Chapter 28

A Panoramic View Of The Early Races.There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first“mindless”race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later Lemurians; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are“productions of blind natural forces,”we are assured by some;“quite modern”we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by Sceptic and Materialist, and made subservient to theBiblein every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian Deluge theory, it is declared by the Christian clergy to be“the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.”Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed Continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of Modern Science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato's Atlantis is regarded by most of the Scientists as a dream.Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. But Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and[pg 276]Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in thePurânas, nor anywhere else. But with only one of the Esoteric keys in hand, it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless“Lands of the Gods,”Devas and Munis described in thePurânas, in their Varshas, Dvîpas, and Zones. Their Shveta-dvîpa, during the early days of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis, after the disappearance of Lemuria, when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk.It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three Races-except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the First had no history of its own. Of Race the Second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans only, before the history of our own Race, the Fifth, can be attempted.What is known of other Continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early Races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of Materialistic Science is daubed with the contemptuous term“superstition.”The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato's“winged”and“hermaphrodite”races, and his Golden Age, under the reign of Saturn and the Gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to theirnewplace in Nature; our Divine Races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of“sea slime”!Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber:Thefictionsof ancient poetry ... will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.However one-sided the efforts of the learned author ofA Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri—efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old Paganism,“to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture”—time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that“truth”by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of Archaic Paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri—the most mysterious Gods of antiquity—has[pg 277]been thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all of these scholars, from first to last, had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter, as follows:We have no reason to think that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upona traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first[the Fourth in Esoteric Teaching]race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge.595To this, Faber adds:I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly indeed in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of the scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlantians were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phenicians, and the Egyptians.596In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the Giants.597Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his Frenchconfrère, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indicopleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah—that he“formerly inhabited theislandAtlantis.”This island, whether it was the“Poseidonis”mentioned inEsoteric Buddhism, or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, which they had the same right to do as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a Giant,[pg 278]as Faber shows; and if a Giant, then why is he not shown as such inGenesis?598Bailly's mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern andpost-diluviannation, which, however, as he says, certainly flourished before the foundation of the Hindû, Egyptian, and Phœnician empires. In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post-diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but wassunkunder the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of Science, who will accept neither the tradition that several Continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric Cycle—it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindûs, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Âryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses—as every Initiate would—the two Continents, and assigns to the small island which last sunk, all the events pertaining to the two enormous Continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes thefirst couple, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In so saying, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to“Earth,”he means Matter, as the Atlanteans were really the first purelyhumanandterrestrialRace—those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated Adept, about the history of the Third Race after its“Fall,”though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations—all of which was based upon, and followed the early Âryan[pg 279]calculations—to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.599It is only when the latter has reached its full human period that a beginning can be made, without the uninitiated reader finding himself hopelessly bewildered.The Third Racefell—and created no longer; itbegatits progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation, it begat, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the“Lords Gods”of theBible, the“Sons of Wisdom,”the Dhyân Chohans, had warned it to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature; but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness—we must not say sin—of what they had done, only when too late; after the Angelic Monads from higher Spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The Doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on Earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various“Fires”are latent, and in others they are active. TheVitalFires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher“principles”awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thusnon-existing. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose Shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in Matter. But as said inPymander:This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature600being mingled with Man601brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of theessence of the Seven[Pitris, or Governors] and her own; theFireand theSpiritandNature[the Noumenon of Matter]; which [commingling] forthwith[pg 280]brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and positive] according to the essences of the Seven Governors.602Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,603the“Power of the Thought Divine.”St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World,“the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,”and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that:Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The“Fall of the Angels,”and the“War in Heaven”are repeated on every plane, the lower“mirror”disfiguring the image of the superior“mirror,”and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of theDesatir:All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is theshadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.In the Kabalistic books, in theZoharprëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the“Shadow”(Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.The Third Race was prëeminently the bright“Shadow,”at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and[pg 281]harmony will reign once more between the two as before the“Fall,”when even mortal man was“created”by the Elements and was not born.The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. Themutilationof Uranus by his son Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was universal604it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed,“a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,”as justly remarked by Decharme,605who, however, does not attempt to explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, bydestroying all his children as soon as born. Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space, or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial“men”from themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolvetheirprogeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus (Chronos) Time,606who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—-in Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of evolution.This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again. As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining[pg 282]them in the bosom of the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create realhuman“men.”607Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.608Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,609and varies from Zeus, the great“Father of the Gods.”He is the“disrespectful son”in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the“Heavenly Man”inPymander; and even in theBiblehe is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the“Sons of Wisdom.”The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purelyhumanAtlantean Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be read in Hesiod, who tells us that:The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an admixture oftwoelements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron Age.610After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.611Hesiod calls this present of thefirst woman“a fatal gift.”It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man“for the theft of [divine creative] fire.”Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima's rule, in the MazdeanVendidâd.Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, theRig Veda, theZend Avesta, etc., but nofirstman is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in theBible.612Everywhere the man ofourRace appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and[pg 283]islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.613Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;614and Pindar echoes the statement.615Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah's,616ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram'zimas, the“master of all,”advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.617As well understood by the author ofMythologie de la Grèce Antique—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says:The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever-decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is extreme.“They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown.”618The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes,619or under the walls of Troy.620Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated in the classics. But this is all“mythology”and poetry. What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their own imagination.[pg 284]40.Then the Third and Fourth621became tall with pride.“We are the kings;622we are the gods”(a).41.They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the narrow-headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female, also Khado,623with little minds (b).42.They built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped (c). Then the Third Eye acted no longer (d).(a) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was—pride! It is the memory of this Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, which has lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and has found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid, and at the same time distorted, legends. Anyone who has read and studied the Commentaries on the Archaic Doctrine, will easily recognize in some of these Atlanteans the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all thosetutti quantiof“accursed memory,”as theological literature expresses it; of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this naturally leads us to enquire into the religious ethics of these early Races, mythical as they may be.What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any; for they knew no dogma, nor had they to believeon faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present, as also the ever to be unknown and invisible, All, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself hisinnerGod, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower“principles”by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the“Sons of Light.”Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From“Sons of Light and Wisdom”they ended by becoming the“Sons of Darkness.”They fell in the battle of mortal life with Life Immortal,[pg 285]and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.624At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root-Race had thus no beliefs that could be calledreligion. That is to say, he was not only ignorant of“gay religions, full of pomp and gold”but even of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians from the very beginning of their intellectual life, had a religion, and a most beautiful one. Had they not their bright Gods of the Elements around them, and even within themselves?625Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tended by, those who had given them being and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into Matter could never have been achieved, nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super-ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner“principles”with a portion, or rather, a reflection, of that essence. The Dhyânîs of the Seven Heavens—the seven planes of Being—are the Noumena of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of Nature—the grosser effects of which we perceive in what Science is pleased to call“modes of motion,”the imponderable forces and what not—are the still higher Noumena of still higher Hierarchies.It was the“Golden Age”in those days of old, the Age when the“Gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.”When it ceased, the Gods departed—i.e., became invisible—and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms—the Elements.It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into sexes—hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals—who became the first“sacrificers”to theGod of Matter. They stand, in the dim far-away past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,626as the[pg 286]first Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter—a worship which very soon degenerated intoself-worship, and thence led to phallicism, which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolism of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Evebecame matter, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel—the latter the life-bearing soil, the former“the tiller of that ground or field.”Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the Ray of which man feels within himself—or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark, cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, the“mighty men ... of renown”in those days,627who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim, Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal God. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon, and, so to say, blended with, astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors—the Hyperborean Continent; the Atlanteans, toward the South Pole, the“Pit,”cosmically and terrestrially—whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two Poles were denominated, by the Ancients, Dragons and Serpents—hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the“Sons of God”—Sons of Spirit and Matter—the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of the dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the“Fallen Angels”in its Esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man's self-consciousness; it is the support on which hinges his entire Life-Cycle—the history of his evolution and growth.On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of Esoteric Anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into various contrasted aspects.The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so much space is[pg 287]devoted to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject every time it presents itself. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The“Fallen Angels,”so-called, areHumanityitself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no beingbeforethe appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart; it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying,“Demon est Deus inversus,”finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.Thus it has now become self-evident that, postulating as we do, (a) the appearance of Man before that of other Mammalia, and even before the Ages of the huge Reptiles; (b) Periodical Deluges and Glacial Periods owing to the Karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a“supernatural”Being, though it is only super-human—our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of Mankind in the Third Race—all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara—owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings“hypostasizing”into their Fifth Principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that these Angels are identical with their“Fallen”Spirits, than the Esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.628TheDivineMan dwelt in the animal, and therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution—when also“all the animal creation wasuntied,”and males were attracted to females—that race fell; not because they had eaten of the Fruit of[pg 288]Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyân Chohans had incarnated.629“When we have ascertained the extent of the universe (and learnt to know all that there is in it) we will multiply our race,”answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated Ascetics will“multiply,”i.e., once more produce“mind-born”immaculate sons—in the Seventh Root-Race.It is so stated in theVishnuandBrahmâ Purânas, in theMahâbhârata630and in theHarivamsha. In one portion of thePushkara Mâhâtmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will-born progeny, the“Sons of passive Yoga,”will not create men,“converts half himself into a femaleby whom he begets daughters,”the future females of the Third Race which begat the Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In theVishnu Purânait is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.631Happily for the Human Race the“Elect Race”had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the highest Dhyânîs (intellectually and spiritually) before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races—save some of the lowest—of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, the“Seeds of theTrinity of Wisdom”had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same Great Personality to stepad libitumfrom one worn-out body into another.(b) The first War that Earth knew, the first shedding of human gore, was the result of man's eyes and senses being opened, which made him see that the daughters of his brethren were fairer than his own—and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race[pg 289]was born. The Titans or Giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race—that of the Giants.For“therewereGiants”in the days of old, indeed.632The evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same proportionate size in the flora goingpari passuwith the fauna. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the Carboniferous period.Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works—in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity—contain references to Giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Râkshasas of Lankâ—the opponents conquered by Râma. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments' attention.

