Chapter 29

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Are Giants A Fiction?Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.[pg 293]It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,[pg 301]Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

Here, again, we come into collision with Science, which so far denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of tall and powerful men now met with occasionally. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces the traditions of Giants as resting upon ill-digested facts, and instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward as disproof of such traditions. Thus, in 1613, in a locality, called from time immemorial the“Field of Giants,”in Lower Dauphiné, France, four miles from St. Romans, enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed to human remains, and even to Teutobodus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius. But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the Dinotherium Giganteum, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings are pointed to as an[pg 290]evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than now. The tallest man of antiquity known to us, we are told, was the Roman Emperor Maximus, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern day, every year we see men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9 feet 6 inches tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. Now, as the ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray“a tendency to revert to the original type,”they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants as a type in ancient days, there would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have failed so far to prove undeniably in the opinion of Science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. We, however, positively deny the reality of the failure. Moreover, as already stated, human stature is little changed since the last Racial Cycle. The giants of old are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust a brazen, much more a human skeleton. And whence the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year 1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, hardly anything was known of fossil man, for Archæology complacently ignored his existence. Of giants who were“in the earth in those days”of old, theBiblealone had spoken to the wise men of the West; the Zodiac being the solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of Orion or Atlas, whose mighty shoulders were said to support the world.

Nevertheless, even the giants have not been left without their witnesses, and one may as well examine both sides of the question. The three Sciences—geological, sidereal and scriptural, the latter in its universal character—may furnish us with the needed proofs. To begin with Geology: it has already confessed that the older the excavated skeletons, the larger, taller and the more powerful their structure. This is already a certain proof in hand. Frédéric de Rougemont, who,[pg 291]though believing too piously in theBibleand Noah's Ark, is none the less a scientific witness, writes:

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633

All those bones, found in the Departments of the Gard, in Austria, Liège, etc., those skulls which all remind one of the negro type ... and which by reason of their type might be mistaken for animals, have all belonged to men ofhigh stature.633

The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who attributes a“tall stature”to those who were submerged in the Deluge—not necessarily“Noah's”—and a smaller stature to the races which lived subsequently.

As for the evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not trouble ourselves with that of Tertullian, who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage—for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity,634if not actual existence, would have to be proven. We may, however, turn to the papers of 1858, which speak of a“sarcophagus of giants”found that year on the site of this same city. As to the ancient Pagan writers, we have the evidence of Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself on the promontory of Sigæum. This skeleton may perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilas, to the giant killed by Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as was that of the other discovered by Messecrates of Stira, in Lemnos—“horrible to behold,”according to Philostratus.635Is it possible that prejudice would carry Science so far as to classallthese men as either fools or liars?

Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognized Orion, or Otus, the brother of Ephialtes.636Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antæus, the Giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or of Hillus, son of Hercules—all Giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally the Abbé Pegues, affirms in his curious work,Les Volcans de la Grèce, that:

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637

In the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which in[pg 292]every place must have necessitated the use of titanic powers, and which tradition associates in all countries with the ideas about giants, volcanoes and magic.637

In the same work above cited, the author wonders why in theBibleand tradition the Gibborim, the giants or the“mighty ones,”the Rephaim, the spectres or the“phantoms,”the Nephilim, or the“fallen ones”(irruentes), are shown as if identical, though they are“allmen,”since theBiblecalls them the primitive and the mighty ones—e.g., Nimrod. The Secret Doctrine explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first twoPhantom(Astral) Races, to the“Fallen”Race—the Third, and to the Race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth, after which“men began to decrease in stature.”

Bossuet sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the“original sin.”“Ye shall be as Gods,”says the Serpent ofGenesisto Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship offalse divinities.638Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration ofimages, of anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly Gods, as pure and as divine as their Progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical“Serpent,”as has been sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, does not refer at all to the physiological“Fall”of men, but to their acquiring the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and this knowledge came to thempriorto their fall. It must not be forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that“Adam knew Eve his wife.”We shall not, however, check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine by the dead-letter of the HebrewBible, but rather point out the great similarities between the two in their Esoteric meaning.

