The Path
of the
Eternal Pilgrim
A Collation from The Secret Doctrine
on the genesis
of the Earth and Mankind
By a Student
The Path
of the
Eternal Pilgrim
A Collation from The Secret Doctrine
on the genesis
of the Earth and Mankind
By a Student
First edition 2013
Published by
The European School of Theosophy
© The European School of Theosophy
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. SOME FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS................................................................... 1
II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EARTH.................................................. 5
1. Each planet is a chain composed of seven globes....................... 5
2. The Mazdean view on the sevenfold constitution
of the Earth................................................................................................ 7
3. The Planetary Spirit of our Globe and other Planets................ 9
4. The “principles” of planet Earth (Globe D).................................. 12
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH.................................................................. 13
1. Each planetary chain is a reincarnation of a lower
planetary chain.................................................................................... 13
2. The Days and Nights of Planets........................................................... 13
3. On “manvantaras” and “Manus”........................................................ 16
4. Planet Earth is a reincarnation of the Moon................................. 18
5. A description of the genesis of the Earth Chain........................ 20
6. What are the laya-centres on which the planet is built?....... 20
7. Fohat guides the transfer of the energies from one
planet to another.................................................................................... 21
IV. ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS..................... 23
1. Planetary life proceeds in seven Rounds........................................ 23
2. What is a Round?.......................................................................................... 23
3. Each Round is guided and built by various
Dhyan Chohans.................................................................................... 23
4. Rounds, globes and their Manus........................................................ 25
5. Each Round is a progressive repetition of a former
Round.......................................................................................................... 29
6. Rounds and the genesis of the Elements........................................ 30
7. Evolution of Elements and physical senses on
this Globe D............................................................................................. 34
8. Rounds and the genesis of Man........................................................... 35
9. The Fourth Round on the Fourth Globe is the crucial
mid-point of evolution..................................................................... 36
10. Fifth and Sixth Rounders......................................................................... 37
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V. THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
THE SEVEN KINGDOMS AND THEIR EVOLUTION
ON EARTH.......................................................................................41
1. There are seven kingdoms.......................................................43
2. The kingdoms represent different stages of evolution........43
3. The order of appearance of the kingdoms on the Earth.......45
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION
AND PROGRESS ON EARTH.......................................................49
1. First things first: what is a monad?........................................49
2. The Monads are Rays of the Dhyani Buddhas:
they are spiritual individualities......................................51
3. Relationship between the Universal Monad,
Cosmic Monads and the human monads.......................58
4. The hosts of monads are limited.............................................59
5. The lunar monads are divided into seven hierarchies........61
6. The order of appearance of the lunar monads on Earth.......61
7. The seven hierarchies of lunar monads are divided
into three great classes.......................................................63
8. The lunar monads and their different stages of
development in the first three and a half Rounds.........64
9. The progress of lunar monads through the kingdoms
during the first three and a half Rounds..........................67
10. Reaching the midpoint of evolution.......................................72
VII. THE THREEFOLD SCHEME OF EVOLUTION.........................75
VIII. NATURE’S OR EARTH’S UNAIDED ATTEMPT TO
CREATE MAN FAILS.........................................................................77
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND: SOME
BASIC IDEAS....................................................................................81
1. Man is not only a product of material evolution..................81
2. There are twelve classes of creators but only seven
of them are the fathers or pitris of man..........................81
3. The seven classes are divided into two distinct kinds:
four rupic or corporeal Barhishad and three
arupic or incorporeal Agnishwatta..................................82
CONTENTS
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
vii
The Barhishad have creative physical fire and the
Agnishwatta have creative spiritual fire..........................83
The Barhishads are Lunar Pitris and the Agnishwattas
are Solar Pitris.....................................................................85
Solar Pitris belong to the Fifth and Lunar Pitris
belong to the Sixth hierarchy of Creative
Powers.................................................................................85
Most of the Agnishwatta incarnated as the Egos
of mankind..........................................................................90
There seem to be at least four, if not seven (and not
only three) classes of arupa angels..................................90
The correspondence between the Pitris and the
human heart........................................................................92
X. THE LUNAR PITRIS AND THE CREATION OF
ASTRAL-PHYSICAL MANKIND.................................................93
[The physical scheme of evolution]
1. The Lunar Pitris are the most developed
lunar monads......................................................................93
2. The Lunar Pitris evolve the chhayas and thus bring
forth the first Human Root-Race......................................94
3. The chhaya-birth takes place on seven portions of the
first continent......................................................................94
4. A more detailed explanation of the “chhaya-birth”............96
5. The First Root Race was composed of the astral
shadows of the Lunar Pitris and these chhayas
are in their turn absorbed into the Second
Root Race...........................................................................100
6. What happened with the Lunar Pitris?................................101
7. The Lunar Pitris are the formative powers during
the first three and a half Root Races..............................102
XI. THE SOLAR PITRIS AND THE GRADUAL AWAKENING
OF MANAS.....................................................................................105
[The intellectual scheme of evolution]
1. The Solar Pitris “refuse” to build physical man:
they endow him with mind............................................105
viii
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
2. The incarnation process is gradual and differs with
the grade of development of the vehicles and
with the status of the Solar Pitris themselves..............109
3. Incarnation process had already started in the
First and Second Root Race............................................111
4. The Kumaras (Rudras or Maruts) are the highest
class of Solar Pitris...........................................................112
5. Some Solar Pitris, i.e. the Kumaras, are Nirmanakyas
from other Manvantaras.................................................116
6. Some Solar Pitris were returing Nirvanees (Pratyeka
Buddhas?)..........................................................................117
7. Some Solar Pitris were “Failures”.........................................118
8. Differences in men..................................................................118
9. The sons of Kriyasakti and the descent of
The Great Sacrifice (The Silent Watcher)......................120
10. The abuse of the creative powers..........................................127
PRELIMINARY MEDITATION
Lead the life necessary for the acquisition of such knowledge and powers,
and Wisdom will come to you naturally. Whenever you are able to
attune your consciousness to any of the seven chords of “Universal
Consciousness”, those chords that run along the sounding-board of
Kosmos, vibrating from one Eternity to another; when you have studied
thoroughly “the music of the Spheres”, then only will you become quite
free to share your knowledge with those with whom it is safe to do so.
Meanwhile be prudent...
(The Master’s words, SD I 167)
Outside of metaphysics no occult philosophy, no esotericism is possible.
(SD I 169)
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
List of abbreviations
SD:
The Secret Doctrine, Volumes I and II.
H.P. Blavatsky. The Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, 1982.
TBL:
Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge.
H.P. Blavatsky. The Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, 1923.
TG:
The Theosophical Glossary.
H.P. Blavatsky. The Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, 1930.
ML:
The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnet from the Mahatmas M. & K.H.
A.T. Barker. Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers,
New York, 1924.
Ocean: The Ocean of Theosophy.
W.Q. Judge. The Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, 1981.
Symbols used
[…] Between square brackets only the compiler’s comments and
thoughts are given, not original teachings. Therefore they should be
taken for what they are worth and be used with the utmost care.
Words and sections in capitals or bold and italic type are as
they appear in the original text, as are differences or apparent
inconsistencies in spellings.
1
I. SOME FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS
For the benefit of those who may not have read, or, if they have, may
not have clearly understood, in Theosophical writings, the doctrine
of the septenary chains of worlds in the Solar Kosmos, the teaching is
briefly thus:–
1. Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is
septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible
or invisible, is credited with six companion globes. The evolution of
life proceeds on these seven globes or bodies from the 1st to the 7th in
Seven Rounds or Seven Cycles.
2. These globes are formed by a process which the Occultists call
the “rebirth of planetary chains (or rings).” When the seventh and
last Round of one of such rings has been entered upon, the highest
or first globe “A,” followed by all the others down to the last, instead
of entering upon a certain time of rest – or “obscuration,” as in their
previous Rounds – begins to die out. The “planetary” dissolution
(pralaya) is at hand, and its hour has struck; each globe has to transfer
its life and energy to another planet.
3. Our Earth, as the visible representative of its invisible superior
fellow globes, its “lords” or “principles”, has to live, as have the
others, through seven Rounds. During the first three, it forms and
consolidates; during the fourth it settles and hardens; during the last
three it gradually returns to its first ethereal form: it is spiritualised,
so to say.
4. Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth – our present
Round. Up to this fourth Life-Cycle, it is referred to as “humanity”
only for lack of a more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes
chrysalis and butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes man, passes
through all the forms and kingdoms during the first Round and through
all the human shapes during the two following Rounds. Arrived on
1
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
our Earth at the commencement of the Fourth in the present series of
life-cycles and races, man is the first form that appears thereon, being
preceded only by the mineral and vegetable kingdoms – even the
latter having to develop and continue its further evolution through man. [...]
During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the globe on which
it lives, will be ever tending to reassume its primeval form, that of a
Dhyan Chohanic Host. Man tends to become a God [Dhyan Chohan]
and then – God, like every other atom in the Universe.
“Beginning so early as with the 2nd round, Evolution proceeds
already on quite a different plan. It is only during the 1st round that
(heavenly) man [the lunar Chohans or Pitris, the first class of lunar
monads] becomes a human being on globe A (rebecomes) a mineral,
a plant, an animal, on globe B and C, etc. The process changes entirely
from the second round – but you have learned prudence . . . and
I advise you to say nothing before the time for saying it has come. . .”
(Extract from the Teacher’s letters on various topics.) (SD I 158-160)
[Note: the change of process in round 2 is not difficult to understand
if one comprehends the purpose of the first round. In the first round
the globes and/or kingdoms have to be formed by the incoming
life-wave(s) in their first rudimentary form. At the end of the first
round this is completed: the framework is done, the houses in their
prototypal stage are ready: the different classes of evolving monads,
who constitute the life-wave as a whole, do not have to start de novo,
but “re-enter” immediately their respective kingdoms, and complete
the first sketch they themselves have formed. Now starting with the
second round the process of material consolidation, concretion and
differentiation may begin, a process which will end in the Fourth
Round on globe D. So, it becomes quite clear that Man (meaning here
the highest class of lunar monads, the Pitris who lead the human
element in the second and third Round and will give chhayas in the
Fourth Round) enters in the second round again the human stage,
which it had formed in the first round. This monadic class doesn’t
have to go again through the lower kingdoms: it had already reached
human form-stage in the first round. Also the other lunar monads
enter their respective kingdoms without going through lower ones,
as will be illustrated later.]
I. SOME FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS
3
5. Every life-cycle on Globe D (our Earth) is composed of seven
root-races. They commence with the Ethereal and end with the
spiritual on the double line of physical and moral evolution – from
the beginning of the terrestrial round to its close. (One is a “planetary
round” from Globe A to Globe G, the seventh; the other, the “globe
round,” or the terrestrial).
[Note: a globe or terrestrial round is a “life-cycle” of 7 root-races on a
certain globe; in other words “a round” of the monadic life-wave on
one of the seven globes: there are thus 7 globe rounds in each planetary
round. A globe-round may also be called a globe-manvantara.]
6. The first root-race, i.e., the first “men” on earth (irrespective of
form) were the progeny of the “celestial men,” called rightly in Indian
philosophy the “Lunar Ancestors” or the Pitris, of which there are
seven classes or Hierarchies. (SD I 160)
As regards the evolution of mankind, the Secret Doctrine postulates
three new propositions, which stand in direct antagonism to modern
science as well as to current religious dogmas: it teaches (a) the
simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on seven different
portions of our globe; (b) the birth of the astral, before the physical
body: the former being a model for the latter; and (c) that man, in this
Round, preceded every mammalian – the anthropoids included – in
the animal kingdom. (SD II 1)
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
* The Arupa or “formless,” there where form ceases to exist, on the objective
plane.
† The word “Archetypal” must not be taken here in the sense that the Platonists
gave to it, i.e., the world as it existed in the Mind of the Deity; but in that of a
world made as a first model, to be followed and improved upon by the worlds
which succeed it physically – though deteriorating in purity.
‡ These are the four lower planes of Cosmic Consciousness, the three higher
planes being inaccessible to human intellect as developed at present. The seven
states of human consciousness pertain to quite another question.
5
II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EARTH
1. Each planet is a chain composed of seven globes
[T]he one eternal Law unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested
Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular
chains of worlds, composed of seven globes, graduated on the four
lower planes of the world of formation (the three others belonging
to the Archetypal Universe). Out of these seven only one, the lowest
and the most material of those globes, is within our plane or means of
perception, the six others lying outside of it and being therefore
invisible to the terrestrial eye. (SD I 152)
Our Globe [the grossest physical Globe or Globe D], as taught from
the first, is at the bottom of the arc of descent, where the matter of our
perceptions exhibits itself in its grossest form. . . . . . . Hence it only stands
to reason that the globes which overshadow our Earth must be on different
and superior planes. In short, as Globes, they are in co-adunition but not
in consubstantiality with our earth and thus pertain to quite another
state of consciousness. Our planet (like all those we see) is adapted to the
peculiar state of its human stock, that state which enables us to see with our
naked eye the sidereal bodies which are co-essential with our terrene plane
and substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Jovians, Martians
and others can perceive our little world: because our planes of consciousness,
differing as they do in degree but being the same in kind, are on the same
layer of differentiated matter. . . . . (SD I 166)
The Earth is sevenfold. It is an entity and not a mere lump of gross
matter. And being thus an entity of a septenary nature there must
be six other globes which roll with it in space. This company of
seven globes has been called the “Earth Chain,” the “Planetary
5
6
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
Chain.” […] The earth is one of seven globes, in respect to man’s
consciousness only, because when he functions on one of the seven
he perceives it as a distinct globe and does not see the other six. This
is in perfect correspondence with man himself who has six other
constituents of which only the gross body is visible to him because
he is now functioning on the Earth – or the fourth globe – and his
body represents the Earth. The whole seven “globes” constitute one
single mass or great globe and they all interpenetrate each other.
But we have to say “globe,” because the ultimate shape is globular
or spherical. If one relies too closely on the explanation made by
Mr. Sinnett it might be supposed that the globes did not interpenetrate
each other but were connected by currents or lines of magnetic force.
And if too close attention is paid to the diagrams used in the Secret
Doctrine to illustrate the scheme, without paying due regard to
the explanations and cautions given by H. P. Blavatsky, the same
error may be made. But both she and her Adept teachers say, that
the seven globes of our chain are in “coadunition with each other but
not in consubstantiality.” (Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 166, first edition.)
This is further enforced by cautions not to rely on statistics or plane
surface diagrams, but to look at the metaphysical and spiritual
aspect of the theory as stated in English. Thus from the very source of
Mr. Sinnett’s book we have the statement, that these globes are
united in one mass though differing from each other in substance,
and that this difference of substance is due to change of center of
consciousness. (Ocean 23-24)
2. The Mazdean view on the sevenfold constitution of the Earth
It was mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary
constitution of our “chain” was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians,
who got it from the first Zarathustra. It is time to prove it to those
Parsis who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In
the Avesta the earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one
and the same time. This is regarded by Dr. Geiger, as an incongruity,
for the following reasons, which he calls discrepancies: the Avesta
speaks of the three-thirds of the earth because the Rig-Veda
II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EARTH
7
mentions “three earths.” . . . . “Three strata or layers, one lying above
the other, are said to be meant by this.” But he is quite mistaken,
as are all exoteric profane translators. The Avesta has not borrowed
the idea from the Rig-Veda, but simply repeats the esoteric teaching.
The “three strata or layers” do not refer to our globe alone, but to
three layers of the globes of our terrestrial chain – two by two, on
each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc.
Thus, with reference to the six spheres or globes above our earth, the
seventh and the fourth, it is septempartite, while with regard to the
planes over our plane – it is tripartite. This meaning is carried out and
corroborated by the text in the Avesta and Vendidad, and even by the
speculations – a most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work – of
the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of
the “earth,” or rather the earth’s chain, into seven Karshvars is not in
contradiction with the three “zones,” if this word is read “planes.” As
Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old – the oldest of all
– since the Gathas already speak of the “septempartite earth.” (Bumi
haptaiti, Yasna, xxxii., 3.) For, “according to the Parsee Scriptures,
the seven Karshvars are to be considered as completely disconnected parts
of the earth,” which they surely are. For, “between them there flows
the Ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated in several passages, to
pass from one Karshvar to another.” The “Ocean” is space, of course,
for the latter was called “Waters of Space” before it was known as
Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is consistently rendered by
Dwipa, and especially Qaniratha by Jambudwipa (“Neriosengh, the
translator of the Yasna.”) But this fact is not taken into account by the
Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a learned Zoroastrian
and Parsi by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger’s work passing
unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the
former on the “incongruities” of this kind abounding in the Mazdean
Scriptures. One of such “incongruities” and “coincidences” concerns
the similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard
to the seven Dwipas (islands, or continents, rather) as met with in
the Puranas, namely: “The Dwipas form concentric rings, which,
separated by the ocean, surround Jambu Dvipa, which is situated in
the centre” (p. 130, vol. I.), and, “according to the Iranian view, the
Karshvar Qaniratha is likewise situated in the centre of the rest . . . .
8
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
each of them (the other six Karshvars) is a peculiar individual space,
and so they group themselves round (above) Qaniratha” (Ibid. p. 131).
Now Qaniratha is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator, “the
country inhabited by the Iranian tribes,” and the other names do not
mean “the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South,
West, and East” (p. 132), but our globe or Earth. For that which is
meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that
“two Vorubarshti and Voru-Zarshti lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu
and Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and
West,” is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the
“chain” of our planet, the Earth, represented in the book of Dzyan
(11) thus:
The Mazdean names given above have only to be replaced by those
used in the Secret Doctrine to become an orthodox tenet. The “Earth”
(our World), therefore, is “tripartite,” because the chain of the
worlds is situated on three different planes above our globe; and it is
septempartite because of the seven globes or spheres which compose
the chain. Hence the further meaning given in Vendidad XIX. 39,
showing that “Qaniratha alone is combined with imat, ‘this’ (earth),
while all other Karshvares are combined with the word ‘avat,’ ‘that’ or
those – upper earths.” Nothing could be plainer. (SD II 757-759)
II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EARTH
9
3. The Planetary Spirit of our Globe and other Planets
Plato proves himself an Initiate, when saying in Cratylus that [theos]
is derived from the verb [theein], “to move,” “to run,” as the first
astronomers who observed the motions of the heavenly bodies called
the planets [theoi], the gods. […] Later, the word produced another
term, [aletheia] – “the breath of God.” (SD I 2 fn)
Plato represented the planets as moved by an intrinsic Rector, one
with his dwelling, like “A boatman in his boat.” As for Aristotle,
he called those rulers “immaterial substances;” though as one
who had never been initiated, he rejected the gods as Entities
(See Vossius, Vol. II., p. 528). But this did not prevent him
from recognising the fact that the stars and planets “were not
inanimate masses but acting and living bodies indeed. . . . . . .” As
if “sidereal spirits were the divine portion of their phenomena, [[ta
theoitera pon phaneron]]” (De Caelo. I. 9). If we look for corroboration
in more modern and Scientific times, we find Tycho Brahe recognising
in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and vital. Kepler, putting
together the Pythagorean sentence, “The Sun, guardian of Jupiter,”
and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in the Sun,” and “The
Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood perfectly how
the Pythagoreans could believe that all the globes disseminated
through Space were rational Intelligences, facultates ratiocinativae,
circulating around the Sun, “in which resides a pure Spirit of fire; the
source of the general harmony” (De Motibus planetarum harmonicis,
p. 248). (SD I 493)
[E]very globe […] is under the supervision and guidance of special
“Builders” and “Watchers” – the various Dhyan-Chohans. (SD I 233)
1. The Lha which turns the fourth (Globe, or our Earth) is servant
to the Lha(s) of the seven (the planetary Spirits), they who revolve,
driving their chariots around their Lord, the one eye (LokaChakshub) of our world. His breath gives life to the seven (gives
light to the planets). It gave life to the first. “They are all dragons
of Wisdom,” adds the Commentary. (Book II, Stanza I.)
10
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[...] This expression shows in plain language that the SpiritGuardian of our globe, which is the fourth in the chain, is subordinate
to the chief Spirit (or God) of the Seven Planetary Genii or Spirits.
As already explained, the ancients had, in their Kyriel of gods, seven
chief Mystery-gods, whose chief was, exoterically, the visible Sun, or
the eighth, and, esoterically, the second Logos, the Demiurge. The seven
(who have now become the “Seven Eyes of the Lord” in the Christian
religion) were the regents of the seven chief planets […]
“The seven higher make the Seven Lhas create the world,” states a
Commentary; which means that our Earth, leaving aside the rest, was
created or fashioned by terrestrial spirits, the “Regents” being simply
the supervisors. This is the first germ, the seed of that which grew
later into the Tree of Astrology and Astrolatry. The Higher ones were
the Kosmocratores, the fabricators of our solar system. (SD II 22-23)
“The Globe, propelled onward by the Spirit of the Earth and his six assistants,
gets all its vital forces, life, and powers through the medium of the seven
planetary Dhyanis from the Spirit of the Sun. They are his messengers of
Light and Life.” (SD II 28-29)
A Planetary Spirit is a Ruler of a planet, a kind of finite or personal
god. There is a marked difference, however, between the Rulers of the
Sacred Planets and the Rulers of a small “chain” of worlds like our
own. (TBL 47)
[T]he terrestrial spirit of the earth is not of a very high grade. It must
be remembered that the planetary spirit has nothing to do with the
spiritual man, but with things of matter and cosmic beings. The gods
and rulers of our Earth are cosmic Rulers; that is to say, they form
into shape and fashion cosmic matter, for which they were called
Cosmocratores. They never had any concern with spirit; the DhyaniBuddhas, belonging to quite a different hierarchy, are especially
concerned with the latter. (TBL 48)
If, for instance, Esoteric Philosophy teaches that the “Spirit”
(collectively again) of Jupiter is far superior to the Terrestrial Spirit,
it is not because Jupiter is so many times larger than our earth, but
II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EARTH
11
because its substance and texture are so much finer than, and superior
to, that of the earth. And it is in proportion to this quality that the
Hierarchies of respective “Planetary Builders” reflect and act upon the
ideations they find planned for them in the Universal Consciousness,
the real great Architect of the Universe. (TBL 50)
The [seven] “Planetary” [spirits] – who are not the Dhyani-Buddhas
– have everything to do with the earth, physically and morally. It
is they who rule its destinies and the fate of men. They are Karmic
agencies [but] they have no concern with the three higher principles;
they have, however, something to do with the fourth. (TBL 48)
[But what then are the Dhyani Buddhas?] The “Dhyani-Buddhas”
are concerned with the human higher triad in a mysterious way that
need not be explained here. The “Builders” [on the other hand] are a
class called, as I already explained, Cosmocratores, or the invisible but
intelligent Masons, who fashion matter according to the ideal plan
ready for them in that which we call Divine and Cosmic Ideation.