There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first“mindless”race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later Lemurians; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.

As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are“productions of blind natural forces,”we are assured by some;“quite modern”we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by Sceptic and Materialist, and made subservient to theBiblein every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian Deluge theory, it is declared by the Christian clergy to be“the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.”Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed Continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of Modern Science, and has, therefore, to be believed in; while Plato's Atlantis is regarded by most of the Scientists as a dream.

Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. But Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and[pg 276]Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in thePurânas, nor anywhere else. But with only one of the Esoteric keys in hand, it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless“Lands of the Gods,”Devas and Munis described in thePurânas, in their Varshas, Dvîpas, and Zones. Their Shveta-dvîpa, during the early days of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis, after the disappearance of Lemuria, when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk.

It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three Races-except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the First had no history of its own. Of Race the Second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans only, before the history of our own Race, the Fifth, can be attempted.

What is known of other Continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early Races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of Materialistic Science is daubed with the contemptuous term“superstition.”The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato's“winged”and“hermaphrodite”races, and his Golden Age, under the reign of Saturn and the Gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to theirnewplace in Nature; our Divine Races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of“sea slime”!

Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber:

Thefictionsof ancient poetry ... will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.

However one-sided the efforts of the learned author ofA Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri—efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old Paganism,“to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture”—time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that“truth”by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of Archaic Paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri—the most mysterious Gods of antiquity—has[pg 277]been thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all of these scholars, from first to last, had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter, as follows:

We have no reason to think that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upona traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction of the first[the Fourth in Esoteric Teaching]race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge.595

To this, Faber adds:

I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly indeed in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of the scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlantians were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phenicians, and the Egyptians.596

In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the Giants.597Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his Frenchconfrère, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indicopleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah—that he“formerly inhabited theislandAtlantis.”This island, whether it was the“Poseidonis”mentioned inEsoteric Buddhism, or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.

