The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The Races With The“Third Eye.”The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663[pg 305]The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:[pg 306]O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666And the note explains:The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.[pg 313]In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.
The subject is so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's-eye, called Esotericism, on almost every inch of the Occult ground travelled over, we have also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by exact Science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our position.653
It may be complained by some that too little is said of the physical,humanside of the extinct races, in the history of their growth and evolution. Much more might be said, assuredly, if simple prudence did[pg 303]not make us hesitate at the threshold of every new revelation. All that finds possibility and landmarks in the discoveries of Modern Science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate—and therefore denies as fact in nature—is withheld.
But even such statements as, for instance, that, of all the mammalians, man was the earliest, that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the ape, and that he was a kind of Cyclops in days of old—all will be contested; yet Scientists will never be able to prove, except to their own satisfaction, thatit was not so. Nor can they admit that the first two Races of men were too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, andshapeeven, to be called physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils. Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the Store-house, so to speak, ofall the seeds of lifefor this Round, vegetable and animal alike.654As Ain Suph is“One,notwithstanding the innumerable forms which are in him,”655so is man, on Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm.
As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657
As soon as man appeared, everything was complete ... for everything is comprised in man. Heunites in himself all forms.656
The mystery of theearthlyman is after the mystery of the Heavenly Man.657
The human form—so called because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of theDivineMan—is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of“Esoteric Studies,”thenew type, at the beginning of every Round.
As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658
As man never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the animal kingdomin esse,i.e., he never formed part of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the latter, a new human form must always have beenthenew type of the cycle. The human shape in one ring [?], as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom below.658
If the idea is what we understand it to mean—for the“rings”spoken of somewhat confuse the matter—then it is the correct Esoteric Teaching.[pg 304]Having appeared at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, Man—the Astral, or the“Soul,”for theZohar, repeating the Archaic Teaching, distinctly says that“therealman is the soul, and his material frame no part of him”—Man became the living and animalUnit, from which the“cast-off clothes”determined the shape of every life and animal in this Round.659
Thus, he“created,”for ages, the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds. The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in theVendîdâdof the Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldæan and Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the Hindû Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu andhisArk with the Seven Rishis, each of whom is shown the Father and Progenitor of specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters, as in theVishnuand otherPurânas. Open the MazdeanVendîdâd, and read the command of Ahura Mazda to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three Races, after telling him to build a Vara—“an enclosure,”an Argha or Vehicle.
Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660
Thither [into the Vara] thou shalt bringthe seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, etc.... All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kindto be kept inexhaustible there, so longas those men shall stay in the Vara.660
Those“men”in the“Vara”are the“Progenitors,”the Heavenly Men or Dhyânîs, the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For the Vara, or Ark, or again the Vehicle, simply meansMan.661
Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662
Thou shalt seal up the Vara [after filling it up with the seeds], and thou shalt make a door, and a windowself-shining within[which is the Soul].662
And when Yima enquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that Vara, he is answered:
Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663
Crush the earth ... and knead it with thy hands, as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay.663
The Egyptian ram-headed God makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so inGenesisdo the Elohim fashion him out of the same material.
When the“Maker of the material world,”Ahura Mazda, is asked, furthermore, what is to give light“to the Vara which Yima made,”he answers that:
There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664
There areuncreatedlights andcreatedlights. There [in Airyana Vaêjô, where Vara is built], the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day [and night].664
This is a clear reference to the“Land of the Gods”or the (now) Polar Regions. Moreover another hint is contained in this verse, a distinct allusion to the“uncreated lights”which enlighten man within—his“principles.”Otherwise, no sense or reason could be found in Ahura Mazda's answer which is forthwith followed by the words:
Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665
Every fortieth year, to every couple [hermaphrodite]two are born, a male and female.665
The latter is a distinct echo of the Secret Doctrine, of a Stanza which says:
At the expiration of every forty [annual] Suns, at the end of every fortieth Day, the double one becomes four; male and female in one, in the first and second and the third....
