. Their organs ... correspond almost exactly term for term: but these organs are arranged after a very different plan. In man they are so arranged that he is essentially a walker, while in apes they necessitate his being a climber.... There is here an anatomical and mechanical distinction.... A glance at the page where Huxley has figured side by side a human skeleton and the skeletons of the most highly developed apes is a sufficiently convincing proof.

The consequence of these facts, from the point of view of the logical application of the law of permanent characterizations, is that man cannot be descended from an ancestor who is already characterized as an ape, any more than a catarrhine tailless ape can be descended from a tailed catarrhine. A walking animal cannot be descended from a climbing one. This was clearly understood by Vogt.

In placing man among the primates, he declares without hesitation that the lowest class of apes have passed the landmark (the common ancestor), from which the different types of this family have originated and diverged. [This ancestor of the apes, Occult Science sees in the lowest human group during the Atlantean period, as shown before.] We must, then, place the origin of man beyond the last ape [corroborating our doctrine], if we wish to adhere to one of the laws most emphatically necessary to the Darwinian theory. We then come to the prosimiæ of Hæckel, the loris, indris, etc. But these animals also are climbers; we must go further, therefore, in search of our first direct ancestor. But the genealogy by Hæckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. From men to the kangaroo the distance is certainly great. Now neither living nor extinct fauna show the intermediate types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.(1590) We know that he considers the want of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Hæckel doubtless is as little embarrassed. He admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man.

Thus, since it has been proved that, according to Darwinism itself, the origin of man must be placed beyond the eighteenth stage, and since it becomes, in consequence, necessary to fill up the gap between marsupials and man, will Hæckel admit the existence of four unknown intermediate groups instead of one? Will he complete his genealogy in this manner? It is not for me to answer.(1591)

But see Hæckel’s famous genealogy, in The Pedigree of Man, called by him the “Ancestral Series of Man.” In the “Second Division” (eighteenth stage) he describes—

Prosimiæ, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur), without marsupial bones and cloaca, with placenta.(1592)

And now turn to de Quatrefages’ The Human Species,(1593) and see his proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that the Prosimiæ of Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They cannot be the ancestors of the apes even, let alone man, according to a fundamental law of Darwin himself, as the great French Naturalist shows. But this does not dismay the “animal theorists” in the least, for self‐contradiction and paradoxes are the very soul of modern Darwinism. Witness—Mr. Huxley; having himself shown, with regard to fossil man and the “missing link,” that:

Neither in Quaternary ages nor at the present time does any intermediary being fill the gap which separates man from the Troglodyte;

and that to “deny the existence of this gap would be as reprehensible as absurd,” the great man of Science denies his own words in actu by supporting with all the weight of his scientific authority that most “absurd” of all theories—the descent of man from an ape!

Says de Quatrefages:

This genealogy is wrong throughout, and is founded on a material error.

Indeed, Hæckel bases his descent of man on the seventeenth and eighteenth stages, the Marsupialia and Prosimiæ—(genus Hæckelii?). Applying the latter term to the Lemuridæ—hence making of them animals with a placenta—he commits a zoological blunder. For after having himself divided mammals according to their anatomical differences into two groups—the indeciduata, which have no decidua (or special membrane uniting the placentæ), and the deciduata, those who possess it—he includes the Prosimiæ in the latter group. Now we have shown elsewhere what other men of Science had to say to this. As de Quatrefages says:

The anatomical investigations of ... Milne Edwards and Grandidier upon the animals ... place it beyond all doubt that the Prosimiæ of Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They are indeciduata. Far from any possibility of their being the ancestors of the apes, according to the principles laid down by Hæckel himself, they cannot even be regarded as the ancestors of the zonoplacental mammals ... and ought to be connected with the Pachydermata, the Edentata, and the Cetacea.(1594)

And yet Hæckel’s inventions pass with some as exact Science!

The above mistake, if indeed it be one, is not even hinted at in Hæckel’s Pedigree of Man, translated by Aveling. If the excuse may stand good that at the time the famous “genealogies” were made, “the embryogenesis of the Prosimiæ was not known,” it is familiar now. We shall see whether the next edition of Aveling’s translation will have this important error rectified, or if the seventeenth and eighteenth stages will remain as they are to blind the profane, as one of the real intermediate links. But, as the French Naturalist observes:

Their [Darwin’s and Hæckel’s] process is always the same, considering the unknown as a proof in favour of their theory.

It comes to this. Grant to man an immortal Spirit and Soul; endow the whole animate and inanimate creation with the monadic principle gradually evolving from latent and passive into active and positive polarity—and Hæckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.

But there are important divergencies even between Darwin and Hæckel. While the former makes us proceed from the tailed catarrhine, Hæckel traces our hypothetical ancestor to the tailless ape, though, at the same time, he places him in a hypothetical “stage” immediately preceding this—Menocerca with tails (nineteenth stage).

Nevertheless, we have one thing in common with the Darwinian school, that is the law of gradual and extremely slow Evolution, embracing many million years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with regard to the nature of the primitive “ancestor.” We shall be told that the Dhyân Chohan, or the “progenitor” of Manu, is a hypothetical being unknown on the physical plane. We reply that it was believed in by the whole of Antiquity, and is by nine‐tenths of the present humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid man, or ape‐man, a purely hypothetical creature of Hæckel’s creation, unknown and untraceable on this Earth, but further its genealogy—as invented by him—clashes with scientific facts and all the known data of modern discovery in Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages demonstrates in a few words, Hæckel “admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man”—a hundred times more difficult to accept than any Deva ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he proceeds in a similar manner in order to complete his genealogical table. In fact he very naïvely admits his inventions himself. Does he not confess the non‐existence of his Sozura (fourteenth stage)—a creature entirely unknown to Science—by confessing over his own signature, that:

The proof of its existence arises from the necessity of an intermediate type between the thirteenth and the fourteenth stages[!].

If so, we might maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of the existence of our three ethereal Races, and of the three‐eyed men of the Third and Fourth Root‐Races, “arises also from the necessity of an intermediate type” between the animal and the Gods. What reason would the Hæckelians have to protest in this special case?

Of course there is a ready answer: Because we do not grant the presence of the Monadic Essence. The manifestation of the Logos as individual consciousness in the animal and human creation is not accepted by exact Science, nor does it cover the whole ground, of course. But the failures of Science and its arbitrary assumptions are far greater on the whole than any “extravagant” Esoteric doctrine can ever furnish.(1595) Even thinkers of the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general epidemic. They accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though they also postulate the individual Ego as a manifestation of the Unconscious (the Western presentation of the Logos or Primeval Divine Thought). They say the evolution of the physical man is from the animal, but that mind in its various phases is altogether a thing apart from material facts, though organism, as a Upâdhi, is necessary for its manifestation.

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Plastidular Souls, And Conscious Nerve‐Cells

But one can never see the end of such wonders with Hæckel and his school, whom the Occultists and Theosophists have every right to consider as materialistic tramps trespassing on private metaphysical grounds. Not satisfied with the paternity of Bathybius (Hæckelii), “plastidular souls” and “atom‐souls”(1596) are now invented, on the basis of purely blind mechanical forces of matter. We are informed that:

The study of the evolution of soul‐life shows us that this has worked its way up from the lower stages of the simple cell‐soul, through an astonishing series of gradual stages in evolution, up to the soul of man.(1597)

“Astonishing,” truly—based as this wild speculation is on the consciousness of the “nerve cells.” For as he tells us:

Little as we are in a position, at the present time, to explain fully the nature of consciousness,(1598) yet the comparative and genetic observation of it clearly shows, that it is only a higher and more complex function of the nerve cells.(1599)

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s song on consciousness—is sung, it seems, and may henceforth be safely stored up in the lumber room of obsolete speculations. Where, however, do Hæckel’s “complex functions” of his scientific “nerve‐cells” land him? Once more right into the Occult and mystic teachings of the Kabalah about the descent of Souls as conscious and unconscious Atoms; among the Pythagorean Monad and the Monads of Leibnitz, and the “Gods, Monads, and Atoms” of our Esoteric teaching;(1600) into the dead letter of Occult teachings, left to the amateur Kabalists and professors of ceremonial Magic. For this is what he says, in explaining his newly‐coined terminology:

Plastidule‐Souls. The plastidules or protoplasmic molecules, the smallest, homogeneous parts of the protoplasm are, on our plastid theory, to be regarded as the active factors of all life‐ functions. The plastidular soul differs from the inorganic molecular soul in that it possesses memory.(1601)

This he develops in his mirific lecture on the “Perigenesis of Plastidule, or the Wave‐motions of Living Particles.” It is an improvement on Darwin’s theory of “Pangenesis,” and a further approach, a cautious move, towards “Magic.” The former is a conjecture that:

Some of the actual identical atoms which formed part of ancestral bodies are thus transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation, so that we are literally “flesh of the flesh” of the primeval creature who has developed into man

—explains the author of A Modern Zoroastrian.(1602) The latter, Occultism, teaches that—(a) the life‐atoms of our (Prâna) Life‐ Principle, are never entirely lost when a man dies. That the atoms best impregnated with the Life‐Principle, an independent, eternal, conscious factor, are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity, and are partially drawn once more together and become the animating principle of the new body in every new incarnation of the Monads. Because (b), as the Individual Soul is ever the same, so are the atoms of the lower principles (the body, its astral, or life‐double, etc.), drawn as they are by affinity and Karmic law always to the same individuality in a series of various bodies.(1603)

To be just and, to say the least, logical, our modern Hæckelians ought to pass a resolution that henceforth the “Perigenesis of the Plastidule,” and other similar lectures, should be bound up with those on “Esoteric Buddhism” and “The Seven Principles in Man.” Thus the public will have a chance, at any rate, of comparing the two teachings and then of judging which is the more or the less absurd, even from the standpoint of materialistic and exact Science.