They were called by the early Masons the “Grand Architect of the
Universe” collectively: but now the modern Masons make of their
G. A. O. T. U. a personal and singular Deity. (TBL 48-49)
I may tell you that the Dhyani-Buddhas have nothing to do with the
lower practical work of the earth-plane. To use an illustration: the
Dhyani-Buddha may be compared to a great ruler of any condition
of life. Suppose that it were merely that of a house: the great ruler
has nothing directly to do with the dirty work of a kitchen-maid.
The higher Dhyanis evolve lower and lower hierarchies of Dhyanis
more and more consolidated and more material until we arrive at
this chain of Planets, some of the latter being the Manus, Pitris and
Lunar Ancestors. As I show in the Second Volume of the Secret
Doctrine, these Pitris have the task of giving birth to man. They do
this by projecting their shadows and the first humanity (if indeed it
can be called humanity) are the astral Chhayas of the Lunar Ancestors
over which physical nature builds the physical body, which at first is
formless. (TBL 100-101)
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
4. The “principles” of planet Earth (Globe D)
The correspondence between a mother-globe and her child-man may
be thus worked out. Both have their seven principles. In the Globe,
the elementals (of which there are in all seven species) form (a) a gross
body, (b) her fluidic double (linga sariram), (c) her life principle (jiva);
(d) her fourth principle kama rupa is formed by her creative impulse
working from centre to circumference; (e) her fifth principle (animal
soul or Manas, physical intelligence) is embodied in the vegetable (in
germ) and animal kingdoms; (f) her sixth principle (or spiritual soul,
Buddhi) is man (g) and her seventh principle (atma) is in a film of
spiritualized akasa that surrounds her. (ML 94)
13
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH
1. Each planetary chain is a reincarnation of a lower
planetary chain
The Earth and mankind, like the Sun, Moon, and planets, have all
their growth, changes, developments, and gradual evolution in their
life-periods; they are born, become infants, then children, adolescents,
grown-up bodies, grow old, and finally die. (SD I 609)
Every such chain of worlds is the progeny and creation of another,
lower, and dead chain – its reincarnation, so to say. To make it clearer:
we are told of the planets – of which seven only were held as sacred,
as being ruled by the highest regents or gods, and not at all because
the ancients knew nothing of the others – that each of these, whether
known or unknown, is a septenary, as is the chain to which the Earth
belongs (see “Esoteric Buddhism”). For instance, all such planets as
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., etc., or our Earth, are
as visible to us as our globe, probably, is to the inhabitants of the
other planets, if any, because they are all on the same plane; while
the superior fellow-globes of these planets are on other planes quite
outside that of our terrestrial senses. (SD I 152-153)
2. The Days and Nights of Planets
It is said that the planetary chains having their “Days” and their
“Nights” – i.e., periods of activity or life, and of inertia or death – and
behave in heaven as do men on Earth: they generate their likes, get old,
and become personally extinct, their spiritual principles only living
in their progeny as a survival of themselves. Without attempting the
13
14
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
very difficult task of giving out the whole process in all its cosmic
details, enough may be said to give an approximate idea of it. When
a planetary chain is in its last Round, its Globe 1 or A, before finally
dying out, sends all its energy and “principles” into a neutral centre
of latent force, a “laya centre,” and thereby informs a new nucleus of
undifferentiated substance or matter, i.e., calls it into activity or gives
it life. (SD I 154)
Occultism divides the periods of Rest (Pralaya) into several kinds;
[1] there is the individual pralaya of each Globe, as humanity and
life pass on to the next; seven minor Pralayas in each Round; [2]
the planetary Pralaya, when seven Rounds are completed; [3] the
Solar Pralaya, when the whole system is at an end; and finally [4]
the Universal Maha or Brahmâ-Pralaya at the close of the “Age of
Brahmâ”. (SD I 172 fn)
[Note: An “Age or Life of Brahmâ” is a Universal Maha-Manvantara,
also called Maha-Kalpa: it constitutes 100 years of Brahmâ:
311,040,000,000,000 years (see SD II 70)]
There are three kinds of pralayas and manwantara:–
1. The universal or Maha pralaya and manwantara. [Each lasts
311,040,000,000,000 years, or a life of Brahmâ.]
2. The solar pralaya and manwantara.
3. The minor pralaya and manwantara. [Each lasts 4,320,000,000
years or a day of Brahmâ.]
When the pralaya No. 1 is finished the universal manwantara begins.
Then the whole universe must be re-evoluted de novo. When the
pralaya of a solar system comes it affects that solar system only. A
solar pralaya = 7 minor pralayas [ = 7 planetary pralayas]. The minor
pralayas of No. 3 concern but our little string of globes, whether manbearing or not. To such a string our Earth belongs. Besides this within
a minor [or planetary] pralaya there is a condition of planetary rest
or as the astronomers say “death,” like that of our present moon – in
which the rocky body of the planet survives but the life impulse has
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH
15
passed out. For example. Let us imagine that our earth is one of a
group of seven planets or man-bearing worlds more or less eliptically
arranged. Our earth being at the exact lower central point of the
orbit of evolution, viz., half way round – we will call the first globe
A, the last Z. After each solar pralaya there is a complete destruction
of our system and after each solar p. begins the absolute objective
reformation of our system and each time everything is more perfect
than before. (ML 93-94)
Within one solar period (of a p. and m.) occur seven such minor
periods [planetary manvantaras], in an ascending scale of progressive
development. (ML 97)
[W]hereas after an absolute pralaya, or when the pre-existing material
consists but of one element, and breath “is everywhere”, the latter
acts from without inwardly: after a minor pralaya, everything having
remained in statu quo – in a refrigerated state, so to say, like the moon
– at the first flutter of manvantara, the planet or planets begin their
resurrection to life from within outwardly (SD 12 fn)
During the minor pralayas, once overtaken by the “Night”, the planets
remain intact, though dead, as a huge animal, caught and embedded
in the polar ice, remains the same for ages. (SD I, 18 fn)
Theosophists will remember that, according to Occult teaching, Cyclic
pralayas so-called are but obscurations, during which periods Nature,
i.e., everything visible and invisible on a resting planet – remains
in statu quo. Nature rests and slumbers, no work of destruction
going on on the globe even if no active work is done. All forms, as
well as their astral types, remain as they were at the last moment
of its activity. The “night” of a planet has hardly any twilight
preceding it. It is caught like a huge mammoth by an avalanche,
and remains slumbering and frozen till the next dawn of its new
day – a very short one indeed in comparison to the “Day of Brahma.”
(SD II, 660 n)
16
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
3. On “manvantaras” and “Manus”
[What does manvantara mean?] It means really “Between two Manus,”
of which there are fourteen [seven root and seven seed manus] in every
“Day of Brahma,” [planetary manvantara] such a “Day” consisting
of 1,000 aggregates of four ages or 1,000 “Great Ages,” Mahayugas.
When the word “Manu” is analyzed it is found that Orientalists state
that it is from the root “Man” to think, hence the thinking man. But,
esoterically every Manu, as an anthropomorphized patron of his
special cycle, or Round, is but the personified idea of the “Thought
Divine” (like the Hermetic Pymander). Each of the Manus, therefore,
is the special god, the creator and fashioner of all that appears during
his own respective cycle of being or Manvantara. (TBL 98-99)
[Note: A life or Age of Brahmâ (311,040,000,000,000) is 100 years of
Brahmâ (one year of Brahmâ is 3,110,400,000,000 years). One year
of Brahmâ is 360 days and nights of Brahmâ (one day of Brahmâ is
4,320,000,000 years). One Day of Brahma equals 14 manvantaras; one
such a manvantara is 306.720.000 years, thus one Day of Brahmâ is
indeed 4,320,000,000 years. Such a Day equals also 1000 Mahayugas:
one Mahayuga being 4,320,000 years. A Maha Yuga is an aggregate
of four Yugas: (1) Krita-Yuga 1,728,000 years; (2) Treta Yuga 1,296,000
years; (3) Dwapara Yuga 864,000 years and (4) Kali Yuga 432,000 years.]
[What is a Manu?] Manu is, and contains the potentiality of all the
thinking forms which will be developed on earth from this particular
source. In the exoteric teaching he is the beginning of this earth, and
from him and his daughter Ila humanity is born; he is a unity which
contains all the pluralities and their modifications. Every Manvantara
has thus its own Manu and from this Manu the various Manus or
rather all the Manasa of the Kalpas will proceed. As an analogy he
may be compared to the white light which contains all the other rays,
giving birth to them by passing through the prism of differentiation
and evolution. (TBL 99)
Manu is the synthesis perhaps of the Manasa, and he is a single
consciousness in the same sense that while all the different cells
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH
17
of which the human body is composed are different and varying
consciousnesses there is still a unit of consciousness which is the man.
But this unit, so to say, is not a single consciousness: it is a reflection of
thousands and millions of consciousnesses which a man has absorbed.
But Manu is not really an individuality, it is the whole of mankind.
You may say that Manu is a generic name for the Pitris, the progenitors
of mankind. They come, as I have shown, from the Lunar Chain. They
give birth to humanity, for, having become the first men, they give
birth to others by evolving their shadows, their astral selves. They
not only give birth to humanity but to animals and all other creatures.
In this sense it is said in the Puranas of the great Yogis that they gave
birth, one to all the serpents, another to all the birds, etc. But, as the
moon receives its light from the Sun, so the descendants of the Lunar
Pitris receive their higher mental light from the Sun or the “Son of
the Sun.” For all you know Vaivasvata Manu may be an Avatar or a
personification of Mahat, commissioned by the Universal Mind to
lead and guide thinking Humanity onwards. (TBL 100)
We are told in the Sacred Hindu scriptures that the first Manu produced
six other Manus (seven primary Manus in all), and these produced in
their turn each seven other Manus (Bhrigu I, 61-63) – the production
of the latter standing in the occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes
clear that Manu – the last one, the progenitor of our Fourth Round
Humanity – must be the seventh, since we are on our fourth Round,
and there is a root-Manu at globe A and a seed Manu at globe G. Just
as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a ‘Root
Manu’ (Dhyan Chohan) and closes with a ‘Seed-Manu,’ so a Root and
a Seed Manu appear respectively at the beginning and the termination
of the human period on any particular planet [globe] It will be easily
seen from the foregoing statement that a Manu-antaric period means,
as the term implies, the time between the appearance of two Manus
or Dhyan Chohans; and hence a minor Manvantara is the duration of
the seven races on any particular planet, and a major manvantara is
the period of one human round along the Planetary chain. Moreover,
that, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7 Manus,
and that there are 49 root-races on the seven planets during each
Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The present seventh Manu
18
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
is called ‘Vaivasvata’ and stands in the exoteric texts for that Manu
who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish
Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata,
the progenitor of our Fifth race – who saved it from the flood that
nearly exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) – is not the seventh Manu,
mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root, or primitive-Manus, but
one of the 49 Manus emanated from this Root-Manu. (SD II 308-309)
4. Planet Earth is a reincarnation of the Moon
Suppose such a [reincarnation] process to have taken place in the
lunar “planetary” chain; suppose again, for argument’s sake […]
that the moon is far older than the Earth. Imagine the six fellowglobes of the moon – aeons before the first globe of our seven was
evolved – just in the same position in relation to each other as the
fellow-globes of our chain occupy in regard to our Earth now.[…]
And now it will be easy to imagine further Globe A of the lunar
chain informing Globe A of the terrestrial chain, and – dying; Globe
B of the former sending after that its energy into Globe B of the new
chain; then Globe C of the lunar, creating its progeny sphere C of the
terrene chain; then the Moon (our Satellite) pouring forth into the
lowest globe of our planetary ring – Globe D, our Earth – all its life,
energy and powers; and, having transferred them to a new centre
becoming virtually a dead planet, in which rotation has almost ceased
since the birth of our globe. The Moon is now the cold residual
quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her
living powers and “principles” are transfused. She now is doomed
for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to
attract her progeny. Constantly vampirised by her child, she revenges
herself on it by soaking it through and through with the nefarious,
invisible, and poisoned influence which emanates from the occult
side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of
her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although
the body which they had formed is soulless and lifeless. Therefore
its emanations are at the same time beneficent and maleficent – this
circumstance finding its parallel on earth in the fact that the grass
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH
19
and plants are nowhere more juicy and thriving than on the graves;
while at the same time it is the graveyard or corpse-emanations,
which kill. And like all ghouls or vampires, the moon is the friend
of the sorcerers and the foe of the unwary. From the archaic aeons
and the later times of the witches of Thessaly, down to some of
the present tantrikas of Bengal, her nature and properties were known
to every Occultist, but have remained a closed book for physicists.
(SD I 154-156)
The Earth Chain of seven globes as thus defined is the direct
reincarnation of a former chain of seven globes, and that former
family of seven was the moon chain, the moon itself being the visible
representative of the fourth globe of the old chain. When that former
vast entity composed of the Moon and six others, all united in one
mass, reached its limit of life it died just as any being dies. Each one of
the seven sent its energies into space and gave similar life or vibration
to cosmic dust – matter, – and the total cohesive force of the whole
kept the seven energies together. This resulted in the evolving of the
present Earth Chain of seven centers of energy or evolution combined
in one mass. As the Moon was the fourth of the old series it is on the
same plane of perception as the Earth, and as we are now confined in
our consciousness largely to Earth we are able only to see one of the
old seven – to wit: our Moon. When we are functioning on any of the
other seven we will perceive in our sky the corresponding old corpse
which will then be a Moon, and we will not see the present Moon.
Venus, Mars, Mercury and other visible planets are all fourth-plane
globes of distinct planetary masses and for that reason are visible to
us, their companion six centers of energy and consciousness being
invisible. (Ocean 24-25)
5. A description of the genesis of the Earth Chain
[I]n the Seventh Round on the Lunar chain, when Class 7 [of the
monads], the last, quits Globe A, that Globe, instead of falling asleep,
as it had done in previous Rounds, begins to die (to go into its
planetary pralaya); and in dying it transfers successively, as just said,
20
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
its “principles,” or life-elements and energy, etc., one after the other
to a new “laya-centre,” which commences the formation of Globe A of
the Earth Chain. A similar process takes place for each of the Globes
of the “lunar chain” one after the other, each forming a fresh Globe of
the “earth-chain.” Our Moon was the fourth Globe of the series, and
was on the same plane of perception as our Earth. But Globe A of the
lunar chain is not fully “dead” till the first Monads of the first class
have passed from Globe G or Z, the last of the “lunar chain,” into the
Nirvana which awaits them between the two chains; and similarly for
all the other Globes as stated, each giving birth to the corresponding
globe of the “earth-chain.” (SD I 171-173)
6. What are the laya-centres on which the planet is built?
The seven Layu centres are the seven Zero points, using the term Zero
in the same sense that Chemists do, to indicate a point at which, in
Esotericism, the scale of reckoning of differentiation begins. From the
Centres – beyond which Esoteric philosophy allows us to perceive the
dim metaphysical outlines of the “Seven Sons” of Life and Light, the
Seven Logoi of the Hermetic and all other philosophers – begins the
differentiation of the elements which enter into the constitution of our
Solar System. (SD I 138-139)
We have said that Laya is what Science may call the Zero-point or line;
the realm of absolute negativeness, or the one real absolute Force,
the noumenon of the Seventh State of that which we ignorantly call
and recognise as “Force”; or again the Noumenon of Undifferentiated
Cosmic Substance which is itself an unreachable and unknowable
object to finite perception; the root and basis of all states of objectivity
and subjectivity too; the neutral axis, not one of the many aspects,
but its centre. It may serve to elucidate the meaning if we attempt to
imagine a neutral centre – the dream of those who would discover
perpetual motion. A “neutral centre” is, in one aspect, the limiting
point of any given set of senses. Thus, imagine two consecutive
planes of matter as already formed; each of these corresponding to
an appropriate set of perceptive organs. We are forced to admit that
III. THE REBIRTH OF THE EARTH
21
between these two planes of matter an incessant circulation takes
place; and if we follow the atoms and molecules of (say) the lower
in their transformation upwards, these will come to a point where
they pass altogether beyond the range of the faculties we are using
on the lower plane. In fact, to us the matter of the lower plane there
vanishes from our perception into nothing – or rather it passes on
to the higher plane, and the state of matter corresponding to such
a point of transition must certainly possess special and not readily
discoverable properties. Such “Seven Neutral Centres,” then, are
produced by Fohat, who, when, as Milton has it – “Fair foundations
(are) laid whereon to build . . .” quickens matter into activity and
evolution. (SD I 148)
7. Fohat guides the transfer of the energies from one
planet to another
2. The Swift and the Radient One produces the seven Layu centres,
against which none will prevail to the great day “be with us” –
and seats the universe on these eternal foundations, surrounding
Sien-Tchan with the Elementary Germs. (Book I. Stanza VI.) (SD I
138)
4. He [Fohat] builds them in the likeness of older wheels (worlds),
placing them on the imperishable centres. How does Fohat build
them? He collects the fiery dust. He makes balls of fire, runs
through them and round them, infusing life thereinto; then sets
them in motion, some one, some the other way. They are cold – he
makes them hot. They are dry – he makes them moist. They shine –
he fans and cools them. Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the
other during seven eternities. (Book I. Stanza VI.) (SD I 144)
The Worlds are built “in the likeness of older Wheels” – i.e.,
those that existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya
because the Law for the birth, growth, and decay of everything in
Kosmos, from the Sun to the glow-worm in the grass, is One. It is
an everlasting work of perfection with every new appearance, but
the Substance-Matter and Forces are all one and the same. But
22
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
this Law acts on every planet through minor and varying laws.
The “imperishable Laya Centres” have a great importance, and
their meaning must be fully understood if we would have a clear
conception of the Archaic Cosmogony, whose theories have now
passed into Occultism. At present, one thing may be stated. The
worlds are built neither upon, nor over, nor in the Laya centres, the
zero-point being a condition, not any mathematical point. (SD I 145)
It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the principles from one planet
to the other, from one star to another – child-star. When a planet dies,
its informing principles are transferred to a laya or sleeping centre,
with potential but latent energy in it, which is thus awakened into life
and begins to form itself into a new sidereal body […] When Fohat is
said to produce “Seven Laya Centres,” it means that for formative or
creative purposes, the Great Law (Theists may call it God) stops, or
rather modifies its perpetual motion on seven invisible points within
the area of the manifested Universe. “The great Breath digs through Space
seven holes into Laya to cause them to circumgyrate during Manvantara”
(Occult Catechism). (SD I 147)
23
IV. ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN
CHARACTERISTICS
1. Planetary life proceeds in seven Rounds
Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is
septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible
or invisible, is credited with six companion globes […] The evolution
of life proceeds on these seven globes or bodies from the 1st to the 7th
in Seven Rounds or Seven Cycles. (SD I 158-159)
2. What is a Round?
[B]y a “Round” is meant the serial evolution of nascent material
nature, of the seven globes of our chain with their mineral, vegetable,
and animal kingdoms (man being there included in the latter and
standing at the head of it) during the whole period of a life-cycle.
The latter would be called by the Brahmins “a Day of Brahma.” It is,
in short, one revolution of the “Wheel” (our planetary chain), which
is composed of seven globes (or seven separate “Wheels,” in another
sense this time). When evolution has run downward into matter,
from planet A to planet G, or Z, as the Western students call it, it is
one Round. (SD I 231-232)
3. Each Round is guided and built by various Dhyan Chohans
[T]he work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different
group of so-called “Creators” or “Architects,” so is that of every globe;
i.e., it is under the supervision and guidance of special “Builders” and
“Watchers” – the various Dhyan-Chohans. (SD I 233)
23
24
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
In the Esoteric System, the Dhyanis [Buddhas] watch successively
over one of the Rounds and the great Root-races of our planetary
chain. They are, moreover, said to send their Bhodisatvas, the human
correspondents of the Dhyani-Buddhas (of whom vide infra) during
every Round and Race. Out of the Seven Truths and Revelations,
or rather revealed secrets, four only have been handed to us, as we
are still in the Fourth Round, and the world also has only had four
Buddhas, so far. This is a very complicated question, and will receive
more ample treatment later on. So far “There are only Four Truths,
and Four Vedas” – say the Hindus and Buddhists. For a similar
reason Irenaeus insisted on the necessity of Four Gospels. But as
every new Root-race at the head of a Round must have its revelation
and revealers, the next Round will bring the Fifth, the following the
Sixth, and so on. (SD I 42)
There are incarnating and there are watching Dhyanis [Buddhas] […]
the latter appear to do their work in this wise. Every class or hierarchy
corresponds to one of the Rounds, the first and lowest hierarchy to
the first and less developed Round, the second to the second, and so
on till the seventh Round is reached, which is under the supervision
of the highest Hierarchy of the Seven Dhyanis. At the last, they will
appear on earth, as also will some of the Planetary, for the whole
humanity will have become Bodhisattvas, their own “sons,” i.e., the
“Sons” of their own Spirit and Essence or – themselves. Thus there is
only a functional difference between the Dhyanis and the Planetary.
The one are entirely divine, the other sidereal. The former only are
called Anupadaka, parentless, because they radiated directly from
that which is neither Father nor Mother but the unmanifested Logos.