This is clear, since every“Sun”meant a whole year, the latter being composed of one Day then, as in the Arctic Circle it is now composed of six months. According to the old teaching, the axis of the Earth gradually changes its inclination to the ecliptic, and at the period referred to, this inclination was such that a polar Day lasted during the whole period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun, when a kind of twilight of very short duration intervened; after which the polar land resumed its position directly under the solar rays. This may be contrary to Astronomy as now taught and understood; but who can say that changes in the motion of the Earth, which do not take place now, did not occur millions of years back?
Returning once more to the statement that Vara meant the Man of the Fourth Round, as much as the Earth of those days, the Moon, and even Noah's Ark, if one will so have it—this is again shown in the dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra. Thus when the latter asks:
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Who is he who brought the law of Mazda into the Vara which Yima made?
Ahura Mazda answered:“It was the bird Karshipta, O holy Zarathushtra!”666
And the note explains:
The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667
The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens: were he living on the earth, he would be king of birds. He brought the law into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avestain the language of birds.667
This again is an allegory and a symbol misunderstood by the Orientalists only, who see in this bird“an incarnation of lightning,”and say its song was“often thought to be the utterance of a god and a revelation,”and what not. Karshipta is the human Mind-Soul, and the deity thereof, symbolized in ancient Magianism by a bird, as the Greeks symbolized it by a butterfly. No sooner had Karshipta entered the Vara or Man, than he understood the law of Mazda, or Divine Wisdom. In the“Book of Concealed Mystery”it is said of the Tree, which is the Tree of knowledge of good and evil:
In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668
In its branches the birds lodge and build their nests (thesoulsand the angels have their place).668
Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol.“Bird”was a Chaldæan, and has become a Hebrew, synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a Spirit, or Deva; and the“Bird's Nest”was, with both, Heaven, and is God's Bosom, in theZohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden“into that place which is called the Bird's Nest.”669
“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670
“Like a bird that is flying from its nest,”and that is the Soul from which the She'kheen-ah [divine wisdom or grace] does not move away.670
The Nest of the Eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces Life, is boundless Space,
—says the Commentary, meaning Hamsa, the Bird of Wisdom.
It is Adam Kadmon who is the tree of the Sephiroth, and it is he who becomes the“tree of knowledge of good and evil,”Esoterically. And that“tree hath around it seven columns [seven pillars] of the world, or Rectores [the same Progenitors or Sephiroth again], operating through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,”etc., one of which orders begets Giants (Nephilim) on Earth.
It was the belief of all antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the[pg 307]earliest mankind was a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have already, in isolated cases, yielded groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet high.671These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the HindûPurânasand the Greek poems of Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans—men of a tremendous super-human physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times—and of actual Cyclopes,“three-eyed”mortals.
It has been often remarked by observant writers, that the“origin of nearly every popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature.”
In these fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricatedex nihiloso many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.672
The evidence for the Cyclopes—a race of Giants—will, in forthcoming Sections, be pointed out in the Cyclopean remnants, which are so called to this day. An indication that the early Fourth Race—during its evolution and before the final adjustment of the human organism, which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race—may have been three-eyed, without having necessarily a third eye in the middle of the brow, like the legendary Cyclops, is also furnished by Science.
To Occultists who believe that spiritual and psychicinvolutionproceeds on parallel lines with physicalevolution—that theinnersenses,[pg 308]innate in the first human races, atrophied during racial growth and the material development of the outer senses—to the students of Esoteric symbology the above statement is no conjecture or possibility, but simplya phase of the law of growth, a proven fact, in short. They understand the meaning of the passage in the Commentaries which says:
There were four-armed human creatures in those early days of the male-females [hermaphrodites]; with one head, yet three eyes. They could see before them and behind them.673A Kalpa later [after the separation of the sexes] men having fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coördinately the Third Eye commenced to lose its power.... When the Fourth [Race] arrived at its middle age, the Inner Vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial stimuli, the process of which was known to the old Sages.674... The Third Eye, likewise, getting gradually petrified,675soon disappeared. The double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the Inner Man [during trances and spiritual visions] the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and feels it, and regulates his action accordingly.... The undefiled Lanoo [Disciple, Chelâ] need fear no danger; he who keeps himself not in purity [who is not chaste] will receive no help from the“Deva Eye.”