Now the Occultists, who trace every atom in the Universe, whether an aggregate or single, to One Unity, the Universal Life; who do not recognize that anything in Nature can be inorganic; who know of no such thing as dead Matter—the Occultists are consistent with their doctrine of Spirit and Soul when speaking of memory in every atom, of will and sensation. But what can a Materialist mean by the qualification? The law of biogenesis, in the sense applied to it by the Hæckelians, is the result of the ignorance on the part of the man of Science of Occult Physics. We know and speak of “life‐atoms,” and of “sleeping‐atoms,” because we regard these two forms of energy—the kinetic and the potential—as produced by one and the same force, or the One Life, and regard the latter as the source and mover of all. But what is it that furnished with energy, and especially with memory, the “plastidular souls” of Hæckel? The “wave motion of living particles” becomes comprehensible on the theory of a Spiritual One Life, of a universal Vital Principle independent of our Matter, and manifesting as atomic energy only on our plane of consciousness. It is that which, individualized in the human cycle, is transmitted from father to son.

Now Hæckel, modifying Darwin’s theory, suggests “more plausibly,” as the author of A Modern Zoroastrian thinks:

That not the identical atoms, but their peculiar motions and mode of aggregation have been thus transmitted [by heredity].(1604)

If Hæckel, or any other Scientist, knew more than any of them does know of the nature of the atom, he would not have improved the occasion in this way. For he only states, in more metaphysical language than Darwin, one and the same thing. The Life‐Principle, or Life Energy, which is omnipresent, eternal, indestructible, is a Force and a Principle as noumenon, while it is Atoms, as phenomenon. It is one and the same thing, and cannot be considered as separate except in Materialism.(1605)

Further, Hæckel enunciates concerning the Atom‐Souls that which, at first sight, appears as occult as the Monad of Leibnitz:

The recent contest as to the nature of atoms, which we must regard as in some form or other the ultimate factors in all physical and chemical processes, seems to be capable of easiest settlement by the conception that these very minute masses possess, as centres of force, a persistent soul, that every atom has sensation and the power of movement.(1606)

He does not say a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz’ theory, and one that is preëminently Occult. Nor does he understand the term “soul” as we do; for, with Hæckel it is simply, along with consciousness, the product of the grey matter of the brain, a thing which, as the cell‐ soul

Is as indissolubly bound up with the protoplasmic body as is the human soul with the brain and spinal cord.(1607)

He rejects the conclusions of Kant, Herbert Spencer, of du Bois‐Reymond and Tyndall. The latter expresses the opinion of all the great men of Science, as of the greatest thinkers of this and past ages, in saying that:

The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were our minds and senses so ... illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings ... electric discharges ... we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem.... The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.

But the complex function of the nerve‐cells of the great German Empiric, or, in other words, his consciousness, will not permit him to follow the conclusions of the greatest thinkers of our globe. He is greater than they. He asserts this, and protests against all:

No one has the right to hold that in the future we shall not be able to pass beyond these limits of our knowledge that to‐day seem impassable.(1608)

And he quotes from Darwin’s introduction to The Descent of Man the following words, which he modestly applies to his scientific opponents and himself:

It is always those who know little, and not those who know much, that positively affirm that this or that problem will never be solved by Science.

The world may rest satisfied. The day is not far off when the “thrice great” Hæckel will have shown, to his own satisfaction, that the consciousness of Sir Isaac Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the reflex action (or minus consciousness) caused by the perigenesis of the plastidules of our common ancestor and old friend, the Moneron Hæckelii. Though, the said Bathybius has been found out and exposed as a pretender simulating the organic substance it is not, and though among the children of men, Lot’s wife alone—and even this, only after her disagreeable metamorphosis—could claim as her forefather the pinch of salt it is; all this will not dismay him in the least. He will go on asserting, as coolly as he has always done, that it was only the peculiar mode and motion of the ghost of the long‐vanished atoms of our Father Bathybius, which—transmitted across æons of time into the cell‐tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man—caused Sophocles and Æschylus, and Shakspere as well, to write their tragedies, Newton, his Principia, Humboldt, his Cosmos, etc. It also prompted Hæckel to invent Græco‐Latin names three inches long, pretending to mean a good deal, and meaning—nothing.

Of course we are quite aware that the true, honest Evolutionist agrees with us; and that he is the first to say that not only is the geological record imperfect, but that there are enormous gaps in the series of hitherto discovered fossils, which can never be filled. He will tell us, moreover, that “no Evolutionist assumes that man is descended from any existing ape or any extinct ape either,” but that man and apes originated probably æons back, in some common root stock. Still, as de Quatrefages points out, he will urge as an evidence corroborating his claim this wealth of absent proofs as well, saying that:

All living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the chances of preservation being few and far between ... [even primitive man] burying or burning his dead.

This is just what we ourselves claim. It is just as possible that the future may have in store for us the discovery of the giant skeleton of an Atlantean, thirty feet high, as of the fossil of a pithecoid “missing link”; only the former is more probable.

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Section III. The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape

A. Geological Facts Bearing On The Question Of Their Relationship.

The data derived from scientific research as to “primeval man” and the ape lend no countenance to theories deriving the former from the latter. “Where, then, must we look for primeval man?”—still queries Mr. Huxley, after having vainly searched for him in the very depths of the Quaternary strata.

Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any yet known, await the researches of some unborn palæontologist? Time will show.(1609)

It will—undeniably—and thus vindicate the Anthropology of the Occultists. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin’s Descent of Man, Mr. Boyd Dawkins believes that he has all but found the “missing link”—in theory. It was due to Theologians more than to Geologists that, till nearly 1860, man had been considered as a relic no older than the Adamic orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma would have it, though, it was left to a French Abbé—Bourgeois—to give this easy‐going theory even a worse blow than had been given to it by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Everyone knows that the Abbé discovered and brought to light good evidence that man was already in existence during the Miocene period, for flints of undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene strata. In the words of the author of Modern Science and Modern Thought:

They must either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, by the dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla or chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools. But in this case the problem would be solved and the missing link discovered, for such an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palæolithic man.(1610)

Or—the descendant of Eocene man, which is a variant offered to the theory. Meanwhile, the dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even Palæolithic man having become an absolute certainty, and as the same author justly observes:

If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since the earth became sufficiently solidified to support vegetable and animal life, the Tertiary period may have lasted for 5,000,000; or for 10,000,000 years, if the life‐sustaining order of things has lasted, as Lyell supposes for at least 200,000,000 years—(1611)

why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as a hypothesis, to the close of Mesozoic times—admitting argumenti causâ that the (much more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow ample time for man and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical “ape more anthropoid,” and even for the latter to have degenerated into those that are found mimicking man in using “branches of trees as clubs, and cracking cocoa‐nuts with hammer and stones.”(1612) Some savage tribes of hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas build their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting Mr. Boyd Dawkins’ theory. The fanciful character of this hypothesis, is, however, generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and Miocene periods there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably contemporaneous with the former of these times—though, as we see, orthodox Anthropology still hesitates, in the teeth of facts, to place him in the era of the dryopithecus, which latter—

Has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla ... (1613)

yet, in the Eocene there have been no other fossil primates unearthed and no pithecoid stocks found save a few extinct lemurian forms. And we find it also hinted that the dryopithecus may have been the “missing link,” though the brain of the creature no more warrants the theory than does the brain of the modern gorilla. (See also Gaudry’s speculations.)

Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence in the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence any farther back than six or seven thousand years was indignantly denied. Now he is refused admission into the Eocene age. Next century it may become a question whether man was not contemporary with the “flying dragon,” the pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon, etc. Let us listen, however, to the echo of Science.

Now, wherever anthropoid apes lived it is clear that, whether as a question of anatomical structure, or of climate and surroundings, man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they resemble bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, and the physical animal man is simply an instance of the quadrumanous type specialized for erect posture and a larger brain(1614).... If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why he might not have lived in the semi‐tropical climate of the Miocene period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen.(1615)

When most of the men of Science who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of man from an “extinct anthropoid mammal;” will not accept even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the circumstances, i.e., without immediate danger of getting knocked off one’s feet by the tidal wave of science‐adulation. Believing that the difficulty of accounting—

For the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure(1616) between man and the highest animal—

the same author says:

But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the average European man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or crétin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape.

If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated.... But to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it ... in other words ... the “missing link.” Now it must be admitted that, hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human skulls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such pre‐human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the sepulchral cave of Cro‐Magnon,(1617) is that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance.... All this is true, and it may well make us hesitate before we admit that man ... is alone an exception to the general law of the universe, and is the creature of a special creation. This is the more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man so closely resembles [?] in physical structure contains 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. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different species of apes and monkeys which are all built on the same lines?(1618)

There was a “special creation” for man, and a “special creation” for the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded as the crown of an ape‐stock. When one finds that not only was the “primeval savage” (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the dryopithecus, alone of the anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very man‐like gibbon is still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it coëxisted with man at the close of the Glacial period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to choose between the dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids—gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all‐sufficient, how are we to “explain” the evolution of this ape into man during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable—more especially on the “natural selection” hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal anthropoid, is too great to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period. Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both man and dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of Hæckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to be found by an appeal to the “unknown,” and a reference, with Darwin, to the “imperfection of the geological record”? So be it; but the same right of appeal must then be equally accorded to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of puzzled Materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a period when the Hæckelian man‐ape is conceived as roaming through primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen’s putative ancestor as swinging himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean Giants, “blurred copies” of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man, according to Huxley, now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science.

Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some in Southern Asia, others again believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a simian ancestry. Hæckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his prosimia, “the ancestor common to all other catarrhini including man”—a “link” now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries—he endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval pithecanthropus alalus.

In all probability it [the transformation of animal into man] occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of man. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into ape‐like men took place was probably the last part of the Tertiary period, the Pliocene age, and perhaps the Miocene age, its forerunner.(1619)

Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind—of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long æons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Hæckel the “dumb ape‐men,” just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait‐statues, two of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Hæckelian doctrines “abominable, revolutionary, immoral”—though Materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape‐ancestor myth—they are simply too absurd to demand disproof.

B. Western Evolutionism: The Comparative Anatomy Of Man And The Anthropoid In No Way A Confirmation Of Darwinism.

We are told that while every other heresy against Modern Science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to man, will be the one “unpardonable” sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.

Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Râmâyana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanumân, the Monkey‐God, “whose feats were great and wisdom never rivalled,” must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Hæckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes have been written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new given to the world or to philosophy in such volumes as Mivart’s Man and Apes, or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley’s defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man’s descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one, we are told, if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we must explain the reason of:

(i) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the higher animal world—man and beast—is physically of one type or pattern.

(ii) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except in a semi‐animal, semi‐arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in man those “rudimentary” organs—as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the apteryx of Australia—the vermiform appendix of the cæcum, the ear muscles,(1620) the “rudimentary tail” with which children are still sometimes born, etc.?

Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves!

Furthermore, the latter—with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent Zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others—while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of Science as the above‐named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled‐for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, Owen, Pruner‐Bey, and finally at the last great work of de Quatrefages, _Introduction à __ l’Étude des Races Humaines, Questions Générales_, to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning this alleged similarity of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley has found himself forced to protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great Anatomist personally who called the “smaller fry” to order, by declaring in one of his articles that the differences between the structure of the human body and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive:

Every bone of a gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of a man.(1621)

Among the existing creatures there is not one single intermediate form that could fill the gap between man and the ape. To ignore that gap, he added, “would be no less wrong than absurd.”

Finally, the absurdity of such an unnatural descent of man is so palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence as to the skull of the pithecoid compared to that of man, that de Quatrefages resorted unconsciously to our Esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes that can claim descent from man than vice versâ. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids—in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development of the said organs in the apes—the size of the human skull and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus becoming more and more spiritualized; whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far more intelligent and good‐natured, while with age it becomes duller; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely back, to make with every day more room for the animal type. The organ of thought—the brain—recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced by that of the wild beast—the jaw apparatus.

Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla could with perfect justice address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from him. It would say to him: We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from a human‐like to an animal‐like structure of organism; but in what way could you, men, descend from us—how can you form a continuation of our genus? For, to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms of a higher organization than our own.

This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatrefages. Owing to the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an ancestor common to both apes and men, but shows his origin to be from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the “Heavenly Man”—the Dhyân Chohans, or the Pitris so‐called, as shown in the first Part of this Volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang‐outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root‐Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal—whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality—which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi‐human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “mind‐less” races of the middle Third Race period.

When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the Earth are so many variations on basic types originally thrown off by the Man of the Third and Fourth Round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the “unity of structural plan” characterizing all vertebrates, loses its edge. The basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a general unity of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. The economy of Nature does not sanction the coëxistence of several utterly opposed “ground plans” of organic evolution on one planet. Once, however, that the general drift of the Occult explanation is formulated, inference as to detail may well be left to the intuitive reader.

Similarly with the important question of the “rudimentary” organs discovered by Anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded by Darwin and Hæckel against their European adversaries, proved of great weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of gill‐clefts, with the “tail” problem, and so on. Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary data.

The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate. In this postulate we find a true “evolution” or “unfolding”—in a sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of Natural Selection. Criticizing Darwin’s inference from “rudiments,” an able writer remarks:

Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that man was first created with these rudimentary sketches in his organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man degenerated, as it is to suppose that these parts existed in full development, activity and practical use, in the lower animals out of whom man was generated?(1622)

Read for “into which man degenerated,” “the prototypes which man shed in the course of his astral developments,” and an aspect of the true Esoteric solution is before us. But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.

So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks. “Evolution” has to deal with the progressive modifications, which Palæontology shows to have affected the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time. It does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of the pre‐physical types which served as the basis for future differentiation. Tabulate the general laws controlling the development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has acquitted itself ably of the task.

To return to the immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary period, were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race. They are thus post‐human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief.

But how to account for the presence of the gill‐clefts in the human fœtus, which represent the stage through which the branchiæ of the fish are developed;(1623) for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the fœtal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the “gastrula” stage, with corresponding stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for the various types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth?... How comes it to pass that stages in the life of fishes, whose ancestors swam [æons before the epoch of the First Root‐Race] in the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the “epitomized history” of human fœtal development?

This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round Man, as that new importation into our planet’s area—the mammalian stock—is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root‐Race. The process of human fœtal growth epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life. The diapason of type is run through in brief. Occultists are thus at no loss to “account for” the birth of children with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human fœtus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs. The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man—the Microcosm of the Macrocosm—and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as “reversion to ancestral features.”(1624) Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present‐day empiricists!

C. Darwinism And The Antiquity Of Man: The Anthropoids And Their Ancestry.

The public has been notified by more than one eminent modern Geologist and man of Science, that:

All estimate of geological duration is not merely imperfect, but necessarily impossible; for we are ignorant of the causes, though they must have existed, which quickened or retarded the progress of the sedimentary deposits.(1625)

And now another man of Science, as well known (Croll) calculating that the Tertiary age began either fifteen or two‐and‐a‐half million years ago—the former being a more correct calculation, according to Esoteric Doctrine, than the latter—there seems in this case, at least, no very great disagreement. Exact Science, refusing to see in man a “special creation” (to a certain degree the Secret Sciences do the same), is at liberty to ignore the first three, or rather two‐and‐a‐half Races—the spiritual, the semi‐astral, and the semi‐human—of our teachings. But it can hardly do the same in the case of the Third, at its closing period, the Fourth, and the Fifth Races, since it already divides mankind into Palæolithic and Neolithic man.(1626) The Geologists of France place man in the Mid‐Miocene age (Gabriel de Mortillet), and some even in the Secondary period, as de Quatrefages suggests; while the English savants do not generally accept such antiquity for their species. But they may know better some day. For, as says Sir Charles Lyell:

