Page 60 (part 3)

"There is no question of selection between human races, " say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument -- one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, or rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. The world knows them as Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders, etc. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserves notice. Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions , which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to chose a member of such mixed tribes.* Darwin notes such [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 2, Page]] 196 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the Occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing," as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e ., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless"* and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises. Yet, in this particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings. It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native -- co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora - - must date back to an enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric position. "It is a very curious fact," says Jukes,** "that not only these marsupial animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several of the shells -- as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants found fossil in the Oolitic rocks -- much more nearly resemble those now living in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might be explained on the supposition that, since the 0olitic (Jurassic) period, less change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian flora and fauna consequently retain. Some- [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- [[Footnote continued from previous page]] crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g. , the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc. The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are very hairy, and the brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men -- not the closest approximation to the " pithecoid man," as Haeckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. (Cf. " Esoteric Buddhism, " p . 55.) * In calling the animal "Soulless," it is not depriving the beast, from the humblest to the highest species, of a "soul," but only of a conscious surviving Ego-soul, i.e., that principle which survives after a man, and reincarnates in a like man. The animal has an astral body, that survives the physical form for a short period; but its (animal) Monad does not re-incarnate in the same, but in a higher species, and has no "Devachan" of course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are latent. ** " Manual of Geology, " p. 302. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 197 THE SEPARATION OF SEXES. thing of the Oolitic type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the Globe. " (! !) Now why has less change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d ' etre for such a "curse of retardation"? It is simply because the nature of the environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its " virgin soil" notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.