Unfortunately not. The“Deva Eye”exists no more for the majority of mankind. The Third Eyeis dead, and acts no longer; but it has left behind a witness to its existence. This witness is now the Pineal Gland. As for the“four-armed”men, it is they who became the prototypes of the four-armed Hindû Gods, as shown in a preceding footnote.
Such is the mystery of thehuman eyethat some Scientists have been forced to resort to Occult explanations in their vain endeavours to explain and account for all the difficulties surrounding its action. The development of the human eye gives more support to Occult Anthropology[pg 309]than to that of the Materialistic Physiologists.“The eyes in the human embryo growfrom within without”—out of the brain, instead of being part of the skin, as in the insects and cuttlefish. Professor Lankester—thinking the brain a queer place for the eye, and attempting to explain the phenomenon on Darwinian lines—suggests the curious view that“our”earliest vertebrate ancestor was a“transparent”creature and hence did not mind where the eye was! And so was man a“transparent creature”once upon a time, we are taught; and hence our theory holds good. But how does the Lankester hypothesis square with the Hæckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changesin the epidermis? If it startedinside, the latter theory goes into the waste basket. This seems to be proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion—or shall we say admission?—is perhaps rendered necessary by evolutionist necessities. Occultism, with its teaching as to the gradual development of senses“from within without,”from astral prototypes, is far more satisfactory. The Third Eyeretreated inwardswhen its course was run—another point in favour of Occultism.
The allegorical expression of the Hindû mystics who speak of the“Eye of Shiva,”the Tri-lochana, or“three-eyed,”thus receives its justification andraison d'être: the transference of the Pineal Gland (once that Third Eye) to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light on the mystery—incomprehensible to some—of the connection betweenabnormal, or spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question is often asked: Why should celibacy and chastity be asine quâ noncondition of regular Chelâship, or the development of psychic and occult powers? The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the Third Eye was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing to the gradual disappearance of spirituality and increase of materiality, the spiritual nature being extinguished by the physical, it became an atrophied organ, as little understood now by Physiologists as is the spleen—when we learn this, the connection becomes clear. During human life the greatest impediment in the way of spiritual development, and especially to the acquirement of Yoga powers, is the activity of our physiological senses. Sexual action also being closely connected, by interaction, with the spinal cord and the grey matter of the brain, it is useless to give any longer explanation. Of course, the normal and abnormal state of the brain, and the degree of active work in the Medulla Oblongata,[pg 310]reacts powerfully on the Pineal Gland, for, owing to the number of“centres”in that region, which controls by far the greatest number of the physiological actions of the animal economy, and also owing to the close and intimate neighbourhood of the two, a very powerful“inductive”action must be exerted by the Medulla on the Pineal Gland.
All this is quite plain to the Occultist, but is very vague in the sight of the general reader. The latter must then be shown the possibility of a three-eyed man in Nature, in those periods when his formation was yet in a comparatively chaotic state. Such a possibility may be inferred from anatomical and zoological knowledge, first of all, and then it may rest on the assumptions of Materialistic Science itself.
It is asserted upon the authority of Science, and upon evidence, which is this time not merely a fiction of theoretical speculation, that many of the animals—especially among the lower orders of the vertebrata—have athirdeye, now atrophied, but which was necessarily active in its origin.676The Hatteria species, a lizard of the order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand—a part of ancient Lemuria so called, mark well—presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary manner; and not only the Hatteria Punctata, but the Chameleon, and certain reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that this was no more than the prolongation of the brain which ended with a small protuberance, called Epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. As its development and anatomical structure showed, it offered such an analogy with that of the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it anything else. There are Palæontologists who to this day feel convinced that this Third Eye originally functioned, and they are certainly right. For this is what is said of the Pineal Gland in Quain'sAnatomy:
It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677
It is from this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of[pg 311]each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity.... The hinder part of the roof is developed by a peculiar process to be noticed later into the pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.