If we consider the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether marine or fresh‐water, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by millions of human beings, we shall be prepared for the general dearth of human memorials in glacial formations, whether recent, pleistocene, or of more ancient date. If there were a few wanderers over lands covered with glaciers, or over seas infested with icebergs, and if a few of them left their bones or weapons in moraines or in marine drifts, the chances, after the lapse of thousands of years, of a geologist meeting with one of them must be infinitesimally small.(1627)

The men of Science avoid pinning themselves down to any definite statement concerning the age of man, as indeed they are hardly able to make any, and thus leave enormous latitude to bolder speculations. Nevertheless, while the majority of the Anthropologists carry back the existence of man only into the period of the post‐glacial drift, or what is called the Quaternary period, those of them who, as Evolutionists, trace man to a common origin with the monkey, do not show great consistency in their speculations. The Darwinian hypothesis demands, in reality, a far greater antiquity for man, than is even dimly suspected by superficial thinkers. This is proven by the greatest authorities on the question—Mr. Huxley, for instance. Those, therefore, who accept the Darwinian evolution, ipso facto hold very tenaciously to an antiquity of man so very great, indeed, that it falls not so far short of the Occultist’s estimate.(1628) The modest thousands of years of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the 100,000 years, to which Anthropology in general limits the age of Humanity, seem quite microscopical when compared with the figures implied in Mr. Huxley’s bold speculations. The former, indeed, makes of the original race of men ape‐like cave‐dwellers. The great English Biologist, in his desire to prove man’s pithecoid origin, insists that the transformation of the primordial ape into a human being must have occurred millions of years back. For in criticizing the excellent cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, notwithstanding his assertion that it is overlaid with “pithecoid bony walls,” coupled with Mr. Grant Allen’s assurances that this skull—

Possesses large bosses on the forehead, strikingly [?] suggestive of those which give the gorilla its peculiarly fierce appearance(1629)—

still Mr. Huxley is forced to admit that, in the said skull, his theory is once more defeated by the—

Completely human proportions of the accompanying limb‐bones, together with the fair development of the Engis skull.

In consequence of all this we are notified that these skulls—

Clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has proceeded, need no longer be sought by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development in the newest Tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the elephas primigenius than that is from us.(1630)

An untold antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific sine quâ non in the question of Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palæolithic man shows as yet no appreciable differentiation from his modern descendant. It is only of late that Modern Science has with every year begun to widen the abyss that now separates her from ancient Science, as that of Pliny and Hippocrates; none of the old writers would have derided the Archaic Teachings with respect to the evolution of the human races and animal species, as the present day Scientist—Geologist or Anthropologist—is sure to do.

The pendulum of thought oscillates between extremes. Having now finally emancipated herself from the shackles of Theology, Science has embraced the opposite fallacy; and in the attempt to interpret Nature on purely materialistic lines, she has built up that most extravagant theory of the ages—the derivation of man from a ferocious and brutal ape. So rooted has this doctrine now become, in one form and another, that the most Herculean efforts will be needed to bring about its final rejection. The Darwinian Anthropology is the incubus of the Ethnologist, a sturdy child of modern Materialism, which has grown up and acquired increasing vigour, as the ineptitude of the theological legend of Man’s “creation” became more and more apparent. It has thriven on account of the strange delusion that—as a Scientist of repute puts it:

All hypotheses and theories with respect to the rise of man can be reduced to two [the evolutionist and the biblical exoteric account].... There is no other hypothesis conceivable [!!].

The anthropology of the Secret Volumes is, however, the best possible answer to such a worthless contention.

The anatomical resemblance between man and the higher ape, so frequently cited by Darwinists as pointing to some former ancestor common to both, presents an interesting problem, the proper solution of which is to be sought for in the Esoteric explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid stocks. We have given it as far as it was useful, by stating that the bestiality of the primeval mindless races resulted in the production of huge man‐like monsters—the offspring of human and animal parents. As time rolled on, and the still semi‐astral forms consolidated into the physical, the descendants of these creatures were modified by external conditions, until the breed, dwindling in size, culminated in the lower apes of the Miocene period. With these the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the “Mindless”—this time with full responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the apes now known as anthropoid.

It may be useful to compare this very simple theory—and we are willing to offer it merely as a hypothesis to the unbelievers—with the Darwinian scheme, so full of insurmountable obstacles, that no sooner is one of them overcome by a more or less ingenious hypothesis, than ten worse difficulties are forthwith discovered behind the one disposed of.

Section IV. Duration of the Geological Periods, Race Cycles, and the Antiquity of Man.

Millions of years have sunk into Lethe, leaving no more recollection in the memory of the profane than the few millenniums of the orthodox Western chronology as to the Origin of Man and the history of the primeval races.

All depends on the proofs found for the antiquity of the Human Race. If the still‐debated man of the Pliocene or even the Miocene period was the Homo primigenius, then Science may be right (argumenti causâ) in basing its present Anthropology—as to the date and mode of origin of Homo sapiens—on the Darwinian theory.(1631) But if the skeletons of man should at any time be discovered in the Eocene strata, while no fossil ape is found there, and the existence of man is thus proved to be prior to that of the anthropoid—then Darwinians will have to exercise their ingenuity in another direction. Moreover, it is said in well‐informed quarters that the twentieth century will be still in its earliest teens when such undeniable proof of man’s priority will be forthcoming.

Even now much evidence is being brought forward to prove that the dates hitherto assigned for the foundations of cities, civilizations and various other historical events have been absurdly curtailed. This was done as a peace‐offering to biblical chronology. The well‐known Palæontologist Ed. Lartet writes:

No date is to be found in Genesis, which assigns a time for the birth of primitive humanity.

But Chronologists have for fifteen centuries endeavoured to force the Bible facts into agreement with their systems. Thus, no less than one hundred and forty different opinions have been formed about the single date of “Creation.”

And between the extreme variations there is a discrepancy of 3,194 years, in the reckoning of the period between the beginning of the world and the birth of Christ. Within the last few years, archæologists have had also to throw back by nearly 3,000 years the beginnings of Babylonian civilization. On the foundation cylinder deposited by Nabonidus, the Babylonian king, conquered by Cyrus—are found the records of the former, in which he speaks of his discovery of the foundation stone that belonged to the original temple built by Naram‐Sin, son of Sargon, of Accadia, the conqueror of Babylonia, who, says Nabonidus, lived 3,200 years before his own time.(1632)

We have shown in Isis Unveiled that those who based history on the chronology of the Jews—a race which had none of its own and rejected the Western till the twelfth century—would lose their way, for the Jewish account could only be followed through kabalistic computation, and only then with key in hand. We characterized the late George Smith’s chronology of the Chaldæans and Assyrians, which he had made to fit in with that of Moses, as quite fantastic. And now, in this respect at least, later Assyriologists have corroborated our denial. For, whereas George Smith makes Sargon I (the prototype of Moses) reign in the city of Akkad about 1600 B.C.—probably out of a latent respect for Moses, whom the Bible makes to flourish 1571 B.C.—we now learn from the first of the six Hibbert Lectures delivered by Professor A. H. Sayce, of Oxford, in 1887, that:

Old views of the early annals of Babylonia and its religions have been much modified by recent discovery. The first Semitic Empire, it is now agreed, was that of Sargon of Accad, who established a great library, patronized literature, and extended his conquests across the sea into Cyprus. It is now known that he reigned as early as B.C. 3,750.... The Accadian monuments found by the French at Tel‐loh must be even older, reaching back to about B.C. 4,000.

In other words, to the fourth year of the World’s creation agreeably with Bible chronology, and when Adam was in his swaddling clothes. Perchance, in a few years more, the 4,000 years may be further extended. The well‐ known Oxford lecturer remarked in his disquisitions upon “The Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians,” that:

The difficulties of systematically tracing the origin and history of the Babylonian Religion were considerable. The sources of our knowledge of the subject were almost wholly monumental, very little help being obtainable from classical or Oriental writers. Indeed, it was an undeniable fact that the Babylonian priesthood intentionally swaddled up the study of the religious texts in coils of almost insuperable difficulty.

That they have confused the dates, and especially the order of events “intentionally,” is undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings and records were all Esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the priests of other ancient nations. Their records were meant only for the Initiates and their disciples, and it is only the latter who were furnished with the keys to the true meaning. But Professor Sayce’s remarks are promising. For he explains the difficulty by saying that as:

The Nineveh library contained mostly copies of older Babylonian texts, and the copyists pitched upon such tablets only as were of special interest to the Assyrian conquerors, belonging to a comparatively late epoch, this added much to the greatest of all our difficulties—namely, our being so often left in the dark as to the age of our documentary evidence, and the precise worth of our materials for history.