They are, in fact, the spiritual aspect of the seven Logoi; and the
Planetary Spirits are in their totality, as the seven Sephiroth (the three
higher being supercosmic abstractions and blinds in the Kabala), and
constitute the Heavenly man, or Adam Kadmon; Dhyani is a generic
name in Buddhism, an abbreviation for all the gods. (TBL 52)
The Builders are those who build and fashion things into a form. The
term is equally applied to the Builders of the Universe and to the
small globes like those of our chain. (TBL 56)
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
25
It must be remembered that the planetary spirit has nothing to do
with the spiritual man, but with things of matter and cosmic beings.
The gods and rulers of our Earth are cosmic Rulers; that is to say,
they form into shape and fashion cosmic matter, for which they
were called Cosmocratores. They never had any concern with spirit;
the Dhyani-Buddhas, belonging to quite a different hierarchy, are
especially concerned with the latter. (TBL 48)
[T]he “Planetary” [Spirits] – who are not the Dhyani-Buddhas – have
everything to do with the earth, physically and morally. It is they who
rule its destinies and the fate of men. They are Karmic agencies. they
have no concern with the three higher principles; they have, however,
something to do with the fourth. To recapitulate, therefore; the term
“Dhyani-Buddhas” is a generic name for all celestial beings. The
“Dhyani-Buddhas” are concerned with the human higher triad in a
mysterious way that need not be explained here. The “Builders” are a
class called, as I already explained, Cosmocratores, or the invisible but
intelligent Masons, who fashion matter according to the ideal plan
ready for them in that which we call Divine and Cosmic Ideation.
They were called by the early Masons the “Grand Architect of the
Universe” collectively: but now the modern Masons make of their
G. A. O. T. U. a personal and singular deity. (TBL 48-49)
4. Rounds, globes and their Manus
Who was Manu, the son of Swayambhuva? The secret doctrine tells
us that this Manu was no man, but the representation of the first
human races evolved with the help of the Dhyan-Chohans (Devas)
at the beginning of the first round. But we are told in his Laws (Book
I. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa – or interval
from creation to creation (read interval from one minor ‘Pralaya’ to
another) – and that in the present divine age, there have been as
yet seven Manus. Those who know that there are seven rounds, of
which we have passed three, and are now in the fourth; and who are
taught that there are seven dawns and seven twilights or fourteen
Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end,
26
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
and on, and between the planets there is an awakening to illusive
life, and an awakening to real life; and that, moreover, there are
root-Manus, and what we have to clumsily translate as the seedManus – the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (or
the Sishtas – the surviving fittest; a mystery divulged only to those
who have passed their third degree in initiation) – those who have
learned all that will be better prepared to understand the meaning
of the following. We are told in the Sacred Hindu scriptures that the
first Manu produced six other Manus (seven primary Manus in all),
and these produced in their turn each seven other Manus (Bhrigu I,
61-63) – the production of the latter standing in the occult treatises
as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu – the last one, the progenitor
of our Fourth Round Humanity – must be the seventh, since we
are on our fourth Round, and there is a root-Manu at globe A and
a seed Manu at globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences
with the appearance of a ‘Root Manu’ (Dhyan Chohan) and
closes with a ‘Seed-Manu,’ so a Root and a Seed Manu appear
respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human
period on any particular planet [globe] It will be easily seen from
the foregoing statement that a Manu-antaric period means, as the
term implies, the time between the appearance of two Manus or
Dhyan Chohans; and hence a minor Manvantara is the duration
of the seven races on any particular planet, and a major manvantara
is the period of one human round along the Planetary chain.
Moreover, that, as it is said that each of the seven Manus creates 7 x 7
Manus, and that there are 49 root-races on the seven planets during
each Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The present seventh
Manu is called ‘Vaivasvata’ and stands in the exoteric texts for
that Manu who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and
the Jewish Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu
Vaivasvata, the progenitor of our Fifth race – who saved it from
the flood that nearly exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) – is not
the seventh Manu, mentioned in the nomenclature of the Root, or
primitive-Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated from this RootManu. (SD II 307-308)
For clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14
Manus in their respective order and relation to each Round:
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
{
2nd (R) M. on Planet
2nd Round {
2nd (S) M. ,, ,,
3rd (R) M. ,, ,, 3rd Round {
3rd (S) M. ,, ,,
4th (R) M. ,, ,,
4th Round {
4th (S) M. ,,
,,
5th (R) M. ,,
,,
5th Round {
5th (S) M. ,,
,,
6th (R) M. ,,
,,
6th Round {
6th (S) M. ,,
,,
7th (R) M. ,,
,,
7th Round
{
7th (S) M. ,,
,,
1st (Root) Manu on Planet 1st Round
1st (Seed) Manu on Planet
27
A – Swayambhuva.
G – Swarochi (or) Swarotisha.
A – Uttama.
G – Thamasa.
A – Raivata.
G – Chackchuska.
A – Vaivasvata (our progenitor)
G – Savarna
A – Daksha Savarna.
G – Brahma Savarna.
A – Dharma Savarna.
G – Rudra Savarna.
A – Rouchya.
G – Bhoutya.
Vaivasvata, thus, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive
Root-Manu of our fourth Human Wave (the reader must always
remember that Manu is not a man but collective humanity), while
our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor [Race] Manus, who are
made to preside over the seven races of this our planet [globe]. Each
of these has to become the witness of one of the periodical and everrecurring cataclysms (by fire and water) that close the cycle of every
Root-race. And it is this Vaivasvata – the Hindu ideal embodiment,
called respectively Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah and by other names
– who is the allegorical man who rescued our race, when nearly the
whole population of one hemisphere perished by water, while the
other hemisphere was awakening from its temporary obscuration.”
(SD II 309)
[Note 1: from this we may infer the following:
1. Each Round has a Root-Manu (on globe A) and a Seed-Manu (on
globe G). Thus the current Round-Manu must be the seventh, because
we already had in the previous three Rounds 3 Root-Manus and 3
Seed-Manus, which is a total of six Manus. We are now in the middle
of the Fourth Round with its current Root-Manu (Viavasvata, the 4th
Round-Root-Manu): 6 + 1 = 7.
28
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
2.There are Seven Rounds, thus there are 14 Round-Manus
constituting one Day of Brahmâ lasting 4.320.000.000 years.
3. Each Globe has a Root-Manu and a Seed-Manu, meaning that
each “globe-round” (a period of evolution of seven Root-Races on a
certain globe) commences with the appearance of a Root-Manu and
closes with a Seed-manu. This is called a minor manvantara or a
globe-manvantara.
4. There are seven Globes, thus there are 14 Globe-Manus.
5. Each Root-Race has its Root-Manu and its Seed-Manu, meaning
that there are 49 Race-Manus in each Round and 49x7 Race-Manus
for the total of seven Rounds or the planetary manvantara. The RootRace-Manu of the Fifth Root-Race is also called Vaivasvata, but must
not be confounded with Vaivasvata of the Fourth Round. He is not
the seventh Manu, but one of the 49 Race-manus emanated from this
Fourth Round Root-Manu].
[Note 2:
In order to understand more clearly the doctrine of the Manus, we
have to introduce the teachings on the Sishtas.
Sishta is a past participle from the verbal root sish, the latter
meaning “to remain behind”: the sishtas are thus the “remainders”.
The remainders of what? Well, sishtas are the “cream”, so to speak,
the most developed, evolved or progressed part of a life-wave. Let’s
explain. When a life-wave goes through a given round it leaves, on
each of the globes, before it goes further on the chain, its most evolved
part, its forerunners. HPB defines in the Theosophical Glossary the
“human” sishtas as follows:
“The great elect or Sages, left after every minor Pralaya (that which
is called “obscuration” in Mr. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism), when the
globe goes into its night or rest, to become, on its re-awakening, the
seed of the next humanity. Lit. “remnant”.” See also HPB’s footnotes
in her article “Have Animals Souls?”
Sishtas are the highest representatives of a life-wave, otherwise of
a certain class of monads, progressing around the planetary-chain,
left behind on a globe, when that globe goes into obscuration, when
a globe-round or globe-manvantara has ended for that round. For
example, when the human life-wave or kingdom has completed in
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
29
the third round on globe D its seven “rings” or Root-Races it leaves
on that globe its sishtas, remainders as life-seeds for the next round.
The bulk of the life wave completes the third round by going on
the ascending arc through globe E, F and G, enters the inter-round
nirvana and starts its fourth round by going through globes A, B and
C on the descending arc, until it reaches globe D. The arrival or influx
of the life-wave on globe D “awakens” the “remainders” or sishtas
of the third round who are the life-seeds for this incoming life-wave.
It is they who will give the necessary forms for this incoming lifewave, or these incoming “monads”. Applied to the human kingdom
the sishtas are really seed-manus, seed-humanity. A seed-manu will
become in its turn the root-manu in the next round for the incoming
life-wave.
The sishtas are therefore a necessary part in the economy of nature:
they are the blossom and the fruit (the seed) of a life-wave in a given
round and they remain on the globes in order that the life-wave is
not obliged to create “forms” de novo in the following round. Thus
the human-sishtas who remained on the globe in the third round are
really, as we will see later on, the Lunar Pitris or the most developed
class of ex-lunar monads, compared with the bulk of the third round
human life-wave. They were so to speak fourth rounders, and since
they were, in evolutionary terms, one round ahead, they could remain
on the globe as a seed for future humanity, without missing anything,
and catch up when the bulk of the human life-wave started its fourth
round. We may infer that the Fifth Rounders within humanity will
be sishtas on this globe while the main part of humanity goes on to
complete its fourth round and start its fifth round.]
5. Each Round is a progressive repetition of a former Round
Now every “Round” (on the descending scale) is but a repetition in a
more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, as every globe –
down to our fourth sphere (the actual earth) – is a grosser and more
material copy of the more shadowy sphere which precedes it in their
successive order, on the three higher planes.[…] On its way upwards
on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualises and etherealises, so to
30
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane
on which the twin globe on the opposite side is placed; the result
being, that when the seventh globe is reached (in whatever Round)
the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it
was in at its starting point – plus, every time, a new and superior
degree in the states of consciousness. (SD I 232)
Every Round repeats on a higher scale the evolutionary work of the
preceding Round. (SD I 187)
[Note: the words descending and ascending can have a double
meaning:
1. Each Round has a descending scale (from globe A to globe D)
and an ascending scale (from globe D to globe A)
2. The total of seven Rounds is also divided into two scales or (better)
arcs: the first three and a half Rounds (ending on Globe D) constitute
the descending arc (for Spirit): it is the cycle of material evolution
and spiritual involution. Thus each Round in the descending scale
is more concrete (or material) than the former one. The second three
and a half Rounds (beginning on Globe D) constitute the ascending
arc (for Spirit): it is the cycle of material involution and spiritual
evolution. Thus each Round in the ascending scale is more abstract or
less material (more ethereal) than the previous Round of that scale.]
6. Rounds and the genesis of the Elements
[I]t must be stated that Occult Science recognises Seven Cosmical
Elements – four entirely physical, and the fifth (Ether) semi-material,
as it will become visible in the air towards the end of our Fourth
Round, to reign supreme over the others during the whole of the
Fifth. The remaining two are as yet absolutely beyond the range of
human perception. These latter will, however, appear as presentments
during the 6th and 7th Races of this Round, and will become known
in the 6th and 7th Rounds respectively. These seven elements with
their numberless Sub-Elements far more numerous than those known
to Science are simply conditional modifications and aspects of the
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
31
ONE and only Element. This latter is not Ether, not even A’kasa but
the Source of these. (SD I 12-13)
3. Of the seven (elements) – first one manifested, six concealed; two
manifested – five concealed; three manifested – four concealed;
four produced – three hidden; four and one tsan (fraction) revealed
– two and one half concealed; six to be manifested – one laid aside.
Lastly, seven small wheels revolving; one giving birth to the
other. (Book I. Stanza VI.)
Although these Stanzas refer to the whole Universe after a
Mahapralaya (universal destruction), yet this sentence, as any student
of Occultism may see, refers also by analogy to the evolution and final
formation of the primitive (though compound) Seven Elements on
our Earth. Of these, four elements are now fully manifested, while
the fifth – Ether – is only partially so, as we are hardly in the second
half of the Fourth Round, and consequently the fifth Element will
manifest fully only in the Fifth Round. (SD I 140)
“The worlds, to the profane,” says a Commentary, “are built up of the known
Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves
collectively a divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the
numberless and countless crores of lives. Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of
the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, being, its particles are
fiery lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other life that
they consume. Therefore they are named the “DEVOURERS.” . . . “Every
visible thing in this Universe was built by such LIVES, front conscious
and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct
matter.” . . . “From the ONE LIFE formless and Uncreate, proceeds the
Universe of lives. First was manifested from the Deep (Chaos) cold luminous
fire (gaseous light?) which formed the curds in Space.” (Irresolvable nebulae,
perhaps?). . . . . . .” . . . These fought, and a great heat was developed by
the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the
first manifested MATERIAL, Fire, the hot flames, the wanderers in heaven
(comets); heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water (?); then dry
mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the
pilgrims (comets?) and forms solid watery wheels (MATTER globes). Bhumi
(the Earth) appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous
32
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third
World-Element – WATER; and from the breath of all (atmospheric) AIR
is born. These four are the four lives of the first four periods (Rounds) of
Manvantara. The three last will follow.” (SD I 249-250)
This means that every new Round develops one of the Compound
Elements, as now known to Science, – which rejects the primitive
nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If
Nature is the “Ever-becoming” on the manifested plane, then those
Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve,
progress, and increase to the Manvantaric end. Thus the First Round,
we are taught, developed but one Element [Fire], and a nature and
humanity in what may be called one aspect of Nature – called by some,
very unscientifically, though it may be so de facto, “One-dimensional
Space.” (SD I 250)
The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements – Fire
and Earth [must be Air] – and its humanity, adapted to this condition
of Nature, if we can give the name Humanity to beings living under
conditions unknown to men, was – to use again a familiar phrase in a
strictly figurative sense (the only way in which it can be used correctly)
– “a two-dimensional species.” The processes of natural development
which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the
fashion of speculating on the attributes of the two, three, and four or
more “dimensional Space;” but in passing, it is worth while to point
out the real significance of the sound but incomplete intuition that
has prompted – among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several
great men of Science, for the matter of that – the use of the modern
expression, “the fourth dimension of Space.” To begin with, of course,
the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable
in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only
be an abbreviation of the fuller form – the “Fourth dimension of matter
in Space.” But it is an unhappy phrase even thus expanded, because
while it is perfectly true that the progress of evolution may be destined
to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which
we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three
dimensions. The faculties, or what is perhaps the best available term,
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
33
the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always
to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular
motion), taste, and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man,
and by the time that it fully develops the next characteristic – let us
call it for the moment Permeability – this will correspond to the next
sense of man – let us call it “Normal Clairvoyance;” thus, when some
bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension to explain the
passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an
endless cord, what they were really in want of, was a sixth characteristic
of matter. The three dimensions belong really but to one attribute or
characteristic of matter – extension; and popular common sense justly
rebels against the idea that under any condition of things there can be
more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth, and thickness.
These terms, and the term “dimension” itself, all belong to one plane
of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So
long as there are foot-rules within the resources of Kosmos, to apply to
matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more;
and from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in
the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement
in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not
militate in any way against the certainty that in the progress of time –
as the faculties of humanity are multiplied – so will the characteristics
of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more
incorrect than even the familiar one of the “Sun rising or setting.”
We now return to the consideration of material evolution through
the Rounds. Matter in the second Round, it has been stated, may be
figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here another caveat
must be entered. That loose and figurative expression may be regarded
– in one plane of thought, as we have just seen – as equivalent to the
second characteristic of matter corresponding to the second perceptive
faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are
concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single
Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature with which the
succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated,
with the development of the “Elements” (in the Occult sense) –
Fire, Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the fourth Round, and our
catalogue so far stops short. The centres of consciousness (destined
34
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
to develop into humanity as we know it) of the third Round arrived
at a perception of the third Element Water. Those of the fourth Round
have added earth as a state of matter to their stock as well as the three
other elements in their present transformation. In short, none of the
so-called elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are
now. For all we know, fire may have been pure akasa, the first Matter
of the Magnum Opus of the Creators and “Builders,” that Astral Light
which the paradoxical Eliphas Levi calls in one breath “the body of
the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet,” the “Androgyne Goat
of Mendes”; air, simply Nitrogen, “the breath of the Supporters of
the Heavenly Dome,” as the Mohammedan mystics call it; water, that
primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a
living soul with. (SD I 252-254)
It will only be in the next, or fifth, Round that the fifth Element,
Ether – the gross body of Akasa, if it can be called even that – will,
by becoming a familiar fact of Nature to all men, as air is familiar to
us now, cease to be as at present hypothetical, and also an “agent”
for so many things. And only during that Round will those higher
senses, the growth and development of which Akasa subserves, be
susceptible of a complete expansion. As already indicated, a partial
familiarity with the characteristic of matter – permeability – which
should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be
expected to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the
next element added to our resources in the next Round, permeability
will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the densest
forms of this will seem to man’s perceptions as obstructive to him as
a thick fog, and no more. (SD I 257-258)
7. Evolution of Elements and physical senses on this Globe D
[Note that this order is different from the sequence of evolution in the
planetary Rounds, which is Fire-Air-Water-Earth-Ether. Note also the
difference between the development of spiritual senses and physical
senses: the former are developed during the rounds, the latter during
the Root-Races.]
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
35
The following order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution
of the Elements and the Senses; or in Cosmic terrestrial “man” or
“Spirit,” and mortal physical man: –
1.Ether..................Hearing...... Sound
2.Air......................Touch......... Sound and Touch
3. Fire, or Light....Sight........... Sound, Touch and Colour
4.Water.................Taste........... Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste
5.Earth..................Smell.......... Sound, Touch, Colour, Taste and Smell
As seen, each Element adds to its own characteristics, those of its
predecessor; as each Root-Race adds the characterizing sense of the
preceding Race. The same is true in the septenary creation of man,
who evolves gradually in seven stages, and on the same principles, as
will be shown further on. (SD II 107-108)
8. Rounds and the genesis of Man
“Man in the First Round and First Race on Globe D, our Earth, was an
ethereal being (a Lunar Dhyani, as man), non-intelligent but superspiritual;
and correspondingly, on the law of analogy, in the First Race of the Fourth
Round. In each of the subsequent races and sub-races . . . he grows more and
more into an encased or incarnate being, but still preponderatingly ethereal.
. . . He is sexless, and, like the animal and vegetable he develops monstrous
bodies correspondential with his coarser surroundings.
II. Round. He (Man) is still gigantic and ethereal but growing firmer
and more condensed in body, a more physical man. Yet still less intelligent
than spiritual, for mind is a slower and more difficult evolution than is the
physical frame . . .
III. Round. He has now a perfectly concrete or compacted body, at first
the form of a giant-ape, and now more intelligent, or rather cunning, than
spiritual. For, on the downward arc, he has now reached a point where his
primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent mentality.
In the last half of the Third Round his gigantic stature decreases, and his
body improves in texture, and he becomes a more rational being, though still
more an ape than a Deva. . . . (All this is almost exactly repeated in the third
Root-Race of the Fourth Round.)
36
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
IV. Round. Intellect has an enormous development in this Round. The
(hitherto) dumb races acquire our (present) human speech on this globe, on
which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge increases.
At this half-way point of the Fourth Round (as of the Fourth Root, or
Atlantean, race) humanity passes the axial point of the minor Manvantara
cycle . . . . the world teeming with the results of intellectual activity and
spiritual decrease . . . .” (SD I 188-189)
9. The Fourth Round on the Fourth Globe in the Fourth Race is
the crucial mid-point of evolution
From the preceding diagrams, which are applicable, mutatis mutandis,
to Rounds, Globes or Races, it will be seen that the fourth member of a
series occupies a unique position. Unlike the others, the Fourth has no
“sister” Globe on the same plane as itself, and it thus forms the fulcrum
of the “balance” represented by the whole chain. It is the sphere of
final evolutionary adjustments, the world of Karmic scales, the Hall
of Justice, where the balance is struck which determines the future
course of the Monad during the remainder of its incarnations in the
cycle. And therefore it is, that, after this central turning-point has been
passed in the Great Cycle, – i.e., after the middle point of the Fourth
Race in the Fourth Round on our Globe – no more Monads can enter
the human kingdom. The door is closed for this Cycle and the balance
struck. For were it otherwise – had there been a new soul created for
each of the countless milliards of human beings that have passed away,
and had there been no reincarnation – it would become difficult indeed
to provide room for the disembodied “Spirits;” nor could the origin
and cause of suffering ever be accounted for. It is the ignorance of the
occult tenets and the enforcement of false conceptions under the guise
of religious education, which have created materialism and atheism as
a protest against the asserted divine order of things. (SD I 182-183)
The latter [the fourth Round] is the cycle of the turning-point, after
which, matter, having reached its lowest depths, begins to strive
onward and to get spiritualized with every new Race and with every
fresh cycle. (SD I 185-186)
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
37
In the middle of the Fourth revolution, which is our present “Round”:
“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned
its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins
its work spirit-ward.” (SD I 232)
10. Fifth and Sixth Rounders
From the doctrine – rather incomprehensible to western minds
– which deals with the periodical “obscurations” and successive
“Rounds” of the Globes along their circular chains, were born the
first perplexities and misconceptions. One of such has reference
to the “Fifth-” and even “Sixth-Rounders.” Those who knew that a
Round was preceded and followed by a long Pralaya, a pause of rest
which created an impassable gulf between two Rounds until the time
came for a renewed cycle of life, could not understand the “fallacy” of
talking about “fifth and sixth Rounders” in our Fourth Round. Gautama
Buddha, it was held, was a Sixth-Rounder, Plato and some other great
philosophers and minds, “Fifth-Rounders.” How could it be? One
Master taught and affirmed that there were such “Fifth-Rounders”
even now on Earth; and though understood to say that mankind was yet
“in the Fourth Round,” in another place he seemed to say that we were
in the Fifth. To this an “apocalyptic answer” was returned by another
Teacher: – “A few drops of rain do not make a Monsoon, though they
presage it.” . . . “No, we are not in the Fifth Round, but Fifth Round
men have been coming in for the last few thousand years.” This was
worse than the riddle of the Sphinx! Students of Occultism subjected
their brains to the wildest work of speculation. For a considerable
time they tried to outvie Œdipus and reconcile the two statements.