The lamina terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front, below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.
The twooptic thalami, formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle, consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their interior behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is thethird ventricle. Behind, the two thalami continue united by theposterior commissure, which is distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by thepeduncles of the pineal gland....
At an early period theoptic tractsmay be recognized as hollow prolongations from the outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.
The formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the thalamencephalon.677
The above is specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres, the Pineal Gland would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very interesting also to note the obvious connection which can be traced between the originally hollow Optic Tract and the Eyes anteriorly, and the Pineal Gland and its Peduncles posteriorly, and between all of these and the Optic Thalami. So that the recent discoveries in connection with the third eye of Hatteria Punctata have a very important bearing on the history of the development of the human senses, and on the Occult assertions in the text.
It is well known that Descartes saw in the Pineal Gland theSeat of the Soul, though this is now regarded as a fiction by those who have ceased to believe in the existence of an immortal principle in man.[pg 312]Although the Soul is joined to every part of the body, he said, there is one special portion of the latter in which the Soul exercises its functions more specially than in any other. And, as neither the heart, nor yet the brain could be that“special”locality, he concluded that it was that little gland which was tied to the brain, and yet had an action independent of it, as it could easily be put into a kind of swinging motion“by theanimal spirits678which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense.”
Unscientific as this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the Occult truth than is any Hæckel. For the Pineal Gland is, as shown, far more closely connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had the leading Scientists a glimmer of therealprocesses employed by the Evolutionary Impulse, and the windingcycliccourse of this great Law, they wouldknowinstead of conjecturing, and would feel certain of the future physical transformations which await the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then would they see the fallacy and the absurdity of their modern“blind-force”and“mechanical”processes of Nature; and, in consequence of such knowledge, would realize that the said Pineal Gland, for instance, could not but be disabled forphysicaluse at this stage of our Cycle. If the odd“eye”is now atrophied in man, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has once been active; for Nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant, form without some definite purpose and for some use. It was an active organ, we say, at that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the Cycle ran down towards that point where the physiological senses were developed by, and wentpari passuwith, the growth and consolidation of physical man—the interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological development—this median“eye”at last atrophied together with the early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the mirror and also the window of the Soul, says popular wisdom,679andVox populi, vox Dei.
In the beginning, every class and family of the living species was hermaphrodite and objectively one-eyed. In the animal—whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their“coats of skin,”viz., to evolve, fromwithin without, the thick coating of physical substance or matter with its internal physiological mechanism—the Third Eye was primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes only developed680later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was, at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of the blind vertebrates, in our day,i.e., beneath an opaque skin.681Only, the stages of the odd, or primeval, eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round, and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore, while the Cyclopean eye was, and stillis, in man the organ ofspiritualsight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye, having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and laid aside by Nature for further use in æons to come.
This explains why the Pineal Gland reached its highest development proportionately with the lowest physical development. It is in the Vertebrata that it is the most prominent and objective, whereas in man it is most carefully hidden and inaccessible, except to the Anatomist. No less light, however, is thereby thrown on the future physical, spiritual, and intellectual state of mankind, in periods corresponding on parallel lines with other past periods, and always on the lines of ascending and descending cyclic evolution and development. Thus, a few centuries before the Kali Yuga—the Age which began nearly 5,000[pg 314]years ago—it was said in Commentary Twenty, if it is paraphrased into comprehensible sentences:
We [the Fifth Root-Race] in our first half [of duration] onward [on the now ascending arc of the Cycle] are on the mid point of [or between] the First and Second Races—falling downward [i.e., the Races were then on the descending arc of the Cycle].... Calculate for thyself, Lanoo, and see.
Calculating as advised, we find that during that transitional period—namely, in the second half of the First spiritual ethereo-astral Race—nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element, as it was on itsdescendingline. And as we are parallel to it, on theascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual. For, remember well, as we are in the Mânasa period of our Cycle of Races, or in the Fifth, we have, therefore, crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter—or the equilibrium between brain intellect and spiritual perception. One important point, has, however, to be borne in mind.