Thus one has a right to infer that some still fresher discovery may lead to a new necessity for pushing the Babylonian dates so far beyond the year 4,000 B.C., as to make them pre‐cosmic in the judgment of every Bible worshipper.

How much more would Palæontology have learned had not millions of works been destroyed! We talk of the Alexandrian Library, which has been thrice destroyed, namely, by Julius Cæsar 48 B.C., in A.D. 390, and lastly in the year A.D. 640 by the general of Kaliph Omar. What is this in comparison with the works and records destroyed in the primitive Atlantean Libraries, wherein records are said to have been traced on the tanned skins of gigantic antediluvian monsters? Or again in comparison with the destruction of the countless Chinese books by command of the founder of the Imperial Tsin dynasty, Tsin Shi Hwang‐ti, in 213 B.C.? Surely the brick‐clay tablets of the Imperial Babylonian Library, and the priceless treasures of the Chinese collections, could never have contained such information as one of the aforesaid “Atlantean” skins would have furnished to the ignorant world.

But even with the extremely meagre data at hand, Science has been able to see the necessity of throwing back nearly every Babylonian date, and has done so quite generously. We learn from Professor Sayce that even the archaic statues at Tel‐loh, in Lower Babylonia, have suddenly been assigned a date contemporary with the fourth dynasty in Egypt.(1633) Unfortunately, dynasties and pyramids share the fate of geological periods; their dates are arbitrary, and depend on the whims of the respective men of Science. Archæologists know now, it is said, that the afore‐mentioned statues are fashioned out of green diorite, that can only be got in the Peninsula of Sinai; and

They accord in the style of art, and in the standard of measurement employed, with the similar diorite statues of the pyramid builders of the third and fourth Egyptian dynasties.... Moreover, the only possible period for a Babylonian occupation of the Sinaitic quarries must be placed shortly after the close of the epoch at which the pyramids were built; and thus only can we understand how the name of Sinai could have been derived from that of Sin, the primitive Babylonian moon‐god.

This is very logical, but what is the date fixed for these dynasties? Sanchuniathon’s and Manetho’s synchronistic tables—or whatever remained of these after holy Eusebius had the handling of them—have been rejected; and still we have to remain satisfied with the four or five thousand years B.C., so liberally allotted to Egypt. At all events one point is gained. There is, at last, a city on the face of the Earth which is allowed, at least, 6,000 years, and it is Eridu. Geology has discovered it. According to Professor Sayce again:

They are now also able to obtain time for the silting up of the head of the Persian Gulf, which demands a lapse of between 5,000 and 6,000 years since the period when Eridu, now twenty‐five miles inland, was the seaport at the mouth of the Euphrates, and the seat of Babylonian commerce with Southern Arabia and India. More than all, the new chronology gives time for the long series of eclipses recorded in the great astronomical work called “The Observations of Bel”; and we are also enabled to understand the otherwise perplexing change in the position of the vernal equinox, which has occurred since our present zodiacal signs were named by the earliest Babylonian astronomers. When the Accadian calendar was arranged and the Accadian months were named, the sun at the vernal equinox was not, as now, in Pisces, or even in Aries, but in Taurus. The rate of the precession of the equinoxes being known, we learn that at the vernal equinox the sun was in Taurus from about 4,700 years B.C., and we thus obtain astronomical limits of date which cannot be impugned.(1634)

It may make our position plainer if we state at once that we use Sir C. Lyell’s nomenclature for the ages and periods, and that when we talk of the Secondary and Tertiary age, of the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene periods—this is simply to make our facts more comprehensible. Since these ages and periods have not yet been allowed fixed and determined durations, two‐and‐a‐half and fifteen million years being assigned at different times to one and the same age (the Tertiary); and since no two Geologists or Naturalists seem to agree on this point—Esoteric Teachings may remain quite indifferent to the appearance of man in the Secondary or the Tertiary age. If the latter age may be allowed even so much as fifteen million years’ duration—well and good; for the Occult Doctrine, jealously guarding its real and correct figures so far as concerns the First, Second, and two‐thirds of the Third Root‐Race, gives clear information upon one point only—the age of Vaivasvata Manu’s humanity.(1635)

Another definite statement is that during the so‐called Eocene period the Continent to which the Fourth Race belonged, and on which it lived and perished, showed the first symptoms of sinking, and that it was in the Miocene age that it was finally destroyed—save the small island mentioned by Plato. These points have now to be checked by scientific data.

A. Modern Scientific Speculations About The Ages Of The Globe, Animal Evolution, And Man.

May we not be permitted to throw a glance at the works of specialists? The work on World‐Life: Comparative Geology, by Prof. A. Winchell, furnishes us with curious data. Here we find an opponent of the nebular theory smiting with all the force of the hammer of his odium theologicum on the rather contradictory hypotheses of the great stars of Science, in the matter of sidereal and cosmic phenomena based on their respective relations to terrestrial durations. The “too imaginative physicists and naturalists” do not fare very easily under this shower of their own speculative computations placed side by side, and cut rather a sorry figure. Thus he writes:

Sir William Thompson, on the basis of the observed principles of cooling, concludes that no more than 10 million years [elsewhere he makes it 100,000,000] can have elapsed since the temperature of the earth was sufficiently reduced to sustain vegetable life.(1636) Helmholz calculates that 20 million years would suffice for the original nebula to condense to the present dimensions of the sun. Prof. S. Newcomb requires only 10 millions to attain a temperature of 212° Fahr.(1637) Croll estimates 70 million years for the diffusion of the heat....(1638) Bischof calculates that 350 million years would be required for the earth to cool from a temperature of 2,000° to 200° Centigrade. Reade, basing his estimate on observed rates of denudation, demands 500 million years since sedimentation began in Europe.(1639) Lyell ventured a rough guess of 240 million years; Darwin thought 300 million years demanded by the organic transformations which his theory contemplates, and Huxley is disposed to demand 1,000 millions [!!].... Some biologists ... seem to close their eyes tight and leap at one bound into the abyss of millions of years, of which they have no more adequate estimate than of infinity.(1640)

Then he proceeds to give what he takes to be more correct geological figures: a few will suffice.

According to Sir William Thompson “the whole incrusted age of the world is 80,000,000 years”; and agreeably with Prof. Houghton’s calculations of a minimum limit for the time since the elevation of Europe and Asia, three hypothetical ages for three possible and different modes of upheaval are given, varying from the modest figure of 640,730 years, through 4,170,000 years to the tremendous figure of 27,491,000 years!!

This is enough, as one can see, to cover our claims for the four Continents and even the figures of the Brâhmans.

Further calculations, the details of which the reader may find in Prof. Winchell’s work,(1641) bring Houghton to an approximation of the sedimentary age of the globe—11,700,000 years. These figures are found too small by the author, who forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.

Again, according to Croll,(1642) 2,500,000 years “represents the time since the beginning of the Tertiary age” in one work; and according to another modification of his view, 15,000,000 only have elapsed since the beginning of the Eocene period,(1643) this, being the first of the three Tertiary periods, leaves the student suspended between two‐and‐a‐half and fifteen millions. But if one has to hold to the former moderate figures, then the whole incrusted age of the world would be 131,600,000 years.(1644)

As the last Glacial period extended from 240,000 to 80,000 years ago (Prof. Croll’s view), therefore, man must have appeared on Earth from 100,000 to 120,000 years ago. But, as says Prof. Winchell with reference to the antiquity of the Mediterranean race:

It is generally believed to have made its appearance during the later decline of the continental glaciers. It does not concern, however, the antiquity of the Black and Brown races, since there are numerous evidences of their existence in more southern regions, in times remotely pre‐glacial.(1645)

As a specimen of geological certainty and agreement, these figures also may be added. Three authorities—Messrs. T. Belt, F.G.S., Robert Hunt, F.R.S., and J. Croll, F.R.S.,—in estimating the time that has elapsed since the Glacial epoch, give figures that vary to an almost incredible extent:

Belt: 20,000 years. Hunt: 80,000 years Croll: 240,000 years(1646)

No wonder that Mr. Pengelly confesses that:

It is at present and perhaps always will be impossible to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even into millenniums.

A wise word of advice from the Occultists to the gentlemen Geologists; they ought to imitate the cautious example of Masons. As chronology, they say, cannot measure the era of the creation, therefore, their “Antient and Primitive Rite” uses 000,000,000 as the nearest approach to reality.

The same uncertainty, contradictions and disagreement reign on all other subjects.