No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives if he is claimed to be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, which they had the same right to do as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a Giant,[pg 278]as Faber shows; and if a Giant, then why is he not shown as such inGenesis?598

Bailly's mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern andpost-diluviannation, which, however, as he says, certainly flourished before the foundation of the Hindû, Egyptian, and Phœnician empires. In this, had he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post-diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but wassunkunder the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of Science, who will accept neither the tradition that several Continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric Cycle—it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindûs, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Âryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses—as every Initiate would—the two Continents, and assigns to the small island which last sunk, all the events pertaining to the two enormous Continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes thefirst couple, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In so saying, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to“Earth,”he means Matter, as the Atlanteans were really the first purelyhumanandterrestrialRace—those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.

Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated Adept, about the history of the Third Race after its“Fall,”though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations—all of which was based upon, and followed the early Âryan[pg 279]calculations—to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.599It is only when the latter has reached its full human period that a beginning can be made, without the uninitiated reader finding himself hopelessly bewildered.

The Third Racefell—and created no longer; itbegatits progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation, it begat, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the“Lords Gods”of theBible, the“Sons of Wisdom,”the Dhyân Chohans, had warned it to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature; but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness—we must not say sin—of what they had done, only when too late; after the Angelic Monads from higher Spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction? The Doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on Earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various“Fires”are latent, and in others they are active. TheVitalFires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher“principles”awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thusnon-existing. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose Shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in Matter. But as said inPymander:

This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature600being mingled with Man601brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of theessence of the Seven[Pitris, or Governors] and her own; theFireand theSpiritandNature[the Noumenon of Matter]; which [commingling] forthwith[pg 280]brought forth seven men of opposite sexes [negative and positive] according to the essences of the Seven Governors.602

Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,603the“Power of the Thought Divine.”St. Paul, another Initiate, called our World,“the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,”and St. Gregory of Nazianzen corroborated Hermes by stating that:

Things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.

It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the Ladder of Being down to the lower. The“Fall of the Angels,”and the“War in Heaven”are repeated on every plane, the lower“mirror”disfiguring the image of the superior“mirror,”and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of theDesatir:

All that is on earth, saith the Lord [Ormazd], is theshadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminious object [light, fire, etc.] is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.

In the Kabalistic books, in theZoharprëeminently, the idea that every objective thing on Earth or in this Universe is the“Shadow”(Dyooknah) of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.

The Third Race was prëeminently the bright“Shadow,”at first, of the Gods, whom tradition exiles on to the Earth after the allegorical War in Heaven. This became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the War between Spirit and Matter. This War will last till the Inner and Divine Man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of that self will be at eternal feud with his Master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and[pg 281]harmony will reign once more between the two as before the“Fall,”when even mortal man was“created”by the Elements and was not born.

The above is made clear in all the great Theogonies, principally in the Grecian, as in that of Hesiod. Themutilationof Uranus by his son Cronus, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain; and as it was universal604it must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed,“a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,”as justly remarked by Decharme,605who, however, does not attempt to explain it. Uranus tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, bydestroying all his children as soon as born. Uranus, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos—Space, or the Unmanifested Deity—is thus made to pay the penalty; for it is these powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial“men”from themselves—as, later on, these men, in their turn, evolvetheirprogeny—without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, passes into the hands of Cronus (Chronos) Time,606who unites himself with Rhea (the Earth—-in Esotericism, Matter in general), and thus produces celestial and terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of evolution.