And as the Masters kept as silent as the stony Sphinx herself, they
were accused of inconsistency, “contradiction,” and “discrepancies.”
But they were simply allowing the speculations to go on, in order to
teach a lesson which the Western mind sorely needs. In their conceit
and arrogance, as in their habit of materializing every metaphysical
conception and term without allowing any margin for Eastern
metaphor and allegory, the Orientalists have made a jumble of the
Hindu exoteric philosophy, and the Theosophists were now doing
38
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
the same with regard to esoteric teachings. To this day it is evident
that the latter have utterly failed to understand the meaning of the
term “Fifth and Sixth Rounders.” But it is simply this: every “Round”
brings about a new development and even an entire change in the
mental, psychic, spiritual and physical constitution of man, all these
principles evoluting on an ever ascending scale. Thence it follows that
those persons who, like Confucius and Plato, belonged psychically,
mentally and spiritually to the higher planes of evolution, were in
our Fourth Round as the average man will be in the Fifth Round,
whose mankind is destined to find itself, on this scale of Evolution,
immensely higher than is our present humanity. Similarly Gautama
Buddha – Wisdom incarnate – was still higher and greater than all
the men we have mentioned, who are called Fifth Rounders, while
Buddha and Sankaracharya are termed Sixth Rounders, allegorically.
Thence again the concealed wisdom of the remark, pronounced at the
time “evasive” – that a few drops of rain do not make the Monsoon,
though they presage it.” (SD I 161-162)
[See also the following: in Mahatma letter 15 it is suggested that fifth
rounders are not only metaphorically but really de facto one round
ahead!]
We men of the fourth round are already reaching the latter half of
the fifth race of our fourth round humanity, while the men (the few
earlier comers) of the fifth round, though only in their first race (or
rather class), are yet immeasurably higher than we are – spiritually
if not intellectually; since with the completion or full development of
this fifth principle (intellectual soul) they have come nearer than we
have, are closer in contact with their sixth principle Buddhi. Of course
many are the differentiated individuals even in the fourth r. as germs
of principles are not equally developed in all, but such is the rule.
Individuals cannot outstrip the humanity of their round any further
than by one remove, for it is mathematically impossible – you say (in
effect): if the fountain of life flows ceaselessly there should be men
of all rounds on the earth at all times, etc. The hint about planetary
rest may dispel the misconception on this head […] When man is
perfected qua a given round on Globe A he disappears thence (as
IV. THE ROUNDS AND THEIR MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
39
had certain vegetables and animals). By degrees this Globe loses its
vitality and finally reaches the moon stage, i.e., death [obscuration],
and so remains while man is making his seven rings on Z and passing
his inter-cyclic period before starting on his next round. So with each
Globe in turn. And now as man when completing his seventh ring
upon A has but begun his first on Z and as A dies when he leaves
it for B, etc., and as he must also remain in the inter-cyclic sphere
after Z, as he has between every two planets, until the impulse again
thrills the chain, clearly no one can be more than one round ahead
of his kind. And Buddha only forms an exception by virtue of the
mystery. We have fifth round men among us because we are in the
latter half of our septenary earth ring. In the first half this could not
have happened. The countless myriads of our fourth round humanity
who have outrun us and completed their seven rings on Z, have had
time to pass their inter-cyclic period begin their new round and work
on to globe D (ours). But how can there be men of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd,
6th and 7th rounds? We represent the first three and the sixth can only
come at rare intervals and prematurely like Buddhas (only under
prepared conditions) and that the last-named the seventh are not yet
evolved! (ML 15)
40
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
41
V. THE SEVEN KINGDOMS AND THEIR
EVOLUTION ON EARTH
[Special preliminary note on the relationship between the lunar
monads and the earth kingdoms:
This section gives some key citations on the evolution of the
kingdoms on earth. This is a very difficult teaching, and several
questions may be asked. In the following no definite answers are
given. For example, an important question is “where do these seven
evolving kingdoms, in their monadic condition, come from?” Of
course they all come from the moon, but how did they manifest
themselves on this earth-chain when they came out of their interplanetary rest or nirvana?
First, we have to realise that the seven kingdoms who are evolving
on this chain constitute seven distinct life-waves or seven distinct
classes of monads, all coming from the moon, as is clearly stated
in ML 15, in Esoteric Buddhism and in SD I 175-176. What does this
mean? Well, in the first round on globe A, the first life-wave coming
in is the lowest elemental kingdom, followed by the middle elemental
kingdom, followed by the other kingdoms, until the seventh or human
life wave enters globe A and starts, for the first time on this chain, its
seven “rings” or Root-races after it has recapitulated its evolution
through the already formed kingdoms on that globe. When HPB
speaks about the seven classes of ex-lunar monads in SD I 171, she
thus means only “human” monads, the human life-wave. This view
makes a distinction between (a) the seven classes of lunar monads,
mentioned in SD I 171, who are collectively the human life wave and
(b) the seven evolving kingdoms or life-waves, of which the human
life wave is only one, i.e. the highest. The former (a) all belong to the
highest or human life-wave, they are all “human” monads, meaning
the monadic life wave that has reached on the moon an incipient
41
42
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
human stage, without any self-consciousness. The latter (b) are 6
other life-waves who have preceded the human life wave. Now this
human life-wave has to complete on earth its humanity and reach for
the Dhyan-Chohanic or manasaputric stage. An important argument
for this view is that one cannot really speak of classes of monads
until the monadic essence has reached an “individualized” human
stage (see SD I 178).
Another argument is that it is clearly stated in the SD that the first
class of these monads is the highest and that they first start on globe
A by incarnating in the lowest kingdom and go through successively
the other kingdoms in order to accustom the new formed globe.
According to this view there were already, before the entering of the
7 classes of ex-lunar “germ-human” monads on globe A, 6 kingdoms,
the outcome of the other life-waves: i.e. the three elementals, mineral,
vegetable and animal. This view seems to be exemplified in the SD.
For example, when HPB explains the “seven creations” according to
the Puranas in SD I 454-456. She mentions the fact that the animal
evolution precedes in the first round the human evolution (as is also
stated in ML 15): because it is the animal kingdom, of course very
rudimentary and ethereal in that stage, which gives rupas for the
incoming human kingdom: the (first class of) human monads gets
its first form-constitution by using the atomic aggregations of the
animal kingdom. One should ponder well on this.
Other passages make clear that even in the fourth round,
man (meaning human monads) is preceded on globe D by 6 other
kingdoms: three elementals, mineral, vegetable and the lowest animal
kingdom (insects, reptiles etc…). This lower kingdom evolution
took more than 300,000,000 years (see SD II 712; 290fn; 56; 308fn;
68fn; 149; 312; 242; 616). It is only after that time that Man appears,
starting with the First Root-race. In the second and third Root-race
it is man which “creates” (physical!) forms for higher animal
monads who have reached the mammalian, but not the human
stage because the door is closed; these animal monads are then
the laggards of the seven original classes of lunar “human” monads,
and not monads belonging to a separate animal life-wave: that
life-wave preceded the First Human Root-race. The consequence
of this view is that the lower life-waves (kingdoms) go through
V. THE SEVEN KINGDOMS AND THEIR EVOLUTION ON EARTH
43
the chain ahead of the human kingdom, while leaving their sishtas
on the globe they have left, as is also suggested in ML 15. This
could mean that what we now know as the mineral kingdom, and
perhaps also a part of the vegetable kingdom, are really sishtas of
their corresponding life-waves, who are now going through their
evolution on Globe E.]
1. There are seven kingdoms
There are seven kingdoms. The first group comprises three degrees
of elementals, or nascent centres of forces – from the first stage
of differentiation of (from) Mulaprakriti (or rather Pradhana,
primordial homogeneous matter) to its third degree – i.e., from full
unconsciousness to semi-perception; the second or higher group
embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral kingdom
thus forming the central or turning point in the degrees of the
“Monadic Essence,” considered as an evoluting energy. (SD I 176)
2. The kingdoms represent different stages of evolution
Three stages (sub-physical) on the elemental side; the mineral
kingdom; three stages on the objective physical side – these are
the (first or preliminary) seven links of the evolutionary chain.” “Preliminary” because they are preparatory, and though belonging
in fact to the natural, they yet would be more correctly described as
sub-natural evolution. This process makes a halt in its stages at the
Third, at the threshold of the Fourth stage, when it becomes, on the
plane of the natural evolution, the first really manward stage, thus
forming with the three elemental kingdoms, the ten, the Sephirothal
number. It is at this point that begins: “A descent of spirit into matter
equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a re-ascent from
the deepest depths of materiality (the mineral) towards its status quo
ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete organism – up
to Nirvana, the vanishing point of differentiated matter.”
Therefore it becomes evident why that which is pertinently called
44
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
in Esoteric Buddhism “Wave of Evolution,” and mineral-, vegetable-,
animal- and man-”impulse,” stops at the door of our Globe, at
its Fourth cycle or Round. It is at this point that the Cosmic
Monad (Buddhi) will be wedded to and become the vehicle of the
Atmic Ray, i.e., it (Buddhi) will awaken to an apperception of it
(Atman); and thus enter on the first step of a new septenary ladder
of evolution, which will lead it eventually to the tenth (counting
from the lowest [i.e. elemental] upwards) of the Sephirothal tree,
the Crown. Everything in the Universe follows analogy. “As above,
so below”; Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which
takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic
plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to
the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual. Thus,
corresponding to the Sephirothal Crown (or upper triad) there are
the three elemental Kingdoms, which precede the Mineral (see
diagram on p. 277 in Five Years of Theosophy), and which, using the
language of the Kabalists, answer in the Cosmic differentiation
to the worlds of Form and Matter from the Super-Spiritual to the
Archetypal. (SD I 176-177)
[Note: From this we may infer the following. The first three and a half
Rounds constitute a descent of spirit (or monad) in matter. This arc
of spiritual involution goes pari passu with a material evolution and
equals the sub-natural evolution, or the septenary ladder of evolution
of matter (of the seven kingdoms). This represents the passage of the
monad (atma-buddhi) through every elemental (fundamental) form
of that planetary manvantara: the first or preliminary seven links of
the evolutionary chain. HPB seems to call the first three and a half
Rounds the preseptenary manvantara, of which the Fourth Round itself
is in its seventh stage of physicality (SD II 308fn). At the midpoint, in
the Fourth round on globe D, the second three and a half Rounds
start. Now starts the re-ascent from the deepest depths of materiality
(mineral kingdom). This arc of spiritual evolution goes pari passu
with a material involution and equals the natural stage of evolution,
a new septenary ladder, starting (not from the elemental as in the
sub-natural or involution stage but) from the mineral, which will lead
to the tenth. What does 10 (sephiroth) mean here? The “Ten” seem to
V. THE SEVEN KINGDOMS AND THEIR EVOLUTION ON EARTH
45
represent all the evolutionary stages, including both the sub-natural
and the natural:
lowest elemental (1)
middle elemental (2)
highest elemental (3)
mineral (4)
vegetable (5)
animal (6)
human (7)
lowest Dhyan Chohanic (8)
middle Dhyan Chohanic (9)
highest Dhyan chohanic (10).
The three Dhyan Chohanic kingdoms, the upper triad of the Sephiroth,
correspond with the three elemental kingdoms, together with the
four other kingdoms, we have the “ten”: these ten stages of evolution
are summarized in the third fundamental where it is stated that each
Spiritual Soul has first to go through every elemental form and then
evolving from the lowest to the highest manas, from mineral to the
highest Dhyani Buddha. In other words, from full unconsiousness
(lowest kingdom) through stages of perception, apperception and selfperception ending in full Self-consiousness: look at the text in the SD,
where HPB clearly makes a distinction between self-perception with
small s and Self consciousness with a capital S. One should ponder on
this: self-perception may already be present in some animals, but not
Self-consiousness.]
3. The order of appearance of the kingdoms on the Earth
To return to “Esoteric Buddhism.” It is there stated with regard to the
enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch on Globe A,
and the man-epoch, that: “The full development of the mineral epoch
on Globe A, prepares the way for the vegetable development, and, as
soon as this begins, the mineral life-impulse overflows into Globe B.
Then, when the vegetable development on Globe A is complete and
46
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
the animal development begins, the vegetable life-impulse overflows
to Globe B, and the mineral impulse passes on to Globe C. Then
finally comes the human life-impulse on Globe A.” (Page 49.) And
so it goes on for three Rounds, when it slackens, and finally stops at
the threshold of our Globe, at the Fourth Round; because the human
period (of the true physical men to be), the seventh, is now reached.
This is evident, for as said, “ . . . there are processes of evolution which
precede the mineral kingdom, and thus a wave of evolution, indeed
several [elemental] waves of evolution, precede the mineral wave in
its progress round the spheres” (ibid). (SD I 175-176)
Taking up evolution on the Earth, it is stated that the stream of
Monads begins first to work up the mass of matter in what are called
elemental conditions when all is gaseous or fiery. For the ancient
and true theory is that no evolution is possible without the Monad
as vivifying agent. In this first stage there is no animal or vegetable.
Next comes the mineral when the whole mass hardens, the Monads
being all imprisoned within. Then the first Monads emerge into
vegetable forms which they construct themselves, and no animals yet
appear. Next the first class of Monads emerges from the vegetable
and produces the animal, then the human astral and shadowy model,
and we have minerals, vegetables, animals and future men, for the
second and later classes are still evolving in the lower kingdoms.
When the middle of the Fourth Round is reached no more Monads
emerge into the human stage and will not until a new planetary mass,
reincarnated from ours, is made. This is the whole process roughly
given, but with many details left out, for in one of the rounds man
appears before the animals. But this detail need lead to no confusion.
(Ocean 27)
Now the life impulse reaches “A” or rather that which is destined
to become “A” and which so far is but cosmic dust. A centre is
formed in the nebulous matter of the condensation of the solar
dust disseminated through space and a series of three evolutions
invisible to the eye of flesh occur in succession, viz., three kingdoms
of elementals or nature forces are evoluted: in other words the animal
soul of the future globe is formed; or as a Kabalist will express it, the
V. THE SEVEN KINGDOMS AND THEIR EVOLUTION ON EARTH
47
gnomes, the salamanders, and the undines are created […] The three
evolutions completed: palpable globe begins to form. The mineral
kingdom fourth in the whole series, but first in this stage leads the
way. Its deposits are at first vaporous soft and plastic, only becoming
hard and concrete in the seventh ring. When this ring is completed
it projects its essence to globe B – which is already passing through
the preliminary stages of formation and mineral evolution begins on
that globe. At this juncture the evolution of the vegetable kingdom
commences on globe A. When the latter has made its seventh ring its
essence passes on to globe B. At that time the mineral essence moves
to globe C and the germs of the animal kingdom enter A. When the
animal has seven rings there, its life principle goes to globe B, and the
essences of vegetable and mineral move on. Then comes man on A, an
ethereal foreshadowing of the compact being he is destined to become
on our earth. Evolving seven parent races with many offshoots of
sub-races, he, like the preceding kingdoms completes his seven rings
and is then transferred successively to each of the globes onward to
Z. From the first man has all the seven principles included in him in
germ but none are developed. If we compare him to a baby we will
be right; no one has ever, in the thousands of ghost stories current,
seen the ghost of an infant, though the imagination of a loving mother
may have suggested to her the picture of her lost babe in dreams.
And this is very suggestive. In each of the rounds he makes one of
the principles develop fully. In the first round his consciousness on
our earth is dull and but feeble and shadowy, something like that
of an infant. When he reaches our earth in the second round he has
become responsible in a degree, in the third he becomes so entirely.
At every stage and every round his development keeps pace, with the
globe on which he is. The descending arc from A to our earth is called
the shadowy, the ascending to Z the “luminous” . . . We men of the
fourth round are already reaching the latter half of the fifth race of
our fourth round humanity, while the men (the few earlier comers)
of the fifth round, though only in their first race (or rather class), are
yet immeasurably higher than we are – spiritually if not intellectually;
since with the completion or full development of this fifth principle
(intellectual soul) they have come nearer than we have, are closer in
contact with their sixth principle Buddhi. Of course many are the
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
differentiated individuals even in the fourth r. as germs of principles
are not equally developed in all, but such is the rule.
. . . Man comes on globe “A” after the other kingdoms have gone
on. (Dividing our kingdoms into seven, the last four are what exoteric
science divides into three. To this we add the kingdom of man or
the Deva kingdom. The respective entities of these we divide into
germinal, instinctive, semi-conscious, and fully conscious). . . . When
all kingdoms have reached globe Z they will not move forward to reenter A in precedence of man, but under a law of retardation operative
from the central point – or earth – to Z and which equilibrates a
principle of acceleration in the descending arc – they will have just
finished their respective evolution of genera and species, when man
reaches his highest development on globe Z – in this or any round.
The reason for it is found in the enormously greater time required
by them to develop their infinite varieties as compared with man;
the relative speed of development in the rings therefore naturally
increases as we go up the scale from the mineral. But these different
rates are so adjusted by man stopping longer in the inter-planetary
spheres of rest, for weal or woe – that all kingdoms finish their work
simultaneously on the planet Z. (ML 94-96)
49
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS:
THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND PROGRESS
ON EARTH
1. First things first: what is a monad?
Now what is a “Monad?” And what relation does it bear to an Atom?
The following reply is based upon the explanations given in answer
to these questions in the above-cited article: “The Mineral Monad,”
written by the author.
“None whatever,” is answered to the second question, “to the atom
or molecule as existing in the scientific conception at present. It can
neither be compared with the microscopic organism, once classed
among polygastric infusoria, and now regarded as vegetable, and
classed among Algae; nor is it quite the Monas of the Peripatetics.
Physically or constitutionally the mineral monad differs, of course,
from the human monad, which is neither physical nor can its
constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements.” In
short, as the spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and
Impartite, whose rays, nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance,
call the “Individual Monads” of men, so the Mineral Monad – being
at the opposite point of the circle – is also One – and from it proceed
the countless physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as
individualized.
Otherwise how could one account for and explain mathematically
the evolutionary and spiral progress of the Four Kingdoms? The
“Monad” is the combination of the last two “principles” in man, the
6th and the 7th, and, properly speaking, the term “human monad”
applies only to the dual soul (Atma-Buddhi), not to its highest spiritual
vivifying Principle, Atma, alone. But since the Spiritual Soul, if divorced
from the latter (Atma) could have no existence, no being, it has thus
49
50
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
been called . . . . Now the Monadic, or rather Cosmic, Essence (if such
a term be permitted) in the mineral, vegetable, and animal, though the
same throughout the series of cycles from the lowest elemental up to
the Deva Kingdom, yet differs in the scale of progression. It would be
very misleading to imagine a Monad as a separate Entity trailing its
slow way in a distinct path through the lower Kingdoms, and after an
incalculable series of transformations flowering into a human being;
in short, that the Monad of a Humboldt dates back to the Monad of an
atom of horneblende. Instead of saying a “Mineral Monad,” the more
correct phraseology in physical Science, which differentiates every
atom, would of course have been to call it “the Monad manifesting
in that form of Prakriti called the Mineral Kingdom.” The atom, as
represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of
something, animated by a psychic something, destined after aeons to
blossom as a man. But it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal
Energy which itself has not yet become individualized; a sequential
manifestation of the one Universal Monas. The ocean (of matter) does
not divide into its potential and constituent drops until the sweep
of the life-impulse reaches the evolutionary stage of man-birth. The
tendency towards segregation into individual Monads is gradual,
and in the higher animals comes almost to the point. The Peripatetics
applied the word Monas to the whole Kosmos, in the pantheistic sense;
and the Occultists, while accepting this thought for convenience sake,
distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the concrete
from the abstract by terms of which the “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal,
(etc.), Monad” are examples. The term merely means that the tidal
wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit.
The “Monadic Essence” begins to imperceptibly differentiate towards
individual consciousness in the Vegetable Kingdom. As the Monads
are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the
spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation,
which properly constitutes the Monad – not the atomic aggregation,
which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the
lower and the higher degrees of intelligence.
Leibnitz conceived of the Monads as elementary and indestructible
units endowed with the power of giving and receiving with respect
to other units, and thus of determining all spiritual and physical
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND
PROGRESS ON EARTH
51
phenomena. It is he who invented the term apperception, which
together with nerve- (not perception, but rather) – sensation, expresses
the state of the Monadic consciousness through all the Kingdoms up
to Man.
Thus it may be wrong on strictly metaphysical lines to call AtmaBuddhi a monad, since in the materialistic view it is dual and therefore
compound. But as Matter is Spirit, and vice versa; and since the
Universe and the Deity which informs it are unthinkable apart from
each other; so in the case of Atma-Buddhi. The latter being the vehicle
of the former, Buddhi stands in the same relation to Atma, as AdamKadmon, the Kabalistic Logos, does to En-Soph, or Mulaprakriti to
Parabrahm. (SD I 177-179)
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
Monad has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself
every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly
that “Man 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 Man.” But by
“Man” the divine Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity, much
less his physical body. (SD II 186)
2. The Monads are Rays of the Dhyani-Buddhas:
they are spiritual individualities
Those unable to seize the difference between the monad – the Universal
Unit – and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the
ever-hidden and the revealed Logos or the Word, ought never to
meddle in philosophy, let alone the Esoteric Sciences. (SD I 614)
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
The Monads (Jivas) are the Souls of the Atoms, both are the
fabric in which the Chohans (Dhyanis, gods) cloth themselves
when a form is needed.” (Esot. Cat.) This relates to Cosmic and
sub-planetary Monads, not to the Super-Cosmic Monas (the
Pythagorean Monad) as called, in its synthetic character, by the
Pantheistical Peripatetics. The Monads of the present dissertation
are treated from the standpoint of their individuality, as atomic
Souls, before these atoms descend into pure terrestrial form. For
this descent into concrete matter marks the medial point of their
own individual pilgrimage. Here, losing in the mineral kingdom
their individuality, they begin to ascend through the seven states of
terrestrial evolution to that point where a correspondence is firmly
established between the human and Deva (divine) consciousness.