The scientific authorities on the Descent of Man are again, for all practical purposes, a delusion and a snare. There are many Anti‐Darwinists in the British Association, and Natural Selection begins to lose ground. Though at one time the saviour, which seemed to rescue the learned theorists from a final intellectual collapse into the abyss of fruitless hypothesis, it begins to be distrusted. Even Mr. Huxley is showing signs of truancy, and thinks “natural selection not the sole factor”:

We greatly suspect that she [Nature] does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.(1647)

Again, C. R. Bree, M.D., argues in this wise in considering the fatal gaps in Mr. Darwin’s theory:

It must be again called to mind that the intermediate forms must have been vast in numbers.... Mr. St. George Mivart believes that change in evolution may occur more quickly than is generally believed; but Mr. Darwin sticks manfully to his belief, and again tells us “natura non facit saltum.”(1648)

Herein the Occultists are at one with Mr. Darwin.

Esoteric teaching fully corroborates the idea of Nature’s slowness and dignified progression. “Planetary impulses” are all periodical. Yet this Darwinian theory, correct as it is in minor particulars, agrees no more with Occultism than with Mr. Wallace, who, in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, shows pretty conclusively that something more than Natural Selection is requisite to produce physical man.

Let us, meanwhile, examine the scientific objections to this scientific theory, and see what they are.

Mr. St. George Mivart is found arguing that:

It will be a moderate computation to allow 25,000,000 for the deposit of the strata down to and including the Upper Silurian. If, then, the evolutionary work done during this deposition only represents a hundredth part of the sum total, we shall require 2,500,000,000 (two thousand five hundred million) years for the complete development of the whole animal kingdom to its present state. Even one quarter of this, however, would far exceed the time which physics and astronomy seem able to allow for the completion of the process.

Finally, a difficulty exists as to the reason of the absence of rich fossiliferous deposits in the oldest strata—if life was then as abundant and varied, as, on the Darwinian theory, it must have been. Mr. Darwin himself admits “the case at present must remain inexplicable; and this may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views” entertained in his book.

Thus, then, we find a remarkable (and on Darwinian principles all but inexplicable) absence of minutely graduated transitional forms. All the most marked groups—bats, pterodactyles, chelonians, ichthyosaurians, amoura, etc.—appear at once upon the scene. Even the horse, the animal whose pedigree has been probably best preserved, affords no conclusive evidence of specific origin by significant fortuitous variations; while some forms, as the labyrinthodonts and trilobites, which seemed to exhibit gradual change, are shown by further investigation to do nothing of the sort.... All these difficulties are avoided if we admit that new forms of animal life of all degrees of complexity appear from time to time with comparative suddenness, being evolved according to laws in part depending on surrounding conditions, in part internal—similar to the way in which crystals (and, perhaps from recent researches, the lowest forms of life) build themselves up according to the internal laws of their component substance, and in harmony and correspondence with all environing influences and conditions.(1649)

“The internal laws of their component substance.” These are wise words, and the admission of the possibility is prudent. But how can these internal laws be ever recognized, if Occult teaching be discarded? As a friend writes, while drawing our attention to the above speculations:

In other words, the doctrine of Planetary Life‐Impulses must be admitted. Otherwise, why are species now stereotyped, and why do even domesticated breeds of pigeons and many animals relapse into their ancestral types when left to themselves?

But the teaching about Planetary Life‐Impulses has to be clearly defined and as clearly understood, if present confusion is not to be made still more perplexing. All these difficulties would vanish as the shadows of night disappear before the light of the rising Sun, if the following Esoteric Axioms were admitted:

(a) The existence and the enormous antiquity of our Planetary Chain;

(b) The actuality of the Seven Rounds

(c) The separation of human Races (outside the purely anthropological division) into seven distinct Root‐Races, of which our present European Humanity is the Fifth;

(d) The antiquity of man in this (Fourth) Round; and finally

(e) That as these Races evolve from ethereality to materiality, and from the latter back again into relative physical tenuity of texture, so every living (so‐called) organic species of animals, with vegetation included, changes with every new Root‐Race.

Were this admitted, if even only along with other, and surely, on maturer consideration, no less absurd, suppositions—if Occult theories have to be considered “absurd” at present—then every difficulty would be made away with. Surely Science ought to try and be more logical than it now is, as it can hardly maintain the theory of man’s descent from an anthropoidal ancestor, and deny in the same breath any reasonable antiquity to such a man! Once Mr. Huxley talks of “the vast intellectual chasm between the ape and man,” and “the present enormous gulf between them,”(1650) and admits the necessity of extending scientific allowances for the age of man on Earth for such slow and progressive development, then all those men of Science who are of his way of thinking, at any rate, ought to come to at least some approximate figures, and agree upon the probable duration of those Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene periods of which so much is said, and about which nothing definite is known—even if they dare not venture beyond. But no two Scientists seem to agree. Every period seems to be a mystery in its duration, and a thorn in the side of the Geologists; and, as just shown, they are unable to harmonize their conclusions even with regard to the comparatively recent geological formations. Thus, no reliance can be placed on their figures when they do give any, for with them it is all either millions or simply thousands of years!

That which is said may be strengthened by the confessions made by themselves and the synopsis of these, to be found in that “Circle of Sciences,” the Encyclopædia Britannica, which shows the mean accepted in the geological and anthropological riddles. In that work the cream of the most authoritative opinions is skimmed off and presented; nevertheless, we find in it a refusal to assign any definite chronological date, even to such comparatively speaking late epochs as the Neolithic era, though, for a wonder, an age is established for the beginnings of certain geological periods; at any rate for some few, the duration of which could hardly be any more shortened, without an immediate conflict with facts.

Thus, it is surmised in the great Encyclopædia that:

One hundred million years have passed ... since the solidification of our earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon it.(1651)

But it seems quite as hopeless to try to convert the modern Geologists and Ethnologists, as it is to make Darwinian Naturalists perceive their mistakes. About the Âryan Root‐Race and its origins, Science knows as little as of the men from other Planets. With the exception of Flammarion, and of a few Mystics among Astronomers, even the habitableness of other Planets is mostly denied. Yet such great Adept Astronomers were the Scientists of the earliest races of the Âryan stock, that they seem to have known far more about the races of Mars and Venus than the modern Anthropologist knows of those of the early stages of the Earth.

Let us leave Modern Science aside for a moment and turn to Ancient Knowledge. As we are assured by Archaic Scientists that all such geological cataclysms—from the upheaval of oceans, deluges, and shifting of continents, down to the present year’s cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and even the extraordinary weather and seeming shifting of seasons which are perplexing all European and American Meteorologists—are due to, and depend on the Moon and Planets; aye, that even modest and neglected constellations have the greatest influence on the meteorological and cosmical changes, over, and within our Earth—let us give one moment’s attention to our sidereal despots, the rulers of our globe and men. Modern Science denies any such influence; Archaic Science affirms it. We will see what both say with regard to this question.

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B. On Chains Of Planets And Their Plurality

Did the Ancients know of Worlds besides their own? What are the data of the Occultists in affirming that every Globe is a Septenary Chain of Worlds—of which only one member is visible—and that these are, were, or will be, “man‐bearing,” just as is every visible Star or Planet? What do they mean by “a moral and physical influence” exerted on our Globe by the Sidereal Worlds?

Such are the questions often put to us, and they have to be considered from every aspect. To the first of the two queries the answer is: We believe it because the first law in nature is uniformity in diversity, and the second is analogy. “As above, so below.” The time is gone by for ever when our pious ancestors believed that our Earth was in the centre of the Universe, and the Church and her arrogant servants could insist that the supposition that any other Planet could be inhabited should be regarded as blasphemy. Adam and Eve, the Serpent and Original Sin, followed by Atonement through Blood, have been too long in the way of progress, and universal truth has thus been sacrificed to the insane conceit of us little men.

Now what are the proofs thereof? Beyond inferential evidence and logical reasoning, there are none for the profane. To the Occultists, who believe in the knowledge acquired by countless generations of Seers and Initiates, the data offered in the Secret Books are all‐sufficient. The general public needs other proofs, however. There are some Kabalists, and even some Eastern Occultists, who, failing to find uniform evidence upon this point in all the mystic works of the nations, hesitate to accept the teaching. Even such “uniform evidence” will be forthcoming presently. Meanwhile, we may approach the subject from its general aspect, and see whether belief in it is so very absurd, as some Scientists along with other Nicodemuses would have it. Unconsciously, perhaps, in thinking of a plurality of inhabited “Worlds,” we imagine them to be like the Globe we inhabit, and to be peopled by beings more or less resembling ourselves. And in so doing we are only following a natural instinct. Indeed, so long as the enquiry is confined to the life‐history of this Globe, we can speculate on the question with some profit, and ask ourselves, with some hope of at least asking an intelligible question, what were the “Worlds” spoken of in all the ancient scriptures of Humanity? But how do we know (a) what kind of beings inhabit the Globes in general; and (b) whether those who rule Planets superior to our own do not exercise the same influence on our Earth consciously, that we may exercise unconsciously, say on the small planets (planetoids or asteroids) in the long run, by our cutting the Earth in pieces, opening canals, and thereby entirely changing our climates. Of course, like Cæsar’s wife, the planetoids, cannot be affected by our suspicion. They are too far, etc. Believing in Esoteric Astronomy, however, we are not so sure of that.