This allegory is the exoteric version of the Esoteric Doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Cronus we see the same story repeated again. As Uranus destroyed his children by Gæa (one in the world of manifestation with Aditi, or the Great Cosmic Deep), by confining[pg 282]them in the bosom of the Earth, Titæa, so Cronus, at this second stage of creation, destroyed his children by Rhea—by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth, or Nature, alone to create realhuman“men.”607Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus, Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.608Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense,609and varies from Zeus, the great“Father of the Gods.”He is the“disrespectful son”in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the“Heavenly Man”inPymander; and even in theBiblehe is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on—by transmutation—under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the“Sons of Wisdom.”The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purelyhumanAtlantean Cycle—if Uranus and Cronus who precede him are found insufficient—may be read in Hesiod, who tells us that:

The Immortals made the race of the Golden and Silver Age [First and Second Races]; Jupiter made the generation of Bronze [an admixture oftwoelements], that of the Heroes, and of the Iron Age.610

After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.611Hesiod calls this present of thefirst woman“a fatal gift.”It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man“for the theft of [divine creative] fire.”Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima's rule, in the MazdeanVendidâd.

Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, theRig Veda, theZend Avesta, etc., but nofirstman is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in theBible.612Everywhere the man ofourRace appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and[pg 283]islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.613Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;614and Pindar echoes the statement.615Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah's,616ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram'zimas, the“master of all,”advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.617As well understood by the author ofMythologie de la Grèce Antique—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says:

The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever-decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is extreme.“They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown.”618The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes,619or under the walls of Troy.620

Thus, as the four Races are found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused and anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated in the classics. But this is all“mythology”and poetry. What can Modern Science have to say to such a euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore, an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and to prove that so much of the domain of this same Science is taken up by fictions and empirical speculations that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even supposing that speck were not a figment of their own imagination.

40.Then the Third and Fourth621became tall with pride.“We are the kings;622we are the gods”(a).

41.They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the narrow-headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female, also Khado,623with little minds (b).

42.They built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped (c). Then the Third Eye acted no longer (d).

(a) Such were the first truly physical men, whose first characteristic was—pride! It is the memory of this Third Race and the gigantic Atlanteans, which has lingered from one generation and race to another generation and race down to the days of Moses, and has found an objective form in those antediluvian giants, those terrible sorcerers and magicians, of whom the Roman Church has preserved such vivid, and at the same time distorted, legends. Anyone who has read and studied the Commentaries on the Archaic Doctrine, will easily recognize in some of these Atlanteans the prototypes of the Nimrods, the Builders of the Tower of Babel, the Hamites, and all thosetutti quantiof“accursed memory,”as theological literature expresses it; of those, in short, who have furnished posterity with the orthodox types of Satan. And this naturally leads us to enquire into the religious ethics of these early Races, mythical as they may be.

What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any; for they knew no dogma, nor had they to believeon faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present, as also the ever to be unknown and invisible, All, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself hisinnerGod, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower“principles”by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the“Sons of Light.”Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From“Sons of Light and Wisdom”they ended by becoming the“Sons of Darkness.”They fell in the battle of mortal life with Life Immortal,[pg 285]and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.624

At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root-Race had thus no beliefs that could be calledreligion. That is to say, he was not only ignorant of“gay religions, full of pomp and gold”but even of any system of faith or outward worship. But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians from the very beginning of their intellectual life, had a religion, and a most beautiful one. Had they not their bright Gods of the Elements around them, and even within themselves?625Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tended by, those who had given them being and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into Matter could never have been achieved, nor would it have received its first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective super-ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his inner“principles”with a portion, or rather, a reflection, of that essence. The Dhyânîs of the Seven Heavens—the seven planes of Being—are the Noumena of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of Nature—the grosser effects of which we perceive in what Science is pleased to call“modes of motion,”the imponderable forces and what not—are the still higher Noumena of still higher Hierarchies.

It was the“Golden Age”in those days of old, the Age when the“Gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals.”When it ceased, the Gods departed—i.e., became invisible—and later generations ended by worshipping their kingdoms—the Elements.