(SD I 619)
[T]he Monad of every living being, unless his moral turpitude breaks
the connection and runs loose and “astray into the lunar path” – to
use the Occult expression – is an individual Dhyan Chohan, distinct
from others, a kind of spiritual individuality of its own, during one special
Manvantara. Its Primary, the Spirit (Atman) is one, of course, with
Paramatma (the one Universal Spirit), but the vehicle (Vahan) it is
enshrined in, the Buddhi, is part and parcel of that Dhyan-Chohanic
Essence; and it is in this that lies the mystery of that ubiquity, which
was discussed a few pages back. “My Father, that is in Heaven, and
I – are one,” – says the Christian Scripture; in this, at any rate, it is the
faithful echo of the esoteric tenet. (SD I 265)
The Planetary origin of the Monad (Soul) and of its faculties was
taught by the Gnostics. On its way to the Earth, as on its way
back from the Earth, each soul born in, and from, the “Boundless
Light,” had to pass through the seven planetary regions both ways.
(SD I 577)
The Astral Rulers of the Spheres (the planets) create the monads (the
Souls) from their own substance out of the “tears of their eyes, and the
sweat of their torments,” endowing the monads with a spark of the
Divine Light, which is their substance. (SD I 577)
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND
PROGRESS ON EARTH
53
It may be useful to show what, in the teachings of the old Initiates,
the Monad was, and what its origin. The monad – a truly “indivisible
thing,” […] is here rendered as the Atma in conjunction with Buddhi
and the higher Manas. This trinity is one and eternal, the latter
being absorbed in the former at the termination of all conditioned
and illusive life. The monad, then, can be traced through the course
of its pilgrimage and its changes of transitory vehicles only from
the incipient stage of the manifested Universe. In Pralaya, or the
intermediate period between two manvantaras, it loses its name, as
it loses it when the real one self of man merges into Brahm in cases of
high Samadhi (the Turiya state) or final Nirvana; “when the disciple” in
the words of Sankara, “having attained that primeval consciousness,
absolute bliss, of which the nature is truth, which is without form
and action, abandons this illusive body that has been assumed by the
atma just as an actor (abandons) the dress (put on).” For Buddhi (the
Anandamaya sheath) is but a mirror which reflects absolute bliss; and,
moreover, that reflection itself is yet not free from ignorance, and is
not the Supreme Spirit, being subject to conditions, being a spiritual
modification of Prakriti, and an effect; Atma alone is the one real and
eternal substratum of all – the essence and absolute knowledge – the
Kshetragna. It is called in the Esoteric philosophy “the One Witness,”
and, while it rests in Devachan, is referred to as “the Three Witnesses
to Karma.” (SD I 570-571)
Atma (our seventh principle) being identical with the universal Spirit,
and man being one with it in his essence, what is then the Monad
proper? It is that homogeneous spark which radiates in millions of
rays from the primeval Seven;” – of which seven further on. It is the
emanating spark from the uncreated Ray – a mystery. In the esoteric,
and even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Adi Buddha (Chogi dangpoi
sangye), the One unknown, without beginning or end, identical with
Parabrahm and Ain-Soph, emits a bright ray from its darkness. This
is the Logos (the first), or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha (also
called Dorjechang). As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest,
but sends into the world of manifestation his heart – the “diamond
heart,” Vajrasattva (Dorjesempa). This is the second logos of creation,
from whom emanate the seven (in the exoteric blind the five) Dhyani
54
THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
Buddhas, called the Anupadaka, “the parentless.” These Buddhas are
the primeval monads from the world of incorporeal being, the Arupa
world, wherein the Intelligences (on that plane only) have neither
shape nor name, in the exoteric system, but have their distinct seven
names in esoteric philosophy. These Dhyani Buddhas emanate, or
create from themselves, by virtue of Dhyana, celestial Selves – the
super-human Bodhisattvas. These incarnating at the beginning of
every human cycle on earth as mortal men, become occasionally,
owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of
Humanity, after which they may re-appear as Manushi (human)
Buddhas. The Anupadaka (or Dhyani-Buddhas) are thus identical
with the Brahminical Manasaputra, “mind-born sons” – whether of
Brahma or either of the other two Trimurtian Hypostases, hence
identical also with the Rishis and Prajapatis. (SD I 571)
These Brahmanas (the Rishi Prajapati?), the creators of the world, are
born here (on earth) again and again. Whatever is produced from
them is dissolved in due time in those very five great elements (the
five, or rather seven, Dhyani Buddhas, also called “Elements” of
Mankind), like billows in the ocean. These great elements are in every
way beyond the elements that make up the world (the gross elements).
And he who is released even from these five elements (the tanmatras)
goes to the highest goal.” “The Lord Prajapati (Brahma) created all
this by the mind only,” i.e., by Dhyana, or abstract meditation and
mystic powers like the Dhyani Buddhas (vide supra). Evidently then,
these “Brahmanas” are identical with the Bodhisattvas (the terrestrial)
of the heavenly Dhyani Buddhas. Both, as primordial, intelligent
“Elements,” become the creators or the emanators of the monads
destined to become human in that cycle; after which they evolve
themselves, or, so to say, expand into their own selves as Bodhisattvas
or Brahmanas, in heaven and earth, to become at last simple men
–”the creators of the world are born here, on earth again and again” –
truly. (SD I 571-572)
In the Northern Buddhist system, or the popular exoteric religion, it
is taught that every Buddha, while preaching the good law on earth,
manifests himself simultaneously in three worlds: in the formless, as
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND
PROGRESS ON EARTH
55
Dhyani Buddha, in the World of forms, as a Bodhisattva, and in the
world of desire, the lowest (or our world) as a man. Esoterically the
teaching differs: The divine, purely Adi-Buddhic monad manifests
as the universal Buddhi (the Maha-buddhi or Mahat in Hindu
philosophies) the spiritual, omniscient and omnipotent root of divine
intelligence, the highest anima mundi or the Logos. This descends “like
a flame spreading from the eternal Fire, immoveable, without increase
or decrease, ever the same to the end” of the cycle of existence, and
becomes universal life on the Mundane Plane. From this Plane of
conscious Life shoot out, like seven fiery tongues, the Sons of Light
(the logoi of Life); then the Dhyani-Buddhas of contemplation: the
concrete forms of their formless Fathers – the Seven Sons of Light,
still themselves, to whom may be applied the Brahmanical mystic
phrase: “Thou art ‘that’ – Brahm.” It is from these Dhyani-Buddhas
that emanate their chhayas (Shadows) the Bodhisattvas of the celestial
realms, the prototypes of the super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas, and of the
terrestrial Buddhas, and finally of men. The “Seven Sons of Light” are
also called “Stars.” (SD I 572)
The star under which a human Entity is born, says the Occult
teaching, will remain for ever its star, throughout the whole cycle of
its incarnations in one Manvantara. But this is not his astrological star.
The latter is concerned and connected with the personality, the former
with the individuality. The “Angel” of that Star, or the DhyaniBuddha will be either the guiding or simply the presiding “Angel,”
so to say, in every new rebirth of the monad, which is part of his own
essence, though his vehicle, man, may remain for ever ignorant of this
fact. The adepts have each their Dhyani-Buddha, their elder “twin
Soul,” and they know it, calling it “Father-Soul,” and “Father-Fire.”
It is only at the last and supreme initiation, however, that they learn
it when placed face to face with the bright “Image.” How much has
Bulwer Lytton known of this mystic fact when describing, in one of his
highest inspirational moods, Zanoni face to face with his Augoeides?
(SD I 572-573)
The Logos, or both the unmanifested and the manifested Word, is
called by the Hindus, Iswara, “the Lord,” though the Occultists give it
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another name. Iswara, say the Vedantins, is the highest consciousness
in nature. “This highest consciousness,” answer the Occultists, “is only
a synthetic unit in the world of the manifested Logos – or on the plane
of illusion; for it is the sum total of Dhyan-Chohanic consciousnesses.”
“Oh, wise man, remove the conception that not-Spirit is Spirit,” says
Sankaracharya. Atma is not-Spirit in its final Parabrahmic state, Iswara
or Logos is Spirit; or, as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity
of manifested living Spirits, the parent-source and nursery of all the
mundane and terrestrial monads, plus their divine reflection, which
emanate from, and return into, the Logos, each in the culmination of
its time. There are seven chief groups of such Dhyan Chohans, which
groups will be found and recognised in every religion, for they are
the primeval seven Rays. Humanity, occultism teaches us, is divided
into seven distinct groups and their sub-divisions, mental, spiritual,
and physical. The monad, then, viewed as one, is above the seventh
principle (in Kosmos and man), and as a triad, it is the direct radiant
progeny of the said compound unit, not the breath (and special creation
out of nihil) of “God,” as that unit is called; for such an idea is quite
unphilosophical, and degrades Deity, dragging it down to a finite,
attributive condition. (SD I 573)
These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from and
are self-generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole
is pure spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other,
the matter in which it condenses, crystallizing into a more and more
gross type as its descends into manifestation. (SD I, 481)
It is then the “Seven Sons of Light” – called after their planets and
(by the rabble) often identified with them – namely Saturn, Jupiter,
Mercury, Mars, Venus, and – presumably for the modern critic, who
goes no deeper than the surface of old religions – the Sun and Moon,
which are, according to the Occult teachings, our heavenly Parents,
or “Father,” synthetically. Hence, as already remarked, polytheism
is really more philosophical and correct, as to fact and nature, than
anthropomorphic monotheism. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus,
the four exoteric planets, and the three others, which must remain
unnamed, were the heavenly bodies in direct astral and psychic
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57
communication with the Earth, its Guides, and Watchers – morally
and physically; the visible orbs furnishing our Humanity with its
outward and inward characteristics, and their “Regents” or Rectors
with our Monads and spiritual faculties. In order to avoid creating
new misconceptions, let it be stated that among the three secret
orbs (or star-angels) neither Uranus nor Neptune entered; not only
because they were unknown under these names to the ancient Sages,
but because they, as all other planets, however many there may be,
are the gods and guardians of other septenary chains of globes within
our systems. (SD I 575)
Exoterically they [the Dhyani Buddhas] are five in number, whereas in
the esoteric schools they are seven, and not single Entities but Hierarchies.
It is stated in the Secret Doctrine that five Buddhas have come and that two
are to come in the sixth and seventh races. Exoterically their president
is Vajrasattva, the “Supreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Buddha,” but
more transcendent still is Vajradhara, even as Parabrahm transcends
Brahma or Mahat. Thus the exoteric and occult significations of the
Dhyani-Buddhas are entirely different. Exoterically each is a trinity,
three in one, all three manifesting simultaneously in three worlds – as
a human Buddha on earth, a Dhyani-Buddha in the world of astral
forms, and an arupa, or formless, Buddha in the highest Nirvanic realm.
Thus for a human Buddha, an incarnation of one of these Dhyanis, the
stay on earth is limited from seven to seven thousand years in various
bodies, since as men they are subjected to normal conditions, accidents
and death. In Esoteric philosophy, on the other hand, this means that
only five out of the “Seven Dhyani-Buddhas” – or, rather, the Seven
Hierarchies of these Dhyanis, who, in Buddhist mysticism, are identical
with the higher incarnating Intelligences, or the Kumaras of the Hindus
– five only have hitherto appeared on earth in regular succession of
incarnations, the last two having to come during the sixth and seventh
Root-Races. This is, again, semi-allegorical, if not entirely so. For the
sixth and seven Hierarchies have been already incarnated on this earth
together with the rest. But as they have reached “Buddhaship,” so
called, almost from the beginning of the fourth Root-Race, they are said
to rest since then in conscious bliss and freedom till the beginning
of the Seventh Round, when they will lead Humanity as a new
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race of Buddhas. These Dhyanis are connected only with Humanity,
and, strictly speaking, only with the highest “principles” of men.
(TBL 50-51)
[Note: from the foregoing material we may infer the following
schemes of emanation within the Hierarchy:
Scheme I (SD I 571)
1. Adi-Buddha (identical with Parabrahm and Ain-Soph)
2. Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha, the First Logos
3. Vajrasattva, the Diamond Heart, the Second Logos
4. Seven Anupadaka Dhyani Buddhas (the primeval Monads)
5. Super-human Bodhisatvas (or Dhyani-Bodhisattvas?)
6. Human Bodhisattvas
7. Manushi Buddhas
Scheme II (SD I 572)
1. The Divine purely Adi-Buddhic monad
2.Maha-Buddhi
3. The Logos
4. Universal Life on the Mundane Plane
5. The Seven Sons of Light (the logoi of life): the “Stars”
6. The Dhyani-Buddhas of contemplation
7. The Bodhisattvas of the celestial realms
8. Super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas
9. Terrestrial Buddhas
10. Men ]
3. Relationship between the Universal Monad, Cosmic Monads
and the human monads
Manu declares himself created by Viraj, or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of
Humanity), which means that his Monad emanates from the never
resting Principle in the beginning of every new Cosmic activity: that
Logos or Universal Monad (collective Elohim) that radiates from
within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the centres of
activity – progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as of
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the yet undifferentiated human monads of planetary chains as well as
of every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is “Swayambhuva,” the
self-born, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges
a planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system),
and whose radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhuva
(a generic name, mysterious and meaning far more than appears),
each of these becoming, as a Host, the Creator of his own Humanity.
(SD II 311)
4. The hosts of monads are limited
In reference to the Monads, the reader is asked to bear in mind that
Eastern philosophy rejects the Western theological dogma of a newlycreated soul for every baby born, as being as unphilosophical as it
is impossible in the economy of Nature. There must be a limited
number of Monads evolving and growing more and more perfect
through their assimilation of many successive personalities, in every
new Manvantara. This is absolutely necessary in view of the doctrines
of Rebirth, Karma, and the gradual return of the human Monad to
its source – absolute Deity. Thus, although the hosts of more or less
progressed Monads are almost incalculable, they are still finite, as is
everything in this Universe of differentiation and finiteness. (SD I 171)
For, however countless, in our conceptions, the number of the
incarnating monads – 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 aeons already passed – still, there must
be a limit. It was 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,
had ceased as soon as Humanity had reached its full physical
development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since the middlepoint of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case of
young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off
by some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period
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of many centuries has elapsed, 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
Re-incarnation.
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 Dhyan-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
terrible and apparent injustice 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 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, 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.
Of all the terrible blasphemies and accusations virtually thrown on
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 connection with every evil and undeserved
blow, that “such is the will of God.” (SD II 303-304)
The stream or mass of Egos which evolves on the seven globes of
our chain is limited in number, yet the actual quantity is enormous.
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For though the universe is limitless and infinite, yet in any particular
portion of Cosmos in which manifestation and evolution have begun
there is a limit to the extent of manifestation and to the number
of Egos engaged therein. And the whole number of Monads now
going through evolution on our Earth Chain came over from the
old seven planets or globes which I have described. Esoteric Buddhism
calls this mass of Egos a “life wave,” meaning the stream of Monads.
(Ocean 25)
5. The lunar monads are divided into seven hierarchies
Now, it must be remembered that the Monads cycling round any
septenary chain are divided into seven classes or hierarchies according
to their respective stages of evolution, consciousness, and merit.
(SD I 171)
6. The order of appearance of the lunar monads on Earth
Let us follow, then, the order of their appearance on planet A,
in the first Round. The time-spaces between the appearances
of these hierarchies on any one Globe are so adjusted that when
Class 7, the last, appears on Globe A, Class 1, the first, has just
passed on to Globe B, and so on, step by step, all round the chain.
(SD I 171-172)
[Note here the difference in order of succession and time-period
when compared with the seven kingdoms/life-waves mentioned in
SD 175-176 and ML 15]
Further, when Globe A of the new chain is ready, the first class or
Hierarchy of Monads from the Lunar chain incarnate upon it in
the lowest kingdom [the lowest elemental kingdom], and so on
successively. The result of this is, that it is only the first class of
Monads which attains the human state of development during the
first Round, since the second class, on each planet, arriving later,
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has not time to reach that stage. Thus the Monads of Class 2 reach
the incipient human stage only in the Second Round, and so on up
to the middle of the Fourth Round. But at this point – and on this
Fourth Round in which the human stage will be fully developed –
the “Door” into the human kingdom closes; and henceforward the
number of “human” Monads, i.e., Monads in the human stage of
development, is complete. For the Monads which had not reached
the human stage by this point will, owing to the evolution of
humanity itself, find themselves so far behind that they will reach
the human stage only at the close of the seventh and last Round.
They will, therefore, not be men on this chain, but will form the
humanity of a future Manvantara and be rewarded by becoming
“Men” on a higher chain altogether, thus receiving their Karmic
compensation. To this there is but one solitary exception, for very
good reasons, of which we shall speak farther on. But this accounts
for the difference in the races. (SD I 173)
It [the monadic life wave] reached this planetary mass, represented to
our consciousness by the central point our Earth, and began on Globe
A or No. I, coming like an army or river. The first portion began on
Globe A and went through a long evolution there in bodies suited to
such a state of matter, and then passed on to B, and so on through
the whole seven greater states of consciousness which have been
called globes. When the first portion left A others streamed in and
pursued the same course, the whole army proceeding with regularity
round the septenary route. This journey went on for four circlings
round the whole, and then the whole stream or army of Egos from the
old Moon Chain had arrived, and being complete, no more entered
after the middle of the Fourth Round. The same circling process of
these differently arrived classes goes on for seven complete Rounds
of the whole seven planetary centers of consciousness, and when the
seven are ended as much perfection as is possible in the immense
period occupied will have been attained, and then this chain or mass
of “globes” will die in its turn to give birth to still another series.
(Ocean 25-26)
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7. The seven hierarchies of lunar monads are divided into three
great classes
The [lunar] Monadic Host may be roughly divided into three great
classes:–
1. The most developed Monads (the Lunar Gods or “Spirits,”
called, in India, the Pitris), whose function it is to pass in the first
Round through the whole triple cycle of the mineral, vegetable, and
animal kingdoms in their most ethereal, filmy, and rudimentary
forms, in order to clothe themselves in, and assimilate, the nature
of the newly formed chain. They are those who first reach the
human form (if there can be any form in the realm of the almost
subjective) on Globe A in the first Round. It is they, therefore, who
lead and represent the human element during the second and
third Rounds, and finally evolve their shadows at the beginning
of the Fourth Round for the second class, or those who come
behind them.
2. Those Monads that are the first to reach the human stage
during the three and a half Rounds, and to become men. [fn: We
are forced to use here the misleading word “Men,” and this is
a clear proof of how little any European language is adapted
to express these subtle distinctions. It stands to reason that
these “Men” did not resemble the men of to-day, either in form
or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them “Men” at all?
Because there is no other term in any Western language which
approximately conveys the idea intended. The word “Men” at
least indicates that these beings were “manus,” thinking entities,
however they differed in form and intellection from ourselves.
But in reality they were, in respect of spirituality and intellection,
rather “gods” than “Men.”]
3. The laggards; the Monads which are retarded, and which will
not reach, by reason of Karmic impediments, the human stage at all
during this cycle or Round, save one exception which will be spoken
of elsewhere as already promised. (SD I 174-175)
[Note: it is possible now to divide the seven classes or hierarchies of
lunar monads in these Three Great Classes in the following manner:
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I. Class I is made up by class 1 of the lunar monads who have
become human monads in the first round. This first class of
monads are the Lunar Pitris.
II. Class II is made up by class 2, 3 and 4 of the lunar monads who
have become human monads in the second, the third and the first
half of the fourth round.
III. Class III is made up by class 5, 6 and 7 of the lunar monads.
Class 5 has reached the animal stage; class 6 the vegetable stage
and class 7 the mineral stage. These three classes will become
human monads in their turn only at the next great planetary
manvantara. Other students infer that all the laggards are in the
animal kingdom. Each student must make his own conclusions.]
8. The lunar monads and their different stages of development
in the first three and a half Rounds
The [first class of] “Lunar Monads” or Pitris, the ancestors of man,
become in reality man himself. They are the “Monads” who enter on
the cycle of evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the chain
of planets, evolve the human form as has just been shown. At the
beginning of the human stage of the Fourth Round on this Globe,
they “ooze out” their astral doubles from the “ape-like” forms which
they had evolved in Round III. And it is this subtle, finer form, which
serves as the model round which Nature builds physical man. These
“Monads” or “divine sparks” are thus the “Lunar” ancestors, the
Pitris themselves. For these “Lunar Spirits” have to become “Men” in
order that their “Monads” may reach a higher plane of activity and
self-consciousness, i.e., the plane of the Manasa-Putras, those who
endow the “senseless” shells, created and informed by the Pitris, with
“mind” in the latter part of the Third Root-Race. (SD I 180-181)
[I]t must be borne in mind that the [seven classes of lunar] Monads
which enter upon the evolutionary cycle upon Globe A, in the first
Round, are in very different stages of development. Hence the matter
becomes somewhat complicated. . . . Let us recapitulate. The most
developed Monads (the lunar) [class I] reach the human germ-stage
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in the first Round; become terrestrial, though very ethereal human
beings towards the end of the Third Round, remaining on it (the
globe) through the “obscuration” period as the seed [sishtas] for
future mankind in the Fourth Round, and thus become the pioneers
of Humanity at the beginning of this, the Fourth Round. Others reach
the Human stage only during later Rounds, i.e., in the second, third, or
first half of the Fourth Round [class II]. And finally the most retarded
of all, i.e., those still occupying animal forms after the middle turningpoint of the Fourth Round – will not become men at all during this
Manwantara [class III]. They will reach to the verge of humanity
only at the close of the seventh Round to be, in their turn, ushered
into a new chain after pralaya – by older pioneers, the progenitors of
humanity, or the Seed-Humanity (Sishta), viz., the men who will be at
the head of all at the end of these Rounds. (SD I 182)
Thus [reaching the fourth round] the [lunar] Monads destined to
animate future Races were ready for the new transformation. They
had passed their phases of immetalization, of plant and animal life,
from the lowest to the highest, and were waiting for their human,
more intelligent form. Yet, what could the plastic modellers [lunar
pitris] do but follow the laws of evolutionary Nature? Could they,
as claimed by the Biblical dead-letter, form “Lord-God”-like, or as
Pygmalion in the Greek allegory, Adam-Galatea out of volcanic dust,
and breathe a living soul into Man? No: because the soul was already
there, latent in its Monad, and needed but a coating. (SD II 150)
The [lunar] Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and
animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal
man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but
has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever changing forms.