Illustration: Evolution of Root-Races in the Fourth Round
[Transcriber's Note: The graph shows, to the left,“Downward Cycle. Evolution of Physical and Intellectual Nature and the Gradual Regression of Spirituality.”To the right is“Ascending Cycle. Reëvolution or Reversion of Spirituality and the Gradual Decrease of Materiality and mere Brain-intellectuality.”Below is“Meridian of Races.”]
We are only in the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as a direct ray from the Universal Mahat—a ray unimpeded by Matter—will be finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles and stages of evolutionary development repeated on a smaller scale, much more must it be so in the case of[pg 315]a Root-Race. Our Race then has, as a Root-Race, crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the spiritual side; but some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of their respective national cycles; while others again—the oldest—having crossed the crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a tribe, will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as sub-races.
It now becomes comprehensible why the Third Eye was gradually transformed into a simple gland, after the physical Fall of those we have agreed to call the Lemurians.
It is a curious fact that in human beings the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral ventricles have been especially developed, whereas it is the Optic Thalami, Corpora Quadrigemina, and Corpora Striata which are the principal parts developed in other mammalian brains. Moreover, it is asserted that the intellect of a man may, to some extent, be gauged by the development of the central convolutions and the fore part of the cerebral hemispheres. It would seem a natural corollary to this that if the development of the Pineal Gland may be considered to be an index of the astral capacities and spiritual proclivities of any man, there will be a corresponding development of that part of the cranium, or an increase in the size of the Pineal Gland at the expense of the posterior part of the cerebral hemispheres. This is a curious speculation and would receive confirmation in the present case. We should see, below and behind, the cerebellum which has been held to be the seat of all the animal proclivities of the human being, and which is allowed by Science to be the great centre for all the physiologically coördinated movements of the body, such as walking, eating, etc.; in front, the fore-part of the brain, the cerebral hemispheres, the part especially connected with the development of the intellectual powers in man; and in the middle, dominating them both, and especially the animal functions, the developed Pineal Gland, in connection with the more highly evolved, or spiritual man.
It must be remembered that these are only physical correspondences; just as the ordinary human brain is the registering organ of memory, but not memory itself.
This is, then, the organ which has given rise to so many legends and traditions, among others to that of men with one head but two faces. These legends may be found in several Chinese works, besides being referred to in the Chaldæan fragments. Apart from the work already cited, theShan Hai King, compiled by Kung Chia from engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yü, 2,255b.c., they may be found in[pg 316]another work, called theBamboo Books, and in a third, the'Rh Ya, whose author was“initiated according to tradition by Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, 1,122b.c.”TheBamboo Bookscontain the ancient annals of China, founda.d.279 on opening the grave of King Seang of Wei, who died 295b.c.682Both these works mention men with two faces on one head—one in front and one behind.
Now what students of Occultism ought to know is that the Third Eyeis indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.
The“Eye of Shiva”did not become entirety atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the Deva-Man of the Third Race had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the Eye lost its powers. But such was the law of evolution, and it was, in strict accuracy, noFall. The sin was not in using those newly-developed powers, but inmisusingthem; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain a God, the fane of everyspiritualiniquity. And if we say“sin”it is merely that everyone should understand our meaning, for Karma683would be the more correct term to use in this case; moreover the reader who should feel perplexed at the use of the term“spiritual”instead of“physical”iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the Psychic, if not of the Spiritual, Man. And in the case of the Atlanteans, it was precisely the Spiritual Being which sinned, the Spirit Element being still the“Master”Principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.
As this sentence may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the benefit of those who are ignorant of Theosophical Teachings.
Questions with regard to Karma and Re-births are constantly being put forward, and great confusion seems to exist upon the subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian faith, and have been trained in the idea that a new Soul is created by God for every newly-born[pg 317]infant, are among the most perplexed. They ask whether the number of Monads incarnating on Earth is limited; to which they are answered in the affirmative. For, however countless, in our conception, the number of the incarnating Monads, still, there must be a limit. This is so even if we take into account the fact that ever since the Second Race, when their respective seven Groups were furnished with bodies, several births and deaths may be allowed for every second of time in the æons already passed. It has been stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature, adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Let us remember that, save in the case of young children, and of individuals whose lives have been violently cut off by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can reïncarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to other animals for their evolutionary progress.