But when, extending our speculations beyond our Planetary Chain, we try to cross the limits of the Solar System, then indeed we act as do presumptuous fools. For—while accepting the old Hermetic axiom, “as above, so below”—as we may well believe that Nature on Earth displays the most careful economy, utilizing every vile and waste thing in her marvellous transformations, and withal never repeating herself, so we may justly conclude that there is no other Globe in all her infinite systems so closely resembling this Earth, that the ordinary powers of man’s thought should be able to imagine and reproduce its semblance and containment.(1652)

And indeed we find in the romances as in all the so‐called scientific fictions and spiritistic “revelations” from Moon, Stars, and Planets, merely fresh combinations or modifications of the men and things, the passions and forms of life, with which we are familiar, though even on the other Planets of our own System nature and life are entirely different from those prevailing on our own. Swedenborg was preeminent in inculcating such an erroneous belief.

But even more. The ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than that to which the physical senses link him. Men dream; they sleep the profound sleep which is too deep for its dreams to impress the physical brain; and in these states there must still be consciousness. How, then, while these mysteries remain unexplored, can we hope to speculate with profit on the nature of Globes which, in the economy of Nature, must needs belong to states of consciousness other and quite different from any which man experiences here?

And this is true to the letter. For even great Adepts (those initiated of course), trained Seers though they be, can only claim thorough acquaintance with the nature and appearance of Planets and their inhabitants belonging to our Solar System. They know that almost all the Planetary Worlds are inhabited, but—even in spirit—they can have access only to those of our System; and they are also aware how difficult it is, even for them, to put themselves into full rapport even with the planes of consciousness within our System, differing as they do from the states of consciousness possible on this Globe; such, for instance, as those which exist on the Chain of Spheres on the three planes beyond that of our Earth. Such knowledge and intercourse are possible to them because they have learned how to penetrate to planes of consciousness which are closed to the perceptions of ordinary men; but were they to communicate their knowledge, the world would be no wiser, because men lack that experience of other forms of perception which alone could enable them to grasp what they might be told.

Still the fact remains that most of the Planets, like the Stars beyond our System, are inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of Science themselves. Laplace and Herschel believed it, though they wisely abstained from imprudent speculation; and the same conclusion has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific considerations by C. Flammarion, the well‐known French Astronomer. The arguments he brings forward are strictly scientific, and are such as appeal even to a materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such thoughts as those of Sir David Brewster, the famous Physicist, who writes:

Those “barren spirits” or “base souls,” as the poet calls them, who might be led to believe that the earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, would have no difficulty in conceiving the earth also to have been destitute of inhabitants. What is more, if such minds were acquainted with the deductions of geology, they would admit that it was uninhabited for myriads of years; and here we come to the impossible conclusion that during these myriads of years there was not a single intelligent creature in the vast domains of the Universal King, and that before the protozoic formations there existed neither plant nor animal in all the infinity of space.(1653)

Flammarion shows, in addition, that all the conditions of life—even as we know it—are present on some at least of the Planets, and points to the fact that these conditions must be much more favourable on them than they are on our Earth.

Thus scientific reasoning, as well as observed facts, concurs with the statements of the Seer, and the innate voice in man’s own heart in declaring that life—intelligent, conscious life—must exist on other worlds than ours.

But this is the limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot carry him. Many are the romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others bristling with scientific knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and describe life on other Globes. But one and all they give but some distorted copy of the drama of life around us. It is either, with Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope, or, with de Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find that at bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. So strong is this tendency that even great natural, though non‐initiated, Seers, fall victims to it when untrained; witness Swedenborg, who goes so far as to dress the inhabitants of Mercury, whom he meets with in the spirit‐world, in clothes such as are worn in Europe!

Commenting on this tendency, Flammarion says:

It seems as if in the eyes of those authors who have written on this subject, the Earth were the type of the Universe, and the man of Earth, the type of the inhabitants of the Heavens. It is, on the contrary, much more probable, that, since the nature of other planets is essentially varied, and the surroundings and conditions of existence essentially different, while the forces which preside over the creation of beings and the substances which enter into their mutual constitution are essentially distinct, it would follow that our mode of existence cannot be regarded as in any way applicable to other globes. Those who have written on this subject have allowed themselves to be dominated by terrestrial ideas, and have therefore fallen into error.(1654)

But Flammarion himself falls into the very error which he here condemns, for he tacitly takes the conditions of life on Earth as the standard by which to determine the degree to which other Planets are adapted for habitation by “other humanities.”

Let us, however, leave these profitless and empty speculations, which, though they seem to fill our hearts with a glow of enthusiasm and to enlarge our mental and spiritual grasp, do but in reality cause a factitious stimulation, and blind us more and more to our ignorance not only of the world we inhabit, but even of the infinitude contained within ourselves.

When, therefore, we find “other worlds” spoken of in the Bibles of Humanity, we may safely conclude that they not only refer to other states of our Planetary Chain and Earth, but also to other inhabited Globes—Stars and Planets; withal, that no speculations were ever made about the latter. The whole of antiquity believed in the Universality of Life. But no really initiated Seer of any civilized nation has ever taught that life on other Stars could be judged by the standard of terrestrial life. What is generally meant by “Earths” and “Worlds,” relates (a) to the “rebirths” of our Globe after each Manvantara and a long period of Obscuration; and (b) to the periodical and entire changes of the Earth’s surface, when continents disappear to make room for oceans, and oceans and seas are violently displaced and sent rolling to the poles, to cede their emplacements to new continents.

We may begin with the Bible—the youngest of the World‐scriptures. In Ecclesiastes, we read these words of the King‐Initiate:

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever.... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.(1655)

Under these words it is not easy to see the reference to the successive cataclysms by which the Races of mankind are swept away, or, going further back, to the various transitions of the Globe during the process of its formation. But if we are told that this refers only to our world as we now see it, then we shall refer the reader to the New Testament, where St. Paul speaks of the Son (the manifested Power) whom God hath appointed heir of all things, “by whom also he made the worlds” (plural).(1656) This “Power” is Chokmah, the Wisdom and the Word.

We shall probably be told that by the term “worlds,” the stars, heavenly bodies, etc., were meant. But apart from the fact that “stars” were not known as “worlds” to the ignorant editors of the Epistles, even if they must have been thus known to Paul, who was an Initiate, a “Master‐ Builder,” we can quote on this point an eminent Theologian, Cardinal Wiseman. In his work (i. 309) treating of the indefinite period of the six days—or shall we say “too definite” period of the six days—of creation and the 6,000 years, he confesses that we are in total darkness as to the meaning of this statement of St. Paul, unless we are permitted to suppose that allusion is made in it to the period which elapsed between the first and second verses of chapter i of Genesis, and thus to those primitive revolutions, i.e., the destructions and the reproductions of the world, indicated in chapter i of Ecclesiastes; or, to accept, with so many others, and in its literal sense, the passage in chapter i of Hebrews, that speaks of the creation of “worlds”—in the plural. It is very singular, he adds, that all the cosmogonies should agree to suggest the same idea, and preserve the tradition of a first series of revolutions, owing to which the world was destroyed and again renewed.

Had the Cardinal studied the Zohar his doubts would have been changed into certainties. Thus saith the “Idra Suta”:

There were old worlds which perished as soon as they came into existence; worlds with and without form called Scintillas—for they were like the sparks under the smith’s hammer, flying in all directions. Some were the primordial worlds which could not continue long, because the “Aged”—his name be sanctified—had not as yet assumed his form,(1657) the workman was not yet the “Heavenly Man.”(1658)

Again in the Midrash, written long before the Kabalah of Simeon Ben Iochai, Rabbi Abahu explains:

The Holy One, blessed be his name, has successively formed and destroyed sundry worlds before this one(1659).... Now this refers both to the first races [the “Kings of Edom”] and to the worlds destroyed.(1660)

“Destroyed” means here what we call “obscuration.” This becomes evident when we read the explanation given further on:

Still when it is said that they [the worlds] perished, it is only meant thereby that they [their humanities] lacked the true form, till the human [our] form came into being, in which all things are comprised and which contains all forms ...—it does not mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from their status [that of worlds in activity].(1661)

When, therefore, we read of the “destruction” of the Worlds, the word has many meanings, which are very clear in several of the Commentaries on the Zohar and in Kabalistic treatises. As said elsewhere, it means not only the destruction of many Worlds which have ended their life‐career, but also that of the several Continents which have disappeared, as also their decline and geographical change of place.

