Page 94 (part 7)

For this is what we learn from these works and others: -- (1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palaeolithic Man, the stone implements become, from gracefully shaped and polished instruments, rude lumbering makeshifts. Pottery, etc., disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer! (2) Palaeolithic Man lived in caves which he shared with hyaenas and lions also,* whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings. Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palaeolithic haches, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this is in Europe, a few portions only of which were barely rising from the waters in the days [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * In such a case Palaeolithic man must have been endowed in his day with thrice Herculean force and magic invulnerability, or else the lion was as weak as a lamb at that period, for both to share the same dwelling. We may as well be asked to believe next that it is that lion or hyaena which has engraved the deer on the antler, as be told that this bit of workmanship was done by a savage of such a kind. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 723 ENTRAPPED BY THE REINDEER. of the highest Atlantean civilizations. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason to maintain that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palaeolithic savages? All the articles which geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than from the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palaeolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period -- for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods. The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that: "It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they . . . . altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer." (" Mod. Science and Mod. Thought, " p. 164.) Another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do. "In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures, or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found . . . . the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period . . . which appear to be intended for female figures of life size" . . . . (p. 199 Ibid. ) And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond post-tertiary or "Quaternary" times -- though Abbe Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning* -- seems to point to the truth of another esoteric statement, [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * More than twenty specimens of fossil monkeys have been found in one locality alone, in Miocene strata (Pikermi, near Athens). If man was not then, the period is [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 2, Page]] 724 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. which runs thus: "Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas." . . . Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands that reappeared while their predecessors formed the floors of new Oceans -- deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since "retreated" and made room for the table lands of Central Asia. The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period of fairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery -- possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palaeolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect. Not one implement fit to bear comparison with the finely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratum is to be seen ; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palaeolithic age, mixed up confusedly with the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above. In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palaeolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism -- in Europe again.