Hence the assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of Karma is inextricably interwoven with that of Reïncarnation.
It is only the knowledge of the constant re-births of one and the same Individuality throughout the Life-Cycle; the assurance that the same Monads—among whom are many Dhyân Chohans, or the“Gods”themselves—have to pass through the“Circle of Necessity,”rewarded or punished by such rebirth for the suffering endured or crimes committed in the former life; that those very Monads, which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris, are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance; it is only this doctrine, we say, that can explain to us the mysterious problem of Good and Evil, and reconcile man to the terribleapparentinjustice of life. Nothing but such certainty can quiet our revolted sense of justice. For, when one unacquainted with the noble doctrine looks around him, and observes the inequalities of birth and fortune, of intellect and capacities; when one sees honour paid to fools and profligates, on whom fortune has heaped her favours by mere privilege of birth, and their nearest neighbour, with all his intellect and noble virtues—far more deserving in every way—perishing of want and for lack of sympathy; when one sees all this and has to turn away,[pg 318]helpless to relieve the undeserved suffering, one's ears ringing and heart aching with the cries of pain around him—that blessed knowledge of Karma alone prevents him from cursing life and men, as well as their supposed Creator.684
Of all the terrible blasphemies and what are virtually accusations thrown at their God by the Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always) false humility which makes the presumably“pious”Christian assert, in the face of every evil and undeserved blow, that“suchis the willof God.”
Dolts and hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and Creator for helpless man, and of that Godscourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words:
But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?
But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?
Logic and simple common sense, we answer. If we are asked to believe in“original sin,”inonelifeonlyon this Earth for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire—and this whether they be good or bad, says the Predestinarian685—why should not everyone of us who is endowed with reasoning powers, condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as:
Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!
Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolvedThe pride of human wisdom,to confoundThedaring scrutinyand provethe faithOf thypresumingcreatures!
Thou great Mysterious Power, who hastinvolved
The pride of human wisdom,to confound
Thedaring scrutinyand provethe faith
Of thypresumingcreatures!
Truly a robust“faith”is required to believe that it is“presumption”to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to“perplex”him, and to test a“faith”with which that“Power,”moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes.
Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every[pg 319]reasonable evidence and on life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law—whether Conscious or Unconscious—predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is Eternity itself; and as such, since no act can be coëqual with Eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is Action itself. It is not thewavewhich drowns a man, but thepersonalaction of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under theimpersonalaction of the laws that govern theocean'smotion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or Materialists—still less as Fatalists,686[pg 320]for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect, in its effects in the phenomenal world.
Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the Law of Re-birth, or of the reïncarnation of the same spiritual Individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of Personalities. The latter are like the various characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. Theinner, or real Man, who personates those characters, knows the whole time that he is Hamlet only for the brief space of a few acts, which, however, on the plane of human illusion, represent the whole life of Hamlet. He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, thepermanentIndividuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the“spiritual”Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality.
The possession of a physical Third Eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Root-Race down to nearly the middle period of the third sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame caused it to disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perception lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether. This was prior to the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean Continent. And now we may return to the Deluges and their many“Noahs.”
The student has to bear in mind that there were many such Deluges as that mentioned inGenesis, and three far more important ones, which will be mentioned and described in the Section of Part III devoted to the subject of pre-historic“Submerged Continents.”To avoid erroneous conjectures, however, with regard to the claim that the Esoteric Doctrine has much in common with the legends contained in the Hindû Scriptures; that, again, the chronology of the latter is almost that of the former—only explained and made clear; and that finally the belief that Vaivasvata Manu—a generic term indeed!—was the Noah of the Âryans and the prototype of the biblical patriarch, all[pg 321]this—as pertaining also to the belief of the Occultists—necessitates a new explanation at this juncture.