(SD II 42)
[Note 1: from this material we may infer the following. In the First
Round on Globe A, when class 1 of the lunar monads has reached
the germ or prototype of the human stage (kingdom 7), class 2 has
reached the germ of the animal stage (kingdom 6), class 3 the germ
of the vegetable stage (kingdom 5), class 4 the germ of the mineral
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stage (kingdom 4), class 5 the germ of the highest elemental stage
(kingdom 3), class 6 the germ of the middle elemental stage (kingdom
2) and class 7 of the lunar monads the germ of the lowest elemental
stage (kingdom 1). This means that at the end of the First Round, on
Globe G, class 1 has reached the end of the human stage; class 2 has
reached the end of the animal stage (in order to begin the human
stage on globe A in the Second round); class 3 has reached the end
of the vegetable stage (to begin in the Second Round the animal
stage), class 4 has reached the end of the mineral stage (to begin in the
Second Round the vegetable stage) etc… This also means that (at the
end) in the second Round class 2 has reached (the end of) the human
stage, and class 3 and 4 reach the human stage in the third and fourth
Round. Thus, at the mid-point of the Fourth Round, on globe D, class
1-2-3-4 of the lunar monads have become human monads, meaning
that these are monads manifesting themselves in that form of prakriti
called the Human Kingdom. Of these four classes it is only the first
one, the most developed class of lunar monads, who emanate their
chhayas, not only for themselves, but also for the monadic classes 2-3-4,
who have also reached the human stage in Rounds 2-3-4. That’s why
this first class of lunar monads is called Lunar Pitris, because they are
the “Fathers” of the lower vestures of all the (four groups of) human
monads. We also know that there are four groups of Lunar Pitris: in
other words the first class of lunar monads is fourfold. Maybe, we
may say, keeping the different grades of development in mind, that
the four groups of Lunar Pitris emanate four kinds of chhayas for each
of the four classes of human monads. Remember also: we are dealing
in the first three and a half Rounds with the evolution of the human
form only, not yet with the self-induced evolution of the human
monads themselves as self-conscious entities: this evolution will and
can only start after their manasic principle, latent in every monad, has
been awakened out of latency by the Manasaputras or Solar Pitris,
who have already “evolved” Manas in a previous evolution-period
or manvantara.
[Note 2: We have to keep in mind the teaching that when class 7 of
monads appears on a Globe, class 1 of monads has just passed on
to the following Globe: in other words when the head of a monadic
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67
life-wave leaves a Globe, the tail enters that Globe. From this we may
infer that the last class of lunar monads are still in their inter-global
Nirvana (between Globe C and Globe D).]
9. The progress of lunar monads through the kingdoms during
the first three and a half Rounds.
[Note: we have to remember that the monadic evolution and the
evolution of the kingdoms are, although different kinds of evolution,
closely interconnected. The monad is always the driving force of all
that evolves. We may infer from the SD that during the first three and
a half Rounds the several kingdoms are “evolved” or formed by the
monads themselves: i.e. the evolution of the globe and its kingdoms
during the first three and a half Rounds goes pari passu with the
involution of the monads into the different kinds of matter or prakriti
which constitute these kingdoms and thus make up the globe. In the
Fourth Round, when the mid-point is reached, the process changes:
the monads “have stopped” involving and start their evolution
upwards through the formed kingdoms, which means that matter
starts now its involution.]
The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:– “A stone becomes a plant;
a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man a spirit; and the spirit a god.”
The “spark” animates all the kingdoms in turn before it enters into
and informs divine man, between whom and his predecessor, animal
man, there is all the difference in the world. (SD I 246)
The Monad or Jiva […] is first of all, shot down by the law of Evolution
into the lowest form of matter – the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration
encased in the stone (or that which will become mineral and stone in
the Fourth Round), it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence,
through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal
matter, it has now reached the point in which it has become the germ,
so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All
this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as
consciousness. For the Monad or Jiva per se cannot be even called spirit:
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it is a ray, a breath of the Absolute, or the Absoluteness rather, and
the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned
and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. (SD I 246-247)
And since the [lunar] Monad has passed, after its “first inmetallization”
on Globe A, through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds in
every degree of the three states of matter, except the last degree of the
third or solid state, which it reached only at the “mid-point of evolution”
it is but logical and natural that at the beginning of the Fourth Round
on Globe D, Man should be the first to appear; and also that his
frame should be of the most tenuous matter that is compatible with
objectivity. To make it still clearer: if the Monad begins its cycle of
incarnations through the three objective kingdoms on the descending
curved line, it has necessarily to enter on the re-ascending curved line
of the sphere as a man also. On the descending arc it is the spiritual
which is gradually transformed into the material. On the middle
line of the base, Spirit and Matter are equilibrized in Man. On the
ascending arc, Spirit is slowly re-asserting itself at the expense of the
physical, or matter, so that, at the close of the seventh Race of the
Seventh Round, the Monad will find itself as free from matter and all
its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the
experience and wisdom, the fruition of all its personal lives, without
their evil and temptations. (SD II 180-181)
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 [human monad] 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
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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) 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 Monad has, during the
cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each
kingdom. Therefore, the Kabalists say correctly that “Man 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 Man.” But by “Man” the divine
Monad [a spiritual Soul or an Atma-Buddhi] is meant, and not the
thinking Entity [Manas], much less his physical body. (SD II 185-186)
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. Thus the astral prototypes of
the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which
preceded (the chhayas of) Men, were the consolidated, though still very
ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms or models produced at
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
the close of the Third Round on Globe D. “Produced from the residue
of the substance matter; from dead bodies of men and (other extinct)
animals of the wheel before,” or the previous Third Round – as Stanza
24 tells us.
[T]he Monads have passed through all these forms of being up to
man, on every planet [globe], in the Three preceding Rounds; every
Round, as well as every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been,
and still having to be the arena of the same evolution, only repeated
each time on a more solid material basis. Therefore the question:–
“What relation is there between the Third Round astral prototypes
and ordinary physical development in the course of the origination
of pre-mammalian organic species?” – is easily answered. One is the
shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined,
and evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects, which are destined
to receive the final and vivid form under the brush of the painter. The
fish evolved into an amphibian – a frog – in the shadows of ponds,
and man passed through all his metamorphoses on this Globe in the
Third Round as he did in this, his Fourth Cycle. The Third Round
types contributed to the formation of the types in this one. On strict
analogy, the cycle of Seven Rounds in their work of the gradual
formation of man through every kingdom of Nature, are repeated
on a microscopical scale in the first seven months of gestation of
a future human being. Let the student think over and work out
this analogy. As the seven months’ old unborn baby, though quite
ready, yet needs two months more in which to acquire strength and
consolidate; so man, having perfected his evolution during seven
Rounds, remains two periods more in the womb of mother-Nature
before he is born, or rather reborn a Dhyani, still more perfect than
he was before he launched forth as a Monad on the newly built chain
of worlds. Let the student ponder over this mystery, and then he
will easily convince himself that, as there are also physical links
between many classes, so there are precise domains wherein the
astral merges into physical evolution. (SD II 256-257)
It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike
creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND
PROGRESS ON EARTH
71
mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only –
the middle, or the transition point of which we have hardly reached.
Nor was man what he is now during the first two and a half Rootraces. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago,
during the secondary period, as we claim. Till then he was, according
to tradition and Occult teaching, “a god on earth who had fallen
into matter,” or generation […] Furthermore, we are taught that the
transformations through which man passed on the descending arc
[i.e. the first three and a half Rounds] – which is centrifugal for spirit
and centripetal for matter – and those he prepares to go through,
henceforward, on his ascending path [the second three and a half
Rounds], which will reverse the direction of the two forces – viz.,
matter will become centrifugal and spirit centripetal – that all such
transformations are next in store for the anthropoid ape also, all those, at
any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round –
and these will all be men in the Fifth Round, as present men inhabited
ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round. (SD II 261-262)
The former – the archaic Science – allows the human physical frame
to have passed through every form, from the lowest to the very
highest, its present one, or from the simple to the complex – to use
the accepted terms. But it claims that in this cycle (the fourth), the
frame having already existed among the types and models of nature
from the preceding Rounds – that it was quite ready for man from the
beginning of this Round. The Monad had but to step into the astral body
of the progenitors, in order that the work of physical consolidation
should begin around the shadowy prototype. (SD II 660)
As shown, the monad had passed through, journeyed and been
imprisoned in, every transitional form throughout every kingdom
of nature during the three preceding Rounds. But the monad which
becomes human is not the Man. In this Round – with the exception
of the highest mammals after man, the anthropoids destined to die
out in this our race, when their monads will be liberated and pass
into the astral human forms (or the highest elementals) of the Sixth
and the Seventh Races, and then into lowest human forms in the fifth
Round – no units of either of the kingdoms are animated any longer
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
by monads destined to become human in their next stage, but only by
the lower Elementals of their respective realms. These “Elementals”
will become human Monads, in their turn, only at the next great
planetary Manvantara. (SD I 184 + fn)
The last human Monad incarnated before the beginning of the
5th Root-Race. The cycle of metempsychosis for the human monad is
closed, for we are in the Fourth Round and the Fifth Root-Race. The
reader will have to bear in mind – at any rate one who has made
himself acquainted with “Esoteric Buddhism” – that the Stanzas
which follow in this Book and Book II speak of the evolution in our
Fourth Round only. The latter is the cycle of the turning-point, after
which, matter, having reached its lowest depths, begins to strive
onward and to get spiritualized with every new Race and with every
fresh cycle. (SD I 184-186)
10. Reaching the mid-point of evolution
Now the evolution of the external form or body round the astral is
produced by the terrestrial forces, just as in the case of the lower
kingdoms; but the evolution of the internal or real man is purely
spiritual. It is now no more a passage of the impersonal Monad
through many and various forms of matter – endowed at best with
instinct and consciousness on quite a different plane – as in the case
of external evolution, but a journey of the “pilgrim-soul” through
various states of not only matter but Self-consciousness and selfperception, or of perception from apperception. (See “Gods, Monads
and Atoms.”) (SD I 175)
The Monad emerges from its state of spiritual and intellectual
unconsciousness; and, skipping the first two planes – too near the
absolute to permit of any correlation with anything on a lower plane
– it gets direct into the plane of Mentality. But there is no plane in the
whole universe with a wider margin, or a wider field of action in its
almost endless gradations of perceptive and apperceptive qualities,
than this plane, which has in its turn an appropriate smaller plane
VI. THE EX-LUNAR MONADS: THEIR CLASSIFICATION AND
PROGRESS ON EARTH
73
for every “form,” from the “mineral” monad up to the time when
that monad blossoms forth by evolution into the divine monad. But
all the time it is still one and the same Monad, differing only in its
incarnations, throughout its ever succeeding cycles of partial or total
obscuration of spirit, or the partial or total obscuration of matter – two
polar antitheses – as it ascends into the realms of mental spirituality,
or descends into the depths of materiality. (SD I 175)
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75
VII. THE THREEFOLD SCHEME
OF EVOLUTION
It now becomes plain that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary
scheme, for the formation of the three periodical Upadhis; or rather three
separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably
interwoven and interblended at every point. These are the Monadic
(or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. These three
are the finite aspects or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion
of atma, the seventh, the one reality.
1. The Monadic is, as the name implies, concerned with the growth
and development into still higher phases of activity of the Monad in
conjunction with:–
2. The Intellectual, represented by the Manasa-Dhyanis (the Solar
Devas, or the Agnishwatta Pitris) the “givers of intelligence and
consciousness” to man and:–
3. The Physical, represented by the Chhayas of the lunar Pitris,
round which Nature has concreted the present physical body. This
body serves as the vehicle for the “growth” (to use a misleading
word) and the transformations through Manas and – owing to the
accumulation of experiences – of the finite into the infinite, of the
transient into the Eternal and Absolute.
Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and
guided by different sets of the highest Dhyanis or “Logoi.” Each is
represented in the constitution of man, the Microcosm of the great
Macrocosm; and it is the union of these three streams in him which
makes him the complex being he now is.
“Nature,” the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve
intelligence unaided – she can only create “senseless forms,” as will
be seen in our “Anthropogenesis.” The “Lunar Monads” cannot
progress, for they have not yet had sufficient touch with the forms
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THE PATH OF THE ETERNAL PILGRIM
created by “Nature” to allow of their accumulating experiences
through its means. It is the Manasa-Dhyanis who fill up the gap,
and they represent the evolutionary power of Intelligence and
Mind, the link between “Spirit” and “Matter” – in this Round.
(SD I 181-182)
[That physical nature on her own is indeed not able to create mankind
will now be illustrated …]
77
VIII. NATURE’S OR EARTH’S UNAIDED
ATTEMPT TO CREATE MAN FAILS
5. The Wheel [Globe D] whirled for thirty crores (of years, or
300,000,000). It constructed rupas (forms). Soft stones that
hardened (minerals); hard plants that softened (vegetation). Visible
from invisible, insects and small lives (sarisripa, swapada). She
(the Earth) shook them off her back, whenever they overran the
mother (a). After thirty crores of years, she turned round. She
laid on her back, on her side . . . . . She would call no sons of
Heaven, she would ask no sons of Wisdom. She created from her
own bosom. She evolved water-men terrible and bad (b). (Book II.
Stanza II.)
(a) This relates to an inclination of the axis – of which there were
several – to a consequent deluge and chaos on Earth (having, however,
no reference to primeval chaos), in which monsters, half-human,
half-animal, were generated. (SD II 52)
“The water-men terrible and bad,” who were the production of
physical nature alone, a result of the “evolutionary impulse” and
the first attempt to create man the “crown,” and the aim and goal
of all animal life on Earth – are shown to be failures in our Stanzas.
(SD II 53)
(b) Oannes (or Dagon, the Chaldean “Man-fish”) divides his
Cosmogony and Genesis into two portions. First the abyss of waters
and darkness, wherein resided most hideous beings – men with wings,
four and two-faced men, human beings with two heads, with the legs
and horns of a goat (our “goat-men,”) hippocentaurs, bulls with the
heads of men, and dogs with tails of fishes. In short, combinations
of various animals and men, of fishes, reptiles and other monstrous
animals assuming each other’s shapes and countenances. (SD II 54)
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Weeded of metaphors and allegories, what will science say to
this idea of a primordial creation of species? It will object to the
“Angels” and “Spirits” having anything to do therewith: but if it is
nature and the physical law of evolution that are the creators of all
there is now on Earth, why could there be “no such abyss” when
the globe was covered with waters, in which numbers of monstrous
beings were generated? Is it the “human beings” and animals with
human heads and double faces, which are a point of the objection?
But if man is only a higher animal and has evolved from the brute
species by an infinite series of transformations, why could not the
“missing links” have had human heads attached to the bodies of
animals, or, being two-headed, have heads of beasts and vice versa,
in Nature’s early efforts? Are we not shown during the geological
periods, in the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with
birds’ wings, and serpents’ heads on animal bodies. And, arguing
from the standpoint of science, does not even our modern human
race occasionally furnish us with monster-specimens: two-headed
children, animal bodies with human heads, dog-headed babies,
etc., etc.? And this proves that, if nature will still play such freaks
now that she has settled for ages into the order of her evolutionary
work, monsters, like those described by Berosus, were a possibility
in her opening programme; which possibility may even have
existed once upon a time as a law, before she sorted out her species
and began regular work upon them; which indeed now admits of
definite proof by the bare fact of “Reversion,” as science puts it.
(SD II 55-56)
6. The Water-men terrible and bad she herself created. From the
remains of others (from the mineral, vegetable and animal remains) from
the first, second and third (Rounds) she formed them. The Dhyani
came and looked. . . . . The Dhyani from the bright Father-Mother,
from the white (Solar-lunar) regions they came, from the abodes of
the Immortal-mortals. (Book II. Stanza II.) (SD II 55)
[The Dhyani are] Gods and planetary spirits, especially the Ribbus.
“The three Ribbus”who yet become “thrice seven in number”of their
gifts. (SD II 55fn]
VIII. NATURE’S OR EARTH’S UNAIDED ATTEMPT
TO CREATE MAN FAILS
79
Thus physical nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal
and man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two and
the lower animal kingdoms, but when it comes to the turn of man,
spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his
creation, besides the “coats of skin” and the “Breath of animal Life.”
The human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher
than purely physical materials to build their personalities with,
under the penalty of remaining even below any “Frankenstein”
animal. (SD II 56)
7. Displeased they were. Our flesh is not there (they said). This is
no fit rupa for our brothers of the fifth. No dwellings for the
lives [Monads]. Pure waters, not turbid, they must drink. Let us
dry them (the waters). (Book II. Stanza II.) (SD II 57)
8. The flames came. The fires with the sparks; the night fires
and the day fires. They dried out the turbid dark waters. With
their heat they quenched them. The Lhas (Spirits) of the high; the
Lhamayin (those) of below, came. They slew the forms, which were
two- and four-faced. They fought the goat-men, and the dogheaded men, and the men with fishes’ bodies. (Book II. Stanza II.)
(SD II 63)
The “Flames” are a Hierarchy of Spirits parallel to, if not identical
with, the “burning” fiery Saraph (Seraphim) mentioned by Isaiah
(vi. 2-6), those who attend, according to Hebrew Theogony, “the Throne
of the Almighty.” Melha is the Lord of the “Flames.” When he appears
on Earth, he assumes the personality of a Buddha, says a popular
legend. He is one of the most ancient and revered Lhas, a Buddhist
St. Michael. (SD II 63)
The word “Below” must not be taken to mean infernal regions, but
simply a spiritual, or rather ethereal, Being of a lower grade, because
nearer to the Earth, or one step higher than our terrestrial sphere;
while the Lhas are Spirits of the highest Spheres – whence the name
of the capital of Tibet, Lha-ssa. (SD II 63)
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9. Mother-water, the great sea wept. She arose, she disappeared in
the Moon, which had lifted her, which had given her birth. (Book
II. Stanza II.)
Now what can this mean? Is it not an evident reference to tidal
action in the early stage of the history of our planet in its fourth
Round? (SD II 64)
10. When they (the [failing] Rupas) were destroyed, Mother-earth
remained bare, she asked to be dried. (Book II. Stanza II.) The time
for its incrustation had arrived. The waters had separated and the
process was started. It was the beginning of a new life. (SD II 65)
[With the beginning of this new life…]
11. The Lord of the Lords came. From her body he separated the
waters, and that was heaven above, the first heaven (the atmosphere,
or the air, the firmament). (Book II. Stanza III.) (SD II 75)
12. The great chohans (Lords), called the Lords of the Moon, of the
airy bodies. “Bring forth men, (they were told), men of your nature.
Give them (i.e., the Jivas or Monads) their forms within. She (Mother
Earth or Nature) will build coverings without (external bodies). (For)
males-female will they be. Lords of the flame, also.” (Book II.
Stanza III.) (SD II 75)
[Note: who are those great Chohans, or the Lords who call their
younger brothers, the Lunar Pitris? It would seem they are the same
as the “failures” mentioned in SD I 188 and SD II 233fn.]
[This brings us to the real genesis of mankind...]
81
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND:
SOME BASIC IDEAS
1. Man is not only a product of material evolution
[because as discussed above, material nature, perhaps meaning the
elemental, mineral, vegetable and lower animal life-waves, alone fails
to create mankind.]
Between man and the animal – whose Monads (or Jivas) are
fundamentally identical – there is the impassable abyss of Mentality
and Self-consciousness. What is human mind in its higher aspect,
whence comes it, if it is not a portion of the essence – and, in some rare
cases of incarnation, the very essence – of a higher Being: one from a
higher and divine plane? Can man – a god in the animal form – be the
product of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal,
which differs from man in external shape, but by no means in the
materials of its physical fabric, and is informed by the same, though
undeveloped, Monad – seeing that the intellectual potentialities of
the two differ as the Sun does from the Glow-worm? And what is it
that creates such difference, unless man is an animal plus a living god
within his physical shell? (SD II 81)
2. There are twelve classes of creators but only seven of them
are the fathers or pitris of man
Occultism divides the “Creators” into twelve classes; of which four
have reached liberation to the end of the “Great Age,” the fifth is ready
to reach it, but still remains active on the intellectual planes, while
seven are still under direct Karmic law. These last act on the manbearing globes of our chain. (SD II 77)
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3. The seven classes are divided into two distinct kinds:
four rupic or corporeal Barhishad and three arupic
or incorporeal Agnishwatta.
Exoteric Hindu books mention seven classes of Pitris, and among them
two distinct kinds of Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and the
Agnishwatta; or those possessed of the “sacred fire” and those devoid
of it. Hindu ritualism seems to connect them with sacrificial fires, and
with Grihasta Brahmins in earlier incarnations: those who have, and
those who have not attended as they should to their household sacred
fires in their previous births. The distinction, as said, is derived from
the Vedas. The first and highest class (esoterically) [is] the Agnishwatta.
(SD II 77)
There are seven classes of Pitris, as shown […], three incorporeal and
four corporeal; and two kinds, the Agnishwatta and the Barhishad.