It was only after his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement of Alexandria began to translategigantesbyserpentes, explaining that“serpents and giants signifydemons.”640

We may be told that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of theBible, we have to show better evidence of the existence of the Giants of the Fourth Race than the reference to them found inGenesis. We answer, that the proofs we give are more satisfactory, at any rate are supported by more literary and scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In the French translation of theShoo-King,641we read:

When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643

When the Miao-tse (that antediluvian and perverted race [explains the annotator] which retired in the days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighbourhood of Canton),642according to our ancient documents, had, owing to the beguilements of Tchy-Yeoo, troubled all the earth, it became full of brigands.... The Lord (Chang-ty [a King of theDivineDynasty]) cast his eyes over the people, and saw no longer among them any trace of virtue. Then he commanded Tchong and Ly [two lower Dhyân Chohans] to cut[pg 294]away every communication between heaven and earth. Since then, there has been no moregoing up and down!643

“Going up and down”means an untrammelled communication and intercourse between the two Worlds.

As we are not in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are permitted must be now collated together, especially those corroborated by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature and history. As the“coats of skin”of men thickened, and they fell more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between Physical and EtherealDivineMan was stopped. The Veil of Matter between the two planes became too dense for even the Inner Man to penetrate. The Mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their Celestial Teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material, soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men—in whom the spark of Divine Wisdom burnt bright, and became only strengthened in its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those who turned it to evil purposes—remained the elect custodians of the Mysteries revealed to mankind by the Divine Teachers. There were those among them, who remained in their Kaumâric condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the Secret Teachings affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchywhich has never died since that period. As theCatechismof the Inner Schools says:

The Inner Man of the First ... only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvâna, spurning Devachan and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind.... Out of the seven Virgin-men [Kumâra]644four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people say of one of them,“He is dead”; behold, he is alive[pg 295]and under another form. These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying Knowledge [Jñâna]. Thou shall never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones [Mahâ ...] before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will understand.645

It is these sacred“Four”who have been allegorized and symbolized in theLinga Purâna, which states that Vâmadeva (Shiva) as a Kumâra is reborn in each Kalpa (Race, in this instance), as four youths—four, white; four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Shiva is preëminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogîs and Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste Asceticism itself which incarnates in these Elect. It is only aftergetting marriedand being dragged by the Gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Shiva, a God—and not one of a very virtuous or merciful type—in the Hindû Pantheon. Higher than the“Four”is onlyOneon Earth as in Heavens—that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Volume I.

We have now to examine the nature of the“Sons of the Flame”and of“Dark Wisdom,”as well as theprosandconsof the Satanic assumption.

Such broken sentences as could be made out from the fragments of the tile, which George Smith calls“The Curse after the Fall,”646are of course allegorical; yet they corroborate that which is taught of the true nature of the Fall of the Angels in our Books. Thus, it is said that the“Lord of the Earth his name called out, the Father Elu [Elohim],”and pronounced his“curse,”which“the God Hea heard, and his liver was angry, becausehisman [Angelic Man] had corrupted his purity,”for which Hea expresses the desire that“wisdom and knowledgehostilely may they injure him [man].”647

The latter sentence points to the direct connection of the Chaldæan with the Genetic account. While Hea tries to bring to nought the wisdom and knowledge gained by man, through his newly-acquired intellectual and conscious capacity of creating in his turn—thus taking the monopoly of creation out of the hands of God (the Gods)—the Elohim do the same in the third chapter ofGenesis. Therefore the Elohim sent him out of Eden.

But this was of no avail. For the Spirit of Divine Wisdom being[pg 296]upon andinman—verily the Serpent of Eternity and all Knowledge, that Mânasic Spirit, which made him learn the secret of“creation”on the Kriyâshaktic, and of procreation on the Earthly planes—led him as naturally to discover his way to immortality, notwithstanding the jealousy of all the Gods.

The early Atlanto-Lemurians are charged with taking unto themselves (the divine incarnations) wives of a lower race, namely, the race of the hitherto mindless men. Every ancient Scripture has the same, more or less disfigured, legend. Primarily, the Angelic“Fall,”which has transformed the“First-born”of God into the Asuras, or into the Ahriman or Typhon of the“Pagans”—i.e., if the accounts given in theBook of Enoch,648and inHermes, inPurânasandBibleare taken literally—has, when read Esoterically, the following simple signification:

Sentences such as,“In his [Satan's] ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of the God of Heaven,”etc., ought to read: Prompted by the Law of Eternal Evolution and Karma, the Angel incarnated on Earth in Man; and as his Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his Body is earthly, he is (allegorically) accused of divulging the Mysteries of Heaven. He combines and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation. Henceforth,“man willbeget, notcreate.”649But as, by so doing, he has to use[pg 297]his weak Body as the means of procreation, that Body will pay the penalty for this Wisdom, carried from Heaven down to the Earth; hence the corruption of physical purity will become a temporary curse.

