Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded by Darwin and Haeckel against their European adversaries, proved of great weight.
Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of gill-clefts, with the "tail" problem, and so on.
Here again Occultism comes to our assistance with the necessary data.
The fact is that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate.
In this postulate we find a true " Evolution " or " Unfolding " -- a sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of natural selection.
Criticising Darwin's inference from "rudiments," an able writer remarks: "Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to suppose that Man was created with the rudimentary sketches in his organization, and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man degenerated, as to suppose that these parts existed in full development in the lower animals out of which man was generated?" ("Creation or Evolution?" Geo.
T.
Curtis, p.
76.) [[Vol.
2, Page]] 684 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Read for "into which Man degenerated," "the prototypes which man shed in the course of his astral developments," and an aspect of the true esoteric solution is before us.
But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.
So far as our present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man.
The amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks.
"Evolution" has to deal with the progressive modifications, which palaeontology shows to have affected the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in the course of geological time.
It does not, and from the nature of things cannot, touch on the subject of the pre-physical types which served as the basis for future differentiation.
Tabulate the general laws controlling the development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it has acquitted itself ably of the task.
To return to the immediate subject of discussion.
The mammalia, whose first traces are discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary Period, were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race.
They are thus post-Human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the group he originated.
This explanation disposes of a portion of the Darwinist brief.
"But how to account for the presence of the gill-clefts in the human foetus, which represent the stage through which the branchiae of the fish are developed;* for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of the lower fishes, which constitutes the foetal heart; for the entire analogy presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the blastoderm, and the appearance of the 'gastrula' stage, with corresponding stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for the various types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in the cycle of its growth?" "How comes it to pass that stages in the life of fishes, whose ancestors swam" -- aeons before the epoch of the First Root-Race, [Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * "At this period," writes Darwin, "the arteries run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiae which are not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking their former (?) position." It is noteworthy that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the foetal development of vertebrates.
Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.
[[Vol.
2, Page]] 685 REVERSION FROM THE WRONG END.
-- "in the seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian, reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the 'epitomized history' of human foetal development?" This plausible objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round man, as that new importation into our planet's area -- the mammalian stock -- is to the Fourth Round Humanity of the Second Root-race.
The process of human foetal growth epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third Round terrestrial life.
The diapason of type is run through in brief.
Occultists are thus at no loss to "account for" the birth of children with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human foetus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs.
The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man -- the microcosm of the Macrocosm -- and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as "reversion to ancestral features."* Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense contemplated by our present-day empiricists!
------- C D ARWINISM AND THE A NTIQUITY OF M AN: T HE A NTHROPOIDS AND THEIR A NCESTRY.
The public has been notified by more than one eminent modern geologist and man of science, that "all estimate of geological duration is not merely impossible, but necessarily imperfect; for we are ignorant of the causes, though they must have existed, which quickened or retarded the progress of the sedimentary deposits."** And now another man of Science, as well known (Croll), calculating that the tertiary age began either 15 or 2 1/2 million of years ago -- the former being a more correct calculation, according to Esoteric doctrine, than the latter there -- seems in this case, at least, no very great disagreement.
Exact Science, refusing to see in man "a special creation" (to a certain degree the Secret Sciences do the same), is at liberty to ignore the first three, or rather two-and-a-half Races -- the Spiritual, the semi-astral, and the [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Those who with Haeckel regard the gill-clefts with their attendant phenomena as illustrative of an active function in our amphibian and piscine ancestors (Vide his XII.
and XIII .
stages), ought to explain why the " Vegetable with leaflets " (Lefevre) represented in foetal growth, does not appear in his 22 stages through which the monera have passed in their ascent to Man.
Haeckel does not postulate a vegetable ancestor.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The human foetus 'epitomizes' and 'shadows forth' the stages of lower animal life, making each embryonic stage a legible map of the corresponding animal form — a structural correspondence across scales.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The passage narrates the origin of terrestrial animal life: mammalia 'were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race,' and other fauna are 'resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms... projected into physical objectivity.'
A non-physical dimension of reality, interpenetrating the physical world, populated by forces, beings, and forms ordinarily imperceptible to physical senses and instruments, that can affect embodied life without being seen — Dion Fortune's 'mind-side of nature,' the astral plane of Western esotericism broadly construed. Distinct from astral_light (a specific transmitting medium or fluid operating within this realm, not the realm itself), pleroma (the divine fullness at the summit of a cosmic hierarchy, not a parallel plane coextensive with ordinary life), and animism (particular indwelling spirits bound to specific natural objects, not the general unseen dimension itself).
The passage's central argument rests on non-physical dimensions: 'astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth,' 'astral progenitors,' 'astral developments,' and 'pre-physical types' that serve as the basis for physical life.
The doctrine that the cosmos unfolds as a structured descent of spirit into matter — a directional process traced stage by stage from an unconditioned principle down through successive planes to full materialization — complemented by its own eventual return ('evolution'). Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (the static structure of the resulting levels of the cascade) and cosmogony (a single originating event rather than an ongoing staged process) in naming the directional cosmic PROCESS of descent itself, paired with its own complementary ascent.
The passage describes lower animals as 'prototypes shed by Man in the course of his astral developments,' presenting a directional descent from a higher human form into lower animal forms — the core of involution as a staged cosmic process.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Explicitly stated: 'Man — the microcosm of the Macrocosm,' and 'the human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate.'