And we may add that, as there are two kinds of Pitris, so there is a
double and a triple set of Barhishad and Agnishwatta. The former,
having given birth to their astral doubles, are reborn as Sons of
Atri, and are the “Pitris of the Demons,” or corporeal beings, on
the authority of Manu (III., 196); while the Agnishwatta are reborn
as Sons of Marichi (a son of Brahma), and are the Pitris of the Gods
(Manu again, Matsya and Padma Puranas and Kulluka in the Laws of
the Manavas, III., 195). (SD II 89)
The Pitris being divided into seven classes, we have here the mystic
number again. Nearly all the Puranas agree that three of these are
arupa, formless, while four are corporeal; the former being intellectual
and spiritual, the latter material and devoid of intellect. Esoterically,
it is the Asuras who form the first three classes of Pitris – “born in
the body of night” – whereas the other four were produced from the
body of twilight. (SD II 91)
Each class of Creators endows man with what it has to give: the one
builds his external form; the other gives him its essence, which later
on becomes the Human Higher Self owing to the personal exertion of the
individual […] (SD II 95)
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND: SOME BASIC IDEAS
83
Pitris (Sk.). The ancestors, or creators of mankind. They are of seven
classes, three of which are incorporeal, arupa, and four corporeal.
In popular theology they are said to be created from Brahma’s
side. They are variously genealogized, but in esoteric philosophy
they are as given in the Secret Doctrine. In Isis Unveiled it is said
of them: “It is generally believed that the Hindu term means
the spirits of our ancestors, of disembodied people, hence the
argument of some Spiritualists that fakirs (and yogis) and other
Eastern wonder-workers, are mediums. This is in more than one
sense erroneous. The Pitris are not the ancestors of the present living
men, but those of the human kind, or Adamic races; the spirits
of human races, which on the great scale of descending evolution
preceded our races of men, and they were physically, as well as spiritually,
far superior to our modern pigmies. In Manava Dharma Shastra
they are called the Lunar Ancestors.” The Secret Doctrine has now
explained that which was cautiously put forward in the earlier
Theosophical volumes. (TG)
Barhishad (Sk.). A class of the “lunar” Pitris or “Ancestors”, Fathers,
who are believed in popular superstition to have kept up in their past
incarnations the household sacred flame and made fire-offerings.
Esoterically the Pitris who evolved their shadows or chhayas to make
therewith the first man. (See Secret Doctrine, Vol. II.) (TG)
4. The Barhishad have creative physical fire and the Agnishwatta
have creative spiritual fire
[T]he Agnishwatta are represented as devoid of, and the Barhishad
as possessed of, fires […] esoteric philosophy explains the original
qualifications as being due to the difference between the natures
of the two classes: the Agnishwatta Pitris are devoid of fire (i.e., of
creative passion), because too divine and pure (vide supra, Sloka 11th);
whereas the Barhishad, being the lunar spirits more closely connected
with Earth, became the creative Elohim of form, or the Adam of dust.
(SD II 78)
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It thus becomes clear why the Agnishwatta, devoid of the grosser
creative fire, hence unable to create physical man, having no double,
or astral body, to project, since they were without any form, are
shown in exoteric allegories as Yogis, Kumaras (chaste youths),
who became “rebels,” Asuras, fighting and opposing gods, etc., etc.
Yet it is they alone who could complete man, i.e., make of him a
self-conscious, almost a divine being – god on Earth. The Barhishad,
though possessed of creative fire, were devoid of the higher Mahatmic element. Being on a level with the lower principles – those
which precede gross objective matter – they could only give birth
to the outer man, or rather to the model of the physical, the astral
man. Thus, though we see them intrusted with the task by Brahma
(the collective Mahat or Universal Divine Mind), the “Mystery of
Creation” is repeated on Earth, only in an inverted sense, as in a
mirror. It is those who are unable to create the spiritual immortal
man, who project the senseless model (the Astral) of the physical
Being; and, as will be seen, it was those who would not multiply,
who sacrificed themselves to the good and salvation of Spiritual
Humanity. For, to complete the septenary man, to add to his three
lower principles and cement them with the spiritual Monad – which
could never dwell in such a form otherwise than in an absolutely
latent state – two connecting principles are needed: Manas and Kama.
This requires a living Spiritual Fire of the middle principle from the
fifth and third states of Pleroma. But this fire is the possession of the
Triangles, not of the (perfect) Cubes, which symbolize the Angelic
Beings: the former having from the first creation got hold of it and
being said to have appropriated it for themselves, as in the allegory
of Prometheus. These are the active, and therefore – in Heaven –
no longer “pure” Beings. They have become the independent and
free Intelligences, shown in every Theogony as fighting for that
independence and freedom, and hence – in the ordinary sense –
“rebellious to the divine passive law.” (SD II 78-79)
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND: SOME BASIC IDEAS
85
5. The Barhishads are Lunar Pitris and the Agnishwattas
are Solar Pitris
The Progenitors of Man, called in India “Fathers,” Pitara or Pitris, are
the creators of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves,
as the first personalities, and we are they. Primeval man would be “the
bone of their bone and the flesh of their flesh,” if they had body and
flesh. As stated, they were “lunar Beings.” The Endowers of man with
his conscious, immortal ego, are the “Solar Angels” – whether so
regarded metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of the Conscious
ego or human Soul are great. The esoteric name of these “Solar Angels”
is, literally, the “Lords” (Nath) of “persevering ceaseless devotion”
(pranidhana). Therefore they of the fifth principle (Manas) seem to be
connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogis who
make of pranidhana their fifth observance (see Yoga Shastra, II., 32.)
It has already been explained why the trans-Himalayan Occultists
regard them as evidently identical with those who in India are termed
Kumaras, Agnishwattas, and the Barhishads. (SD II 88)
6. Solar Pitris belong to the Fifth and Lunar Pitris belong to the
Sixth hierarchy of Creative Powers
[Note: as already seen above and will be more explained in detail
below, the solar and lunar pitris are the creators of mankind. In the
SD (I 213-222) it is clearly stated that these two classes of Pitris or
“Fathers” belong themselves to certain hierarchies of Creative Powers,
namely the Fifth and the Sixth hierarchy. Although it is tempting
to equate these Seven Great Hierarchies with the seven “creators”,
responsible for mankind, this is not so. The latter only belong to the
Fifth and Sixth hierarchy. Here below is first given a description of
the first four hierarchies, followed by the Fifth and Sixth to which
the two classes of Pitris belong. The seventh Hierarchy seems to be
composed of elementals and terrestrial spirits who are responsible for
the physical make-up of man.]
The hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided into seven (or 4 and 3)
esoteric, within the twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs
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of the Zodiac; the seven of the manifesting scale being connected,
moreover, with the Seven Planets. All this is subdivided into
numberless groups of divine Spiritual, semi-Spiritual, and ethereal
Beings. (SD I 213)
The highest group is composed of the divine Flames, so-called,
also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose
esotericism is securely hidden in the Zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the
nucleole of the superior divine World [...]. They are the formless Fiery
Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad,
which is placed by the Kabalists in the “Archetypal World.” (SD I 213)
The second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Æther
(corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or the Atma-Buddhi) whose names
are legion, are still formless, but more definitely “substantial.” They
are the first differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or “Creation”
– a misleading word. As the name shows, they are the prototypes of
the incarnating Jivas or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit
of Life. It is through these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the ray
which is furnished by them with its future vehicle, the Divine Soul,
Buddhi. These are directly concerned with the Hosts of the higher
world of our system. From these twofold Units emanate the threefold.
(SD I 216)
The Third order corresponds to the Atma-Buddhi-Manas: Spirit, Soul
and Intellect, and is called the “Triads.” (SD I 218)
The Fourth are substantial Entities. This is the highest group among
the Rupas (Atomic Forms). It is the nursery of the human, conscious,
spiritual Souls. They are called the “Imperishable Jivas,” and
constitute, through the order below their own, the first group of
the first septenary host – the great mystery of human conscious and
intellectual Being. For the latter are the field wherein lies concealed
in its privation the germ that will fall into generation. That germ will
become the spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the
development of the embryo, and which is the cause of the hereditary
transmission of faculties and all the inherent qualities in man. The
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND: SOME BASIC IDEAS
87
Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties,
is neither taught nor accepted in Occultism. Evolution, in it, proceeds
on quite other lines; the physical, according to esoteric teaching,
evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This
inner soul of the physical cell – this “spiritual plasm” that dominates
the germinal plasm – is the key that must open one day the gates of
the terra incognita of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of
Embryology. (SD I 218-219)
Explain, or complete the teaching of the seven Suns with the seven
systems of planes of being, of which the “Suns” are the central bodies,
and you have the seven angelic planes, whose “Host” are gods
thereof, collectively. (See Comm. to Stanza VII Book I.) They are the
Head-group divided into four classes from the incorporeal down to the
semi-corporeal, which classes are directly connected – though in very
different ways as regards voluntary connection and functions – with
our mankind. They are three, synthesized by the fourth (the first and
highest), which is called the “Central Sun” in the Kabalistic doctrine
just quoted. This is the great difference between the Semitic and the
Aryan Cosmogony; one materializing, humanizes the mysteries of
nature; the other spiritualizes matter, and its physiology is always
made subservient to metaphysics. Thus, though the seventh principle
reaches man through all the phases of being, pure as an indiscrete
element and an impersonal unity, it passes through (the Kabala
teaches from) the Central Spiritual Sun and Group the second (the
polar Sun), which two radiate on man his Atma. Group Three (the
equatorial Sun) cement the Buddhi to Atman and the higher attributes
of Manas, while group Four (the spirit of our visible sun) endows him
with his Manas and its vehicle – the Kama rupa, or body of passions
and desires, the two elements of Ahamkara which evolve individualized
consciousness – the personal ego. Finally, it is the spirit of the Earth in
its triple unity that builds the physical body, attracting to it the Spirits
of Life and forming his Linga Sarira. (SD II 240-243)
The Fifth group is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with the
Microcosmic Pentagon, the five-pointed star representing man. In
India and Egypt these Dhyanis were connected with the Crocodile,
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and their abode is in Capricornus. These are convertible terms in
Indian astrology, as this (tenth) sign of the Zodiac is called Makara,
loosely translated “crocodile.” The word itself is occultly interpreted
in various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt the defunct
man – whose symbol is the pentagram or the five-pointed star,
the points of which represent the limbs of a man – was shown
emblematically transformed into a crocodile: Sebakh or Sevekh “or
seventh,” as Mr. Gerald Massey says, showing it as having been
the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a crocodile. He is
the “Dragon of Wisdom” or Manas, the “Human Soul,” Mind, the
Intelligent principle, called in our esoteric philosophy the “Fifth”
principle. (SD I 219)
It becomes the task of the fifth Hierarchy – the mysterious beings that
preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or “Crocodile” in
India as in Egypt – to inform the empty and ethereal animal form and
make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which
very little may be said to the general public. It is a mystery, truly, but
only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and
conscious spiritual Beings in the Universe, limiting full Consciousness
to man alone, and that only as a “function of the Brain.” Many are
those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in
man, since the beginning of his appearance, and who, for all that, still
exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.
. . . To put it more clearly: the invisible Entity may be bodily present
on earth without abandoning, however, its status and functions in the
supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better
than remind the reader of like cases in Spiritualism, though such cases
are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating,
or taking temporary possession of a medium. Just as certain persons
– men and women, reverting to parallel cases among living persons
– whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power
of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their “double” in one
place, while the body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur
in the case of superior Beings […] Therefore, that which living men
(Initiates) can do, the Dhyanis, who have no physical body to hamper
them, can do still better. (SD I 233-235)
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89
The sixth and seventh groups partake of the lower qualities of the
Quaternary. They are conscious, ethereal Entities, as invisible as
Ether, which are shot out like the boughs of a tree from the first
central group of the four, and shoot out in their turn numberless side
groups, the lower of which are the Nature-Spirits, or Elementals of
countless kinds and varieties; from the formless and unsubstantial
– the ideal thoughts of their creators – down to the Atomic, though,
to human perception, invisible organisms. The latter are considered
as the “Spirits of Atoms” for they are the first remove (backwards)
from the physical Atom – sentient, if not intelligent creatures. They
are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle.
For, as the doctrine teaches, there are no such privileged beings in
the universe, whether in our or in other systems, in the outer or the
inner worlds, as the angels of the Western Religion and the Judean.
A Dhyan Chohan has to become one; he cannot be born or appear
suddenly on the plane of life as a full-blown angel. The Celestial
Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred in the
next cycle of life into higher, superior worlds, and will make room for
a new hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind. Being
is an endless cycle within the one absolute eternity, wherein move
numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned. Gods, created as such,
would evince no personal merit in being gods. Such a class of beings,
perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in
them, in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of
the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice quite
Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an
impossibility in Nature. Therefore the “Four” and the “Three” have
to incarnate as all other beings have. This sixth group, moreover,
remains almost inseparable from man, who draws from it all but his
highest and lowest principles, or his spirit and body, the five middle
human principles being the very essence of those Dhyanis. Alone, the
Divine Ray (the Atman) proceeds directly from the One. When asked
how that can be? How is it possible to conceive that those “gods,”
or angels, can be at the same time their own emanations and their
personal selves? Is it in the same sense in the material world, where
the son is (in one way) his father, being his blood, the bone of his
bone and the flesh of his flesh? To this the teachers answer “Verily
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it is so.” But one has to go deep into the mystery of being before
one can fully comprehend this truth. (SD I 221-222)
The group of the hierarchy which is commissioned to “create” men
is a special group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this cycle just
as a higher and still more spiritual group evolved him in the Third
Round. But as it is the Sixth – on the downward scale of Spirituality
– the last and seventh being the terrestrial Spirits (elementals) which
gradually form, build, and condense his physical body – this Sixth
group evolves no more than the future man’s shadowy form, a filmy,
hardly visible transparent copy of themselves. (SD I 233)
7. Most of the Agnishwatta incarnated as the Egos of mankind
These are then those “Flames” (the Agnishwatta) who, as shown in
Sloka 13, “remain behind” instead of going along with the others to
create men on Earth. But the true esoteric meaning is that most of
them were destined to incarnate as the Egos of the forthcoming crop of
Mankind. The human Ego is neither Atman nor Buddhi, but the higher
Manas: the intellectual fruition and the efflorescence of the intellectual
self-conscious Egotism – in the higher spiritual sense. The ancient
works refer to it as Karana Sarira on the plane of Sutratma, which is
the golden thread on which, like beads, the various personalities of
this higher Ego are strung. (SD I 179)
8. There seem to be at least four if not seven (and not only three)
classes of arupa angels
The number seven does not imply only seven Entities, but seven
groups or Hosts, as explained before. The highest group, the Asuras
born in Brahma’s first body – which turned into “Night” – are
septenary, i.e., divided like the Pitris into seven classes, three of which
are arupa (bodiless) and four with bodies. (See Vishnu Purana, Book
I.) They [the Asura] are in fact more truly our Pitris (ancestors) than
the [lunar] Pitris who projected the first physical men. (SD I 218fn)
IX. THE PROGENITORS OF MANKIND: SOME BASIC IDEAS
91
It is said by Krishna, the Logos incarnate, in the Bhagavat-gita, “The
seven great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my
nature, were born from my mind: from them sprang (emanated or
was born) the human race and the world,” (Chap. X. Verse 6.) Here,
by the seven great Rishis, the seven great rupa hierarchies or classes
of Dhyan Chohans [lunar pitris], are meant. Let us bear in mind that
the Saptarshi (the seven Rishis) are the regents of the seven stars of
the Great Bear, therefore, of the same nature as the angels of the
planets, or the seven great Planetary Spirits. They were all reborn,
all men on earth in various Kalpas and races. Moreover, “the four
preceding Manus” are the four classes of the originally arupa gods –
the Kumaras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.: who are also said to have
incarnated. They are not the Prajapatis, as the first [the lunar pitris]
are, but their informing principles – some of which have incarnated in
men, while others have made other men simply the vehicles of their
reflections. As Krishna truly says – the same words being repeated
later by another vehicle of the logos – “I am the same to all beings. . . .
those who worship me (the 6th principle or the intellectual divine Soul,
Buddhi, made conscious by its union with the higher faculties of Manas)
are in me, and I am in them.” (Ibid, 29.) The Logos, being no personality
but the universal principle, is represented by all the divine Powers
born of its mind – the pure Flames, or, as they are called in Occultism,
the “Intellectual Breaths” – those angels who are said to have made
themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and quiescent, into
the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is recognised, the
true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr. Subba
Row’s excellent lecture on the Bhagavatgita, (“Theosophist,” April 1887,
p. 444.) (SD II 318fn)
[Note: there seems to be a paradox: generally speaking there are only
three classes of arupa angels (Agnishwatta) mentioned. The foregoing
passage suggests the existence of more classes, at least four. One can
infer that there are 7 different classes of arupa angels, but only the
three lowest groups – within their own hierarchy called rupa, but in
contradistinction with the lunar angels of course arupa – have, under
karmic law, a “creative” function on this earth chain, i.e. endowing
mankind with mind. These three lower classes of arupa angels are to us
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“Solar Pitris”. We may not forget that there are in reality twelve classes
of creators (SD II 77), of which four have reached liberation and the
fifth or eighth (counting upwards) remains active on the intellectual
planes. One may infer that this “fifth class” mentioned in SD II 77 is
the same class as the “fourth” (one class higher than our three solar
pitris: together these are the four “rupa” Solar Angels) mentioned
in SD II 318fn. As we will see later on, other passages suggest that
maybe it is this class which incarnates (as a collective entity) as the
Silent Watcher in the egg-like forms immaculately created through
kryasakti by the Kumaras, after these have incarnated in the Third
Root Race before the separation of the sexes.]
9. The correspondence between the Pitris and the human Heart
Now, with regard to the seven classes of Pitris, each of which is again
divided into seven, a word to students and a query to the profane.
That class of the “Fire Dhyanis,” which we identify on undeniable
grounds with the Agnishwattas, is called in our school the “Heart”
of the Dhyan-Chohanic Body; and it is said to have incarnated in the
third race of men and made them perfect. The esoteric Mystagogy
speaks of the mysterious relation existing between the hebdomadic
essence or substance of this angelic Heart and that of man, whose
every physical organ, and psychic, and spiritual function, is a
reflection, so to say, a copy on the terrestrial plane of the model or
prototype above. Why, it is asked, should there be such a strange
repetition of the number seven in the anatomical structure of man?
Why should the heart have four lower “cavities and three higher
divisions,” answering so strangely to the septenary division of the
human principles, separated into two groups, the higher and the
lower; and why should the same division be found in the various
classes of Pitris, and especially our Fire Dhyanis? For, as already
stated, these Beings fall into four corporeal (or grosser) and three
incorporeal (or subtler) “principles,” or call them by any other name
you please. Why do the seven nervous plexuses of the body radiate
seven rays? Why are there these seven plexuses, and why seven
distinct layers in the human skin? (SD II 91-92)
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OF ASTRAL-PHYSICAL MANKIND
[The physical scheme of evolution]
1. The Lunar Pitris are the most developed lunar monads!
The [first class of] “Lunar Monads” or Pitris, the ancestors of man,
become in reality man himself. They are the “Monads” who enter
on the cycle of evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the
chain of planets, evolve the human form as has just been shown.
At the beginning of the human stage of the Fourth Round on this
Globe, they “ooze out” their astral doubles from the “ape-like” forms
which they had evolved in Round III. And it is this subtle, finer form,
which serves as the model round which Nature builds physical man.
These “Monads” or “divine sparks” are thus the “Lunar” ancestors,
the Pitris themselves. For these “Lunar Spirits” have to become
“Men” in order that their “Monads” may reach a higher plane of
activity and self-consciousness, i.e., the plane of the Manasa-Putras,
those who endow the “senseless” shells, created and informed
by the Pitris, with “mind” in the latter part of the Third Root-Race.
(SD I 180-181)
The most developed Monads (the lunar) [class 1] reach the
human germ-stage in the first Round; become terrestrial, though
very ethereal human beings towards the end of the Third Round,
remaining on it (the globe) through the “obscuration” period as
the seed for future mankind in the Fourth Round, and thus
become the pioneers of Humanity at the beginning of this, the
Fourth Round.
93
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2. The Lunar Pitris evolve the chhayas and thus bring forth the
First Human Root-Race
“The Dhyanis (Pitris) are those who have evolved their bhuta (doubles) from
themselves, which rupa (form) has become the vehicle of monads (seventh
and sixth principles) that had completed their cycle of transmigration in the
three preceding Kalpas (Rounds). Then, they (the astral doubles) became the
men of the first Human Race of the Round. But they were not complete, and
were senseless.” (SD I 183)
12. The great chohans (Lords), called the Lords of the Moon, of the
airy bodies. “Bring forth men, (they were told), men of your nature.
Give them (i.e., the Jivas or Monads) their forms within. She (Mother Earth
or Nature) will build coverings without (external bodies). (For) malesfemale will they be. Lords of the flame, also.” (Book II. Stanza III.)
Who are the Lords of the Moon? In India they are called Pitris or
“lunar ancestors,” but in the Hebrew scrolls it is Jehovah himself who
is the “Lord of the Moon,” collectively as the Host, and also as one of
the Elohim. (SD II 75)
Occult philosophy […] teaches that the first human stock was projected
by higher and semi-divine Beings out of their own essences. (SD II 87)
Subservient to eternal law, the pure gods could only project out
of themselves shadowy men, a little less ethereal and spiritual, less
divine and perfect than themselves – shadows still. The first humanity,
therefore, was a pale copy of its progenitors; too material, even in its
ethereality, to be a hierarchy of gods; too spiritual and pure to be men,
endowed as it is with every negative (Nirguna) perfection. Perfection,
to be fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the incorruptible
must grow out of the corruptible, having the latter as its vehicle and
basis and contrast. (SD II 95)
3. The chhaya-birth takes place on seven portions of the
first continent
13. They (the Moon-gods) went, each on his allotted land: seven
of them, each on his lot. The Lords of the Flame remained
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95
behind. They would not go, they would not create. (Book II.
Stanza III.)
The Secret teachings show the divine [lunar] Progenitors creating
men on seven portions of the globe “each on his lot” – i.e., each a
different race of men externally and internally, and on different
zones. (SD II 77)
14. The Seven Hosts, the “Will (or Mind)-Born” Lords, Propelled
by the Spirit of Life-Giving (Fohat), separate men from themselves,
each in his own zone. (Book II. Stanza IV.)