The Mediæval Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write:

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650

The Kabalah was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the Angels mostgraciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity.650

This shows how the incident of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the Divine Secrets of Heaven to the Daughters of Men—as allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth chapter ofGenesis—was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of this period may be regarded as thepre-human period, that of Divine Man, or as plastic Protestant Theology now has it—thePre-Adamite period. But evenGenesisbegins itsrealhistory (Chap. vi) by the giants of“those days”and the“sons of God”marrying and teaching their wives—the“daughters of men.”

This period is the one described in thePurânas; and relating as it does to days lost in archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any Anthropologist feel certain whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The wholepersonnelof theBrâhmanasandPurânas—the Rishis, Prajâpatis, Manus, their wives and progeny—belong to that pre-human period. All these are theSeedof Humanity, so to speak. It is around these“Sons of God,”the“mind-born”astral Children of Brahmâ, that our physical frames have grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Paurânic histories of all those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations on this and other Spheres, events perceived by the“Shiva Eye”of the ancient Seers—the“Third Eye”of our Stanzas—and described allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for sectarian purposes; mutilated, but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the overgrowth of fancy.

But with the Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed and[pg 298]took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look upon, but in whomlower, more material, though sidereal, Beings had incarnated. These Beings in female forms—Lilith is the prototype of them in the Jewish traditions—are called in the Esoteric accounts Khado (Dâkinî, in Sanskrit). Allegorical legends call the Chief of these Liliths Sangye Khado (Buddha Dâkinî, in Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of“walking in the air,”and the“greatestkindness to mortals;”but with nomind—only animal instinct.651

(c) This is the beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body—that“miracle of miracles,”as an English author calls it—and ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature; but they were not giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their science was innate in them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory that which his informing principleknewat the moment of its incarnation. Time alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the Matter in which the“principles”had clothed themselves, could, the one, weaken the memory of their pre-natal knowledge, the other, blunt and even extinguish every spark of the spiritual and divine in them. Therefore had they, from the first, fallen victims to their animal natures and bred“monsters”—i.e., men of distinct varieties from themselves.

Speaking of the Giants, Creuzer well describes them in saying that:

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....

Those children of Heaven and Earth were endowed at their birth by theSovereign Powers, the authors of their being, with extraordinary faculties both moral and physical. Theycommanded the Elements, knew the secrets of Heaven and the Earth, of the sea and the whole world, and read futurity inthe stars.... It seems, indeed, as though, when reading of them, one has to dealnot with men as we arebut with Spirits of the Elements sprung from the bosom of Nature and having full sway over her.... All these beings are marked with a character ofmagicandsorcery....

And so they were, those now legendary heroes of the pre-historic, still once really existing, races. Creuzer was wise in his generation, for he did not charge with deliberate deceit, or dulness and superstition, an endless series of recognized Philosophers, who mention[pg 299]these races and assert that, even in their own time, they had seen their fossils. There were sceptics in days of old—as many and great as they are now. But even a Lucian, a Democritus and an Epicurus, yielded to the evidence offactsand showed the discriminative capacity of really great intellects, which can distinguish fiction from fact, and truth from exaggeration and fraud. Ancient writers were no more fools than are our modern wise men; for, as well remarked by the author of“Notes on Aristotle's Psychology in Relation to Modern Thought,”inMind:

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.

The common division of history into ancient and modern is ... misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century,b.c., were in many respects moderns; especially, we may add, in their scepticism. They were not very likely to acceptfablesso easily.

Yet the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, those“children of Heaven and Earth,”were indeed marked with a character ofsorcery; for the Esoteric Doctrine charges them precisely with what, if believed, would put an end to the difficulties of Science with regard to the origin of man, or rather, his anatomical similarities to the anthropoid ape. It accuses them of having committed the (to us) abominable crime of breeding with so-called“animals,”and thus producing a truly pithecoid species, now extinct. Of course, as also in the question of spontaneous generation—in which Esoteric Science believes, and which it teaches—the possibility of such a cross-breed between man and an animal of any kind will be denied. But apart from the consideration that in those early days, as already remarked, neither the human Atlantean Giants, nor yet the“animals,”were the physiologically perfect men and mammalians that are now known to us, the modern notions upon this subject—those of the Physiologists included—are too uncertain and fluctuating to permit them an absoluteà prioridenial of such a fact.

