Page 59 (part 3)

. . T HEY ( the animals ) BEGAN TO BREED. T HE TWO-FOLD MAN ( then ) SEPARATED ALSO. H E (man), SAID " L ET US AS THEY; LET US UNITE AND MAKE CREATURES." T HEY DID. . . . ------- 32. A ND THOSE WHICH HAD NO SPARK ( the " narrow-brained "** TOOK HUGE SHE-ANIMALS UNTO THEM ( a ). T HEY BEGAT UPON THEM DUMB RACES. D UMB THEY WERE ( the " narrow-brained ") THEMSELVES. B UT THEIR TONGUES UNTIED ( b ). T HE TONGUES OF THEIR PROGENY REMAINED STILL. M ONSTERS THEY BRED. A RACE OF CROOKED, RED-HAIR-COVERED MONSTERS, GOING ON ALL FOURS.*** A DUMB RACE, TO KEEP THE SHAME UNTOLD.**** ( a ) The animals "separated the first," says Stanza 31. Bear in mind that at that period men were different, even physiologically, from what [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * " Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, " pp. 186-7. The "Unknown Ancestry" referred to are the primeval astral prototypes. Cf. § II ., p. 260 ( a ) . ** See verse 24. *** These "animals," or monsters, are not the anthropoid or any other apes, but verily what the Anthropologists might call the "missing link," the primitive lower man; see infra. **** The shame of their animal origin which our modern scientists would emphasize if they could. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 185 THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS MEN. they are now, having passed the middle point of the Fifth Race. We are not told what the "huge she-animals" were; but they certainly were as different from any we know now, as were the men. This was the first physical "fall into matter" of some of the then existing and lower races. Bear in mind Stanza 24. The "Sons of Wisdom" had spurned the early Third Race, i.e ., the non-developed, and are shown incarnating in, and thereby endowing with intellect, the later Third Race. Thus the sin of the brainless or "mindless" Races, who had no "spark" and were irresponsible, fell upon those who failed to do by them their Karmic duty. ( b ) See later on concerning the beginning of human speech. ------- W HAT MAY BE THE O BJECTIONS TO THE F OREGOING. Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater clearness, however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Book I., Stanza VI. Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that nature had built, at one time, around the human astral form an ape-like external shape, yet it is as correct that this shape was no more that of the "missing link," than were the coverings of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms of nature. Nor was it, as shown in the proper place, on this Fourth Round planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third Rounds, when MAN was, in turn, "a stone, a plant, and an animal" until he became what he was in the First Root-Race of present humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, except when the latter is divorced from the dogma of "Natural Selection" and the like. Indeed, between the Monera of Haeckel and the Sarisripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jiva ; for the "human" Monad, whether immetallized in the stone-atom, or invegetallized in the plant, or inanimalized in the animal, is still and ever a divine, hence also a HUMAN Monad. It ceases to be human only when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms "mineral," "vegetable" and "animal" monad are meant to create a superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (jiva) [[Vol. 2, Page]] 186 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. other than divine, and consequently having been, or having to become, human. And the latter term has to remain meaningless unless the difference is well understood. The Monad is a drop out of the shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be correct, within the plane of primeval differentiation. It is divine in its higher and human in its lower condition -- the adjectives "higher" and "lower" being used for lack of better words -- and a monad it remains at all times, save in the Nirvanic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms. As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine Mind, and the manifested Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it, repeating an Eastern teaching, so the M ONAD has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that " M AN becomes a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, a Spirit, and finally God. Thus accomplishing his cycle or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the heavenly M AN." But by "Man" the divine Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity, much less his physical body. While rejecting the immortal Soul, the men of Science now try to trace the latter through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak. The animals -- the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded man in this Fourth Round, as well as those contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races -- all are either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product (physically) of man. It is correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, i.e ., during the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of nature. That he was "a stone, a plant, an animal." But ( a ) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth Round; and ( b ) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows of the present, as the Occultists express it. And finally the forms and genera of neither man, animal, nor plant were what they became later.