The mysterious “Kings of Edom” are sometimes referred to as the “Worlds” that had been destroyed; but it is a “cloak.” The Kings who reigned in Edom before there reigned a King in Israel, or the “Edomite Kings,” could never symbolize the “prior worlds,” but only the “attempts at men” on this Globe—the Pre‐Adamite Races, of which the Zohar speaks, and which we explain as the First Root‐Race. For as, speaking of the six Earths (the six “Limbs” of Microprosopus), it is said that the seventh (our Earth) came not into the computation when the six were created (the six Spheres above our Globe in the Terrestrial Chain), so the first seven Kings of Edom are left out of calculation in Genesis. By the law of analogy and permutation, in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers, as also in the Books of Knowledge and of Wisdom, the “seven primordial worlds” mean also the “seven primordial” races (sub‐races of the First Root‐Race of the Shadows); and, again, the Kings of Edom are the sons of “Esau, the father of the Edomites”;(1662) i.e., Esau represents in the Bible the race which stands between the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the Âryan. “Two nations are in thy womb,” said the Lord to Rebekah; and Esau was red and hairy. From verse 24 to 34, chapter xxv of Genesis contains the allegorical history of the birth of the Fifth Race.

Says the Siphra Dtzenioutha:

And the Kings of ancient days died and their chiefs [crowns] were found no more.

And the Zohar states:

The Head of a nation that has not been formed at the beginning in the likeness of the White Head: its people is not from this Form.... Before it [the White Head, the Fifth Race or Ancient of the Ancients] arranged itself in its [own, or present] Form ... all Worlds have been destroyed; therefore it is written: and Bela, the Son of Beor, reigned in Edom [Gen., xxxvi. Here the “Worlds” stand for Races]. And he [such or another King of Edom] died, and another reigned in his stead.

No Kabalist who has hitherto treated of the symbolism and allegory hidden under these “Kings of Edom” seems to have perceived more than one aspect of them. They are neither the “worlds that were destroyed,” nor the “Kings that died”—alone; but both, and much more, to treat of which there is no space at present. Therefore, leaving the mystic parables of the Zohar, we will return to the hard facts of materialistic Science; first, however, citing a few from the long list of great thinkers who have believed in the plurality of inhabited Worlds in general, and in Worlds that preceded our own. These are, the great mathematicians Leibnitz and Bernouilli, Sir Isaac Newton himself, as may be read in his Optics; Buffon, the Naturalist; Condillac, the Sceptic; Bailly, Lavater, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and, as a contrast to the two last named—suspected at least of Mysticism—Diderot and most of the writers of the Encyclopædia. Following these come Kant, the founder of modern Philosophy; the poet Philosophers, Goethe, Krause, Schelling; and many Astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and Herschel, to Lalande and Laplace, with their many disciples in more recent years.

A brilliant list of honoured names indeed; but the facts of physical Astronomy speak even more strongly than these names in favour of the presence of life, of even organized life, on other Planets. Thus in four meteorites which fell respectively at Alais in France, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Hungary, and again in France, on analysis, there was found graphite, a form of carbon known to be invariably associated with organic life on this Earth of ours. And that the presence of this carbon is not due to any action occurring within our atmosphere is shown by the fact that carbon has been found in the very centre of a meteorite; while in one which fell at Argueil, in the south of France, in 1857, there was found water and turf, the latter being always formed by the decomposition of vegetable substances.

And further, examining the astronomical conditions of the other Planets, it is easy to show that several are far better adapted for the development of life and intelligence—even under the conditions with which men are acquainted—than is our Earth. For instance, on the Planet Jupiter the seasons, instead of varying between wide limits as do ours, change by almost imperceptible degrees, and last twelve times as long as ours. Owing to the inclination of its axis the seasons on Jupiter are due almost entirely to the eccentricity of its orbit, and hence change slowly and regularly. We shall be told, that no life is possible on Jupiter, as it is in an incandescent state. But not all Astronomers agree with this. For instance, what we state is declared by M. Flammarion; and he ought to know.

On the other hand Venus would be less adapted for human life such as exists on Earth, since its seasons are more extreme and its changes of temperature more sudden; though it is curious that the duration of the day is nearly the same on the four inner planets, Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars.

On Mercury, the Sun’s heat and light are seven times what they are on the Earth, and Astronomy teaches that it is enveloped in a very dense atmosphere. And as we see that life appears more active on Earth in proportion to the light and heat of the Sun, it would seem more than probable that its intensity is far, far greater on Mercury than here.

Venus, like Mercury, has a very dense atmosphere, as also has Mars, and the snows which cover their poles, the clouds which hide their surface, the geographical configuration of their seas and continents, the variations of seasons and climates, are all closely analogous—at least to the eye of the physical Astronomer. But such facts and the considerations to which they give rise have reference only to the possibility of the existence on these Planets of human life as known on Earth. That some forms of life such as we know are possible on these Planets, has been long since abundantly demonstrated, and it seems perfectly useless to go into detailed questions of the physiology, etc., of these hypothetical inhabitants, since, after all, the reader can arrive only at an imaginary extension of his familiar surroundings. It is better to rest content with the three conclusions which M. Flammarion, whom we have so largely quoted, formulates as rigorous and exact deductions from the known facts and laws of Science.

i. The various forces which were active in the beginning of evolution gave birth to a great variety of beings on the several worlds; both in the organic and inorganic kingdoms.

ii. The animated beings were constituted from the first according to forms and organisms in correlation with the physiological state of each inhabited globe.

iii. The humanities of other worlds differ from us, as much in their inner organization as in their external physical type.

Finally the reader who may be disposed to question the validity of these conclusions as being opposed to the Bible, may be referred to an Appendix in M. Flammarion’s work dealing in detail with this question, since in a work like the present it seems unnecessary to point out the logical absurdity of those churchmen who deny the plurality of worlds on the ground of biblical authority.

In this connection we may well recall those days when the burning zeal of the Primitive Church opposed the doctrine of the Earth’s rotundity, on the ground that the nations at the Antipodes would be outside the pale of salvation; and again, we may remember how long it took for a nascent Science to break down the idea of a solid firmament, in the grooves of which the stars moved for the special edification of terrestrial humanity.

The theory of the Earth’s rotation was met by a like opposition—even to the martyrdom of its discoverers—because, besides depriving our orb of its dignified central position in space, the theory produced an appalling confusion of ideas as to the Ascension—the terms “up” and “down” being proved to be merely relative, thus complicating not a little the question of the precise locality of Heaven!(1663)

According to the best modern calculations, there are no less than 500,000,000 Stars of various magnitudes, within the range of the best telescopes. As to the distances between them, they are incalculable. Is, then, our microscopical Earth—a “grain of sand on an infinite sea‐ shore”—the only centre of intelligent life? Our own Sun, itself 1,300,000 times larger than our Planet, sinks into insignificance beside the giant Sun, Sirius, and the latter in its turn is dwarfed by other luminaries in infinite Space. The self‐centred conception of Jehovah as the special guardian of a small and obscure semi‐nomadic tribe, is tolerable beside that which confines sentient existence to our microscopical Globe. The primary reasons were without doubt: (a) astronomical ignorance on the part of the early Christians, coupled with an exaggerated appreciation of man’s own importance—a crude form of selfishness; and (b) the dread that, if the hypothesis of millions of other inhabited Globes were accepted, the crushing rejoinder would ensue: “Was there then a Revelation to each World?”—involving the idea of the Son of God eternally “going the rounds,” as it were. Happily it is now unnecessary to waste time and energy in proving the possibility of the existence of such Worlds. All intelligent persons admit it. That which now remains to be demonstrated is, that if it is once proven that there are inhabited Worlds besides our own, with humanities entirely different from each other as from our own—as maintained in the Occult Sciences—then the evolution of the preceding Races is half proved. For where is that Physicist or Geologist who is prepared to maintain that the Earth has not changed scores of times, in the millions of years which have elapsed in the course of its existence; and that changing its “skin,” as it is called in Occultism, the Earth has not had each time her special Humanities adapted to such atmospheric and climatic conditions as were entailed by such change? And if so, why should not our preceding four and entirely different Mankinds have existed and thrived before our Adamic Fifth Root Race?

Before closing our debate, however, we have to examine the so‐called organic evolution more closely. Let us search well and see whether it is quite impossible to make our Occult data and chronology agree—up to a certain point—with those of Science.

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