A careful perusal of the Commentaries would make one think that the Being with which the new“Incarnate”bred, was called an“animal,”not because he was no human being, but rather because he was so dissimilar physically and mentally to the more perfect races, which had developed physiologically at an earlier period. Remember Stanza VII and what is said in Shloka 24, viz., that when the“Sons of Wisdom”came to incarnate the first time, some of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a Spark, while some of the Shadows were left over from thefillingand perfecting, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which“remained destitute of knowledge,”or those again which were left“mindless,”remained as they were, even after the[pg 300]natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Adam and Eve, with Cain and Abel, were supposed to be the onlyhumanfamily on Earth. Yet we see Cain going to the land of Nod and taking there a wife. Evidently one race only was supposed perfect enough to be called human; and, even in our own day, while the Sinhalese regard the Veddhas of their jungles asspeaking animalsand no more, some British people, in their arrogance, firmly believe that every other human family—especially the dark Indians—is aninferiorrace. Moreover there are Naturalists who have seriously considered the problem whether some savage tribes—like the Bushmen, for instance—can be regarded asmenat all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals“fair to look upon,”as a biped:

Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair.

Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.

If men existed two million years ago, they must have been—just as were the animals—quite different physically and anatomically from what they have now become, and nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we learn that the animal world has bred strictlyinter se—i.e., in accordance with genus and species—only since the appearanceon this Earthof the Atlantean Race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work,Modern Science and Modern Thought, this idea of the refusal to breed with another species, or that sterility is the only result of such breeding,“appears to be aprimâ faciededuction rather than an absolute law”even now. He shows that:

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

Different species do, in fact, often breed together, as is seen in the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the mule is sterile.... But this rule is not universal, and quite recently one new hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is perfectly fertile.

The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as also that of several other domestic animals; foxes and dogs again, and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rütimeyer as descended from“three distinct species of fossil-oxen, theBos primigenius,Bos longifronsandBos frontosus.”652Yet some of those species,as the ape family, which so clearly resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told,

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.

Numerous branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series.

The gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance.

Thus Mr. Darwin's remark—or shall we say the remark of Linnæus?—natura non facit saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would—were there any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct votaries—reconcile the modern evolution theory, in more than one way, if not entirely, with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the Anthropologists to meet with the“missing link”in our Fourth Round geological formations.

We will show elsewhere that Modern Science, however unconsciously to itself, pleads our case by its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape should be discovered to bethe descendant of man, than that these two types should have a common, fantastic and nowhere-to-be-found ancestor. Thus the wisdom of the compilers of the old Stanzas is vindicated by at least one eminent man of Science, and the Occultist prefers to believe, as he has ever done, that, as the Commentary says:

Man was the first and highest [mammalian] animal that appeared in this [Fourth Round] creation. Then came still huger animals; and last of all the dumb man who walks on all fours. [For] the Râkshasas [Giant-Demons] and Daityas [Titans] of the White Dvipa [Continent] spoiled his [the dumb man's] sires.

Furthermore, as we see, there are Anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the chronologies of Modern Science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English Scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the hypothesis of even a Tertiary man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of Homo Primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English Scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the Quaternary. Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these latter. The French school of Anthropology, basing their views on the discoveries of l'Abbé Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly to be[pg 302]found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a Secondary-Age man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures given in the Brâhmanical exoteric books which approximate to the Esoteric Teaching.

(d)“Then the Third Eye acted no longer,”says the Shloka, because Man had sunk too deep into the mire of Matter.

What is the meaning of this strange and weird statement in Shloka 42, concerning the Third Eye of the Third Race which had died and acted no longer?

A few more Occult Teachings must now be given with reference to this point as well as some others. The history of the Third and Fourth Races must be amplified, in order that it may throw some more light on the development of our present humanity; and show how the faculties, called into activity by Occult training, restore man to the position he previously occupied in reference to spiritual perception and consciousness. But the phenomenon of the Third Eye has to be first explained.

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