It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into sexes—hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals—who became the first“sacrificers”to theGod of Matter. They stand, in the dim far-away past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built,626as the[pg 286]first Anthropomorphists who worshipped Form and Matter—a worship which very soon degenerated intoself-worship, and thence led to phallicism, which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolism of every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Evebecame matter, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel—the latter the life-bearing soil, the former“the tiller of that ground or field.”

Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the Ray of which man feels within himself—or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark, cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, the“mighty men ... of renown”in those days,627who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim, Kabiri with the Egyptians and the Phœnicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Râkshasas and Daityas with the Indian races.

Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal God. At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon, and, so to say, blended with, astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors—the Hyperborean Continent; the Atlanteans, toward the South Pole, the“Pit,”cosmically and terrestrially—whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two Poles were denominated, by the Ancients, Dragons and Serpents—hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given to the“Sons of God”—Sons of Spirit and Matter—the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of the dual and triple nature in man. The legend of the“Fallen Angels”in its Esoteric signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret of man's self-consciousness; it is the support on which hinges his entire Life-Cycle—the history of his evolution and growth.

On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of Esoteric Anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the One into various contrasted aspects.

The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so much space is[pg 287]devoted to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure subject every time it presents itself. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. The“Fallen Angels,”so-called, areHumanityitself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no beingbeforethe appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart; it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying,“Demon est Deus inversus,”finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.

Thus it has now become self-evident that, postulating as we do, (a) the appearance of Man before that of other Mammalia, and even before the Ages of the huge Reptiles; (b) Periodical Deluges and Glacial Periods owing to the Karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a“supernatural”Being, though it is only super-human—our teachings have very few chances of an impartial hearing. Add to it the claim that a portion of Mankind in the Third Race—all those Monads of men who had reached the highest point of Merit and Karma in the preceding Manvantara—owed their psychic and rational natures to divine Beings“hypostasizing”into their Fifth Principles, and the Secret Doctrine must lose caste in the eyes of not only Materialism but even of dogmatic Christianity. For, no sooner will the latter have learned that these Angels are identical with their“Fallen”Spirits, than the Esoteric tenet will be proclaimed most terribly heretical and pernicious.628TheDivineMan dwelt in the animal, and therefore, when the physiological separation took place in the natural course of evolution—when also“all the animal creation wasuntied,”and males were attracted to females—that race fell; not because they had eaten of the Fruit of[pg 288]Knowledge and knew Good from Evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyân Chohans had incarnated.629“When we have ascertained the extent of the universe (and learnt to know all that there is in it) we will multiply our race,”answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means that the great Adepts and Initiated Ascetics will“multiply,”i.e., once more produce“mind-born”immaculate sons—in the Seventh Root-Race.

It is so stated in theVishnuandBrahmâ Purânas, in theMahâbhârata630and in theHarivamsha. In one portion of thePushkara Mâhâtmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized by Daksha, who, seeing that his will-born progeny, the“Sons of passive Yoga,”will not create men,“converts half himself into a femaleby whom he begets daughters,”the future females of the Third Race which begat the Giants of Atlantis, the Fourth Race, so called. In theVishnu Purânait is simply said that Daksha, the father of mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.631

Happily for the Human Race the“Elect Race”had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the highest Dhyânîs (intellectually and spiritually) before Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races—save some of the lowest—of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, the“Seeds of theTrinity of Wisdom”had already acquired the secret of immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same Great Personality to stepad libitumfrom one worn-out body into another.

(b) The first War that Earth knew, the first shedding of human gore, was the result of man's eyes and senses being opened, which made him see that the daughters of his brethren were fairer than his own—and their wives also. There were rapes committed before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the Fifth Race[pg 289]was born. The Titans or Giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race—that of the Giants.

For“therewereGiants”in the days of old, indeed.632The evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same proportionate size in the flora goingpari passuwith the fauna. The pretty ferns we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the Carboniferous period.

Scriptures, and fragments of philosophical and scientific works—in short, almost every record that has come down to us from antiquity—contain references to Giants. No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the Râkshasas of Lankâ—the opponents conquered by Râma. Are these accounts no better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few moments' attention.

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