They threw off their “shadows” or astral bodies – if such an ethereal
being as a “lunar Spirit” may be supposed to rejoice in an astral,
besides a hardly tangible body. In another Commentary it is said that
the “Ancestors” breathed out the first man, as Brahma is explained
to have breathed out the Suras (Gods), when they became “Asuras”
(from Asu, breath). In a third it is said that they, the newly-created
men, “were the shadows of the Shadows.” (SD II 86)
It is the Hosts of the four material [or rupa] classes who create men
simultaneously on the seven zones. (SD II 91)
It is proposed, then, to call the first continent, or rather the first
terra firma on which the first Race was evolved by the divine [lunar]
progenitors:–
I. “The Imperishable Sacred Land.”
The reasons for this name are explained as follows: This “Sacred
Land” – of which more later on – is stated never to have shared
the fate of the other continents; because it is the only one whose
destiny it is to last from the beginning to the end of the Manvantara
throughout each Round. It is the cradle of the first man and the
dwelling of the last divine mortal, chosen as a Sishta for the future
seed of humanity. Of this mysterious and sacred land very little can
be said, except, perhaps, according to a poetical expression in one
of the Commentaries, that the “pole-star has its watchful eye upon
it, from the dawn to the close of the twilight of ‘a day’ of the great
breath.” (SD II 6)
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4. A more detailed explanation of the “chhaya-birth”
With regard to this sentence – “They [the chhayas] were the
shadows of the Shadows” – a few more words may be said and a
fuller explanation attempted. [...] An “Adam” made of the dust of
the ground will always be found preferable, by a certain class of
students, to one projected out of the ethereal body of his creator;
though the former process has never been heard of, while the latter
is familiar, as all know, to many Spiritualists in Europe and America,
who, of all men, ought to understand it. For who of those who have
witnessed the phenomenon of a materialising form oozing out of
the pores of a medium or, at other times, out of his left side, can
fail to credit the possibility, at least, of such a birth? If there are
in the Universe such beings as Angels or Spirits, whose incorporeal
essence may constitute an intelligent entity notwithstanding the
absence of any (to us) solid organism; and if there are those who
believe that a god made the first man out of dust, and breathed
into him a living Soul – and there are millions upon millions who
believe both – what does this doctrine of ours contain that is so
impossible? (SD II 86)
15. Seven times Seven Shadows (chhayas) of Future Men (or
Amanasas) were (thus) Born, each of his own colour (complexion) and
kind. Each (also) inferior to his Father (creator). The Fathers, the
Boneless, could give no Life to Beings with Bones. Their Progeny
were Bhuta (phantoms) with neither Form nor Mind. Therefore they
were called the Chhaya (image or shadow) Race. (Book II. Stanza IV.)
(SD II 90)
16. How are the (real) manushyas born? The manus with minds, how
are they made? The fathers (Barhishad (?) ) call to their help their
own fire (the Kavyavahana, electric fire), which is the fire which burns
in earth. The spirit of the earth called to his help the solar fire
(Suchi, the spirit in the Sun). These three (the Pitris and the two fires)
produced in their joint efforts a good rupa. It (the form) could
stand, walk, run, recline and fly. Yet it was still but a chhaya, a
shadow with no sense. . . . . . (Book II. Stanza IV.) (SD II 102)
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97
It is the four orders or classes of [lunar] Dhyan Chohans out of
the seven, says the Commentary, “who were the progenitors of
the concealed man,” i.e., the subtle inner man. The “Lha” of the
Moon, the lunar spirits, were, as already stated, only the ancestors
of his form, i.e., of the model according to which Nature began
her external work upon him. Thus primitive man was, when he
appeared, only a senseless Bhuta or a “Phantom.” […]
This attempt was again a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of
physical nature’s unaided attempts to construct even a perfect
animal – let alone man. For the “Fathers,” the lower Angels, are
all Nature-Spirits and the higher Elementals also possess an
intelligence of their own; but this is not enough to construct a
thinking man. “Living Fire” was needed, that fire which gives the
human mind its self-perception and self-consciousness, or Manas;
and the progeny of Parvaka and Suchi are the animal electric and
solar fires, which create animals, and could thus furnish but a
physical living constitution to that first astral model of man. The
first creators, then, were the Pygmalions of primeval man: they
failed to animate the statue – intellectually. (SD II 102)
Brahma creates the four orders of beings, termed gods, demons,
progenitors, and MEN” . . . “progenitors” meaning the prototypes and
Evolvers of the first Root Race of men. The progenitors are the [lunar]
Pitris, and are of seven classes. They are said in exoteric mythology to
be born of Brahma’s side, like Eve from the rib of Adam. (SD I 456fn)
Chhaya-birth, or that primeval mode of sexless procreation, the
first Race having oozed out, so to say, from the bodies of the Pitris.
(SD II 174)
If the materialised forms, which are sometimes seen oozing out of
the bodies of certain mediums could, instead of vanishing, be fixed
and made solid – the creation of the first Race would become quite
comprehensible. (SD II 174)
[Bhutas or chhayas] in esoteric teaching […] means elementary
substances, something made of attenuated, noncompound essence,
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and, specifically, the astral double of any man or animal. In this
case these primitive men are the doubles of the first ethereal Dhyanis
or Pitris. (SD II 102fn)
“The Heavenly rupa (Dhyan Chohan) creates (man) in his own form; it is
a spiritual ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of
the universal (manifested) Substance; that form is the ideal shadow of Itself:
and this is the man of the first race.” (SD II 242)
[T]hose Angels who, in the exoteric legends, obeyed the law – they
must be identical with the Barhishad Pitris, or the Pitar-Devata, i.e.,
those possessed of the physical creative fire. They could only create, or
rather clothe, the human Monads with their own astral Selves, but
they could not make man in their image and likeness. “Man must not
be like one of us,” say the creative gods, entrusted with the fabrication
of the lower animal but higher; (see Gen. and Plato’s Timaeus). Their
creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means,
esoterically, that it is they who became the first Race, and thus shared
its destiny and further evolution. They would not, simply because they
could not, give to man that sacred spark which burns and expands into
the flower of human reason and self-consciousness, for they had it not
to give. This was left to that class of Devas who became symbolised
in Greece under the name of Prometheus, to those who had nought
to do with the physical body, yet everything with the purely spiritual
man. (SD II 94-95)
But men, during the first and the second races, were not physical
beings, but merely rudiments of the future men: Bhutas, which
proceeded from Bhutadi, “origin,” or the “original place whence
sprung the Elements.” (SD II 108)
“They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords. They (the shadows)
expanded. The Spirits of the Earth clothed them; the solar Lhas warmed them
(i.e. preserved the vital fire in the nascent physical forms). The Breaths
had life, but had no understanding. They had no fire nor water of their own.”
(SD II 109)
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99
The first race of men were, then, simply the images, the astral doubles,
of their Fathers, who were the pioneers, or the most progressed
Entities from a preceding though lower sphere, the shell of which
is now our Moon. But even this shell is all-potential, for, having
generated the Earth, it is the phantom of the Moon which, attracted by
magnetic affinity, sought to form its first inhabitants, the pre-human
monsters. (SD II 115)
Evolutionary law compelled the lunar “Fathers” to pass, in their
monadic condition, through all the forms of life and being on this
globe; but at the end of the Third Round, they were already human in
their divine nature, and were thus called upon to become the creators
of the forms destined to fashion the tabernacles of the less progressed
Monads, whose turn it was to incarnate. These “Forms” are called
“Sons of Yoga,” because Yoga (union with Brahma exoterically) is the
supreme condition of the passive infinite deity, since it contains all the
divine energies and is the essence of Brahma, who is said (as Brahma)
to create everything through Yoga power. […] Yoga here is the same
as Dhyana, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the Tibetan
text, where the “Sons of Yoga” are called “Sons of Dhyana,” or of that
abstract meditation through which the Dhyani-Buddhas create their
celestial sons, the Dhyani-Bodhisattvas. All the creatures in the world
have each a superior above. “This superior, whose inner pleasure it
is to emanate into them, cannot impart efflux until they have adored” –
i.e., meditated as during Yoga. (SD II 115-116)
Esoteric philosophy, which teaches spontaneous generation – after
the Sishta and Prajapati have thrown the seed of life on the Earth
– shows the lower angels able to construct physical man only, even
with the help of Nature, after having evolved the ethereal form out
of themselves, and leaving the physical form to evolve gradually
from its ethereal, or what would now be called, protoplasmic model.
(SD II 150)
[T]he Dhyan-Chohanic essence, the Chhaya or double of the Pitris,
[…] contains within itself the potentiality of all forms […] it is [this]
Dhyan Chohanic essence – the causality of the primal cause which
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creates physical man – which is the living, active and potential matter,
pregnant per se with that animal consciousness of a superior kind,
such as is found in the ant and the beaver, which produces the long
series of physiological differentiations. (SD II 120)
5. The First Root Race was composed of the astral shadows of
the Lunar Pitris and these chhayas are in their turn absorbed into
the Second Root Race
21. When the race became old, the old waters mixed with the
fresher waters (a); when the drops became turbid, they vanished
and disappeared, in the new stream, in the hot stream of life.
The outer of the first became the inner of the second. (b). The old
wing became the shadow, and the shadow of the wing (c). (Book II.
Stanza V.)
(a) The old (primitive) Race merged in the second race, and became
one with it.
(b) This is the mysterious process of transformation and evolution
of mankind. The material of the first forms – shadowy, ethereal,
and negative – was drawn or absorbed into, and thus became
the complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary
explains this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed
of the astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course
neither astral nor physical bodies of their own – this Race never died.
Its “men” melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies
of their own “sweat-born” progeny, more solid than their own. The
old form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new
form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days
of a period more blissful than the Golden Age; but the first, or parent
material was used for the formation of the new being, to form the
body and even the inner or lower principles or bodies of the progeny.
(c) When the shadow retires, i.e. when the astral body becomes
covered with more solid flesh, man develops a physical body. The
“wing,” or the ethereal form that produced its shadow and image,
became the shadow of the astral body and its own progeny. The
expression is queer but original. (SD II 121)
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101
23. The Self-Born were the Chhayas, the shadows from the bodies
of the sons of twilight. Neither water nor fire could destroy them.
Their sons were (so destroyed). (Book II. Stanza VI.)
This verse cannot be understood without the help of the
Commentaries. It means that the First Root-Race, the “Shadows” of the
Progenitors, could not be injured, or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal
and so little human in constitution, they could not be affected by any
element – flood or fire. But their “Sons,” the Second Root-Race, could be
and were so destroyed. As the “progenitors” merged wholly in their own
astral bodies, which were their progeny; so that progeny was absorbed
in its descendants, the “Sweat-born.” These were the second Humanity
– composed of the most heterogeneous gigantic semi-human monsters –
the first attempts of material nature at building human bodies. (SD II 138)
“First come the SELF-EXISTENT on this Earth. They are the ‘Spiritual
Lives’ projected by the absolute WILL and LAW, at the dawn of every rebirth
of the worlds. These LIVES are the divine ‘Sishta,’ (the seed-Manus, or the
Prajapati and the Pitris).
From these proceed –
1. The First Race, the “Self-born,” which are the (astral) shadows of their
Progenitors. The body was devoid of all understanding (mind, intelligence, and
will). The inner being (the higher self or Monad), though within the earthly
frame, was unconnected with it. The link, the Manas, was not there as yet.
2. From the First (race) emanated the second, called the “Sweat-born”
and the “Boneless.” This is the Second Root-Race, endowed by the preservers
(Rakshasas) and the incarnating gods (Asuras and the Kumaras) with
the first primitive and weak spark (the germ of intelligence) . . And from
these in turn proceeds:–
3. The Third Root-Race, the “Two-fold” (Androgynes). The first Races
hereof are shells, till the last is “inhabited” (i.e., informed) by the Dhyanis.”
(SD II 164-165)
6. What happened with the Lunar Pitris?
[T]he [lunar] “progenitors” merged wholly in their own astral bodies.
(SD II 138)
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Their [the Lunar Pitris] creating the semblance of men out of their
own divine Essence means, esoterically, that it is they who became
the first Race, and thus shared its destiny and further evolution. (SD
II 94-95)
The “Lunar Monads” or Pitris, the ancestors of man, become in
reality man himself. They are the “Monads” who enter on the cycle of
evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the chain of planets,
evolve the human form as has just been shown. At the beginning of
the human stage of the Fourth Round on this Globe, they “ooze out”
their astral doubles from the “ape-like” forms which they had evolved
in Round III. And it is this subtle, finer form, which serves as the
model round which Nature builds physical man. These “Monads” or
“divine sparks” are thus the “Lunar” ancestors, the Pitris themselves.
For these “Lunar Spirits” have to become “Men” in order that their
“Monads” may reach a higher plane of activity and self-consciousness,
i.e., the plane of the Manasa-Putras, those who endow the “senseless”
shells, created and informed by the Pitris, with “mind” in the latter
part of the Third Root-Race. (SD I 180-181)
“Having projected their shadows and made men of one element (ether), the
progenitors re-ascend to Maha-loka, whence they descend periodically, when
the world is renewed, to give birth to new men. The subtle bodies remain
without understanding (Manas) until the advent of the Suras (Gods) now
called Asuras (not Gods).” (SD II 92) [Note: this passage seems to refer
to other progenitors than the Lunar Pitris.]
7. The Lunar Pitris are the formative powers during the first
three and a half Root-Races
Thus, as we shall find, for the first three and a half Root-Races,
up to the middle or turning point, it is the astral shadows of the
“progenitors,” the lunar Pitris, which are the formative powers in
the Races, and which build and gradually force the evolution of the
physical form towards perfection – this, at the cost of a proportionate
loss of spirituality. Then, from the turning point, it is the Higher Ego,
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103
or incarnating principle, the nous or Mind, which reigns over the
animal Ego, and rules it whenever it is not carried down by the latter.
In short, Spirituality is on its ascending arc, and the animal or physical
impedes it from steadily progressing on the path of its evolution only
when the selfishness of the personality has so strongly infected the
real inner man with its lethal virus, that the upward attraction has
lost all its power on the thinking reasonable man. In sober truth,
vice and wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this
period of our human evolution – at least they ought to be so. The
fact that mankind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now,
civilized nations having succeeded in making of the first an ethical
characteristic, of the second an art, is an additional proof of the
exceptional nature of the phenomenon. (SD II 110)
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105
XI. THE SOLAR PITRIS AND THE GRADUAL
AWAKENING OF MANAS
[The intellectual scheme of evolution]
1. The Solar Pitris “refuse” to build physical man: they endow
him with mind
The course of evolution developed the lower principles and produced
at last the form of man with a brain of better and deeper capacity
than that of any other animal. But this man in form was not man in
mind, and needed the fifth principle, the thinking, perceiving one, to
differentiate him from the animal kingdom and to confer the power
of becoming self-conscious. The monad was imprisoned in these
forms, and that monad is composed of Atma and Buddhi; for without
the presence of the monad evolution could not go forward. Going
back for a moment to the time when the races were devoid of mind,
the question arises, “who gave the mind, where did it come from,
and what is it?” It is the link between the Spirit of God above and the
personal below; it was given to the mindless monads by others who
had gone all through this process ages upon ages before in other worlds
and systems of worlds, and it therefore came from other evolutionary
periods which were carried out and completed long before the solar
system had begun. This is the theory, strange and unacceptable today,
but which must be stated if we are to tell the truth about theosophy;
and this is only handing on what others have said before. The manner
in which this light of mind was given to the Mindless Men can be
understood from the illustration of one candle lighting many. Given
one lighted candle and numerous unlighted ones, it follows that from
one light the others may also be set aflame. So in the case of Manas.
It is the candle of flame. The mindless men having four elementary
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principles of Body, Astral Body, Life and Desire, are the unlighted
candles that cannot light themselves. The Sons of Wisdom, who are
the Elder Brothers of every family of men on any globe, have the light,
derived by them from others who reach back, and yet farther back,
in endless procession with no beginning or end. They set fire to the
combined lower principles and the Monad, thus lighting up Manas in
the new men and preparing another great race for final initiation. This
lighting up of the fire of Manas is symbolized in all great religions and
Freemasonry. In the east one priest appears holding a candle lighted
at the altar, and thousands of others light their candles from this one.
The Parsees also have their sacred fire which is lighted from some
other sacred flame. (Ocean 53-54)
17. The breath (human Monad) needed a form; the Fathers gave it.
The breath needed a gross body; the Earth moulded it. The breath
needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it into its form.
The breath needed a mirror of its body (astral shadow); “We gave it
our own,” said the Dhyanis. The breath needed a vehicle of desires (Kama Rupa); “It has it,” said the Drainer of Waters (Suchi, the fire
of passion and animal instinct). The breath needs a mind to embrace
the Universe; “We cannot give that,” said the Fathers. “I never
had it,” said the Spirit of the Earth. “The form would be consumed
were I to give it mine,” said the Great (solar) Fire . . . . (nascent) Man
remained an empty, senseless Bhuta . . . . Thus have the boneless
given life to those who became (later) men with bones in the third
(race). (Book II. Stanza IV.) (SD II 105)
Having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three
Rounds, his physical frame – one adapted to the thermal conditions of
those early periods – was ready to receive the divine Pilgrim at the first
dawn of human life, i.e., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the midpoint of the 3rd Root Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once
united, the two and then the three made one; for though the lower
animals, from the amoeba to man, received their monads, in which
all the higher qualities are potential, all have to remain dormant till
each reaches its human form, before which stage manas (mind) has
no development in them. In the animals every principle is paralysed,
XI. THE SOLAR PITRIS AND THE GRADUAL AWAKENING
OF MANAS
107
and in a foetus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third (the
astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama, which is desire,
instinct) whose intensity and development varies and changes with
the species. ( SD II 254-255)
[B]esides the material which will be needed for its future human
form, the monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that
material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness to
guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by
the homogeneous monad, or by senseless though living matter. The
Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the
two middle principles, which are the sentient life of the irrational
animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the
latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become
separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this
conscious, rational, individual Soul, (Manas) “the principle, or the
intelligence, of the Elohim,” to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit
of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all
this? The Occult doctrine teaches that while the monad is cycling on
downward into matter, these very Elohim – or Pitris, the lower [Solar]
Dhyan-Chohans – are evolving pari passu with it on a higher and more
spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter on their own
plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point,
they will meet the incarnating senseless monad, encased in the lowest
matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union
will produce that terrestrial symbol of the “Heavenly Man” in space
– perfect man. (SD I 247)
These [solar] Dhyan Chohans, as we see, do not pass through the
three kingdoms as do the lower pitris; nor do they incarnate in man
until the Third Root Race. (SD I 188)
[The Solar Pitris are called] Not-gods, for the Brahmins, perhaps, but
the highest Breaths, for the Occultist; since those progenitors (Pitar),
the formless and the intellectual, refuse to build man, but endow him
with mind; the four corporeal classes [or lunar pitris] creating only
his body. (SD II 92)
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Up to the Fourth Round, and even to the later part of the Third Race
in this Round, Man – if the ever-changing forms that clothed the
Monads during the first three Rounds and the first two and a half
races of the present one can be given that misleading name – is, so far,
only an animal intellectually. It is only in the actual midway Round
that he develops in himself entirely the fourth principle as a fit vehicle
for the fifth. But Manas will be relatively fully developed only in the
following Round, when it will have an opportunity of becoming
entirely divine until the end of the Rounds. (SD II 161-162)
We find, in short, that the higher Angels had broken, countless aeons
before, through the “Seven Circles,” and thus robbed them of the
Sacred fire which means in plain words, that they had assimilated
during their past incarnations, in lower as well as in higher worlds, all
the wisdom therefrom – the reflection of Mahat in its various degrees
of intensity. No Entity, whether angelic or human, can reach the state
of Nirvana, or of absolute purity, except through aeons of suffering
and the knowledge of evil as well as of good, as otherwise the latter
remains incomprehensible. (SD II 80-81)
We now come to an important point with regard to the double evolution
of the human race. The Sons of Wisdom, or the spiritual Dhyanis, had
become “intellectual” through their contact with matter, because
they had already reached, during previous cycles of incarnation, that
degree of intellect which enabled them to become independent and
self-conscious entities, on this plane of matter. They were reborn only
by reason of Karmic effects. They entered those who were “ready,” and
became the Arhats, or sages, alluded to above. This needs explanation.
It does not mean that Monads entered forms in which other Monads
already were. They were “Essences,” “Intelligences,” and conscious
spirits; entities seeking to become still more conscious by uniting with
more developed matter. Their essence was too pure to be distinct
from the universal essence; but their “Egos,” or Manas (since they are
called Manasaputra, born of “Mahat,” or Brahma) had to pass through
earthly human experiences to become all-wise, and be able to start on
the returning ascending cycle. The Monads are not discrete principles,
limited or conditioned, but rays from that one universal absolute
XI. THE SOLAR PITRIS AND THE GRADUAL AWAKENING
OF MANAS
109
Principle. The entrance into a dark room through the same aperture
of one ray of sunlight following another will not constitute two rays,
but one ray intensified. (SD II 167)
Therefore, the FLAMES, whose functions are confused in the exoteric
books, and who are called indifferently Prajapati, Pitris, Manus,
Asuras, Rishis, Kumaras, etc. etc., are said to incarnate personally in
the Third Root-Race and thus find themselves “reborn over and over
again.” In the Esoteric doctrine they are generally named the Asuras,
or the Asu-ra Devata or Pitar-devata (gods) for, as said, they were first
Gods – and the highest – before they became “no-gods,” and had from
Spirits of Heaven fallen into Spirits of the Earth. (SD II 247-248)
“[T]he inner man (the conscious Entity) was not.” This “Conscious
Entity” Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is, the
very entire essence and esse of the high Intelligences condemned,
by the undeviating law of Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this
manvantara. (SD II 248)
2. The incarnation process is gradual and differs with the grade
of development of the vehicles and with the status of the
Solar Pitris themselves
24. The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night (issued from the body of
Brahma when it became Night), ready for re-birth, came down. They
saw the (intellectually) vile forms of the first third (still senseless
Race). “We can choose,” said the Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some
entered the Chhayas. Some projected a spark. Some deferred until
the Fourth (Race). From their own essence they filled (intensified)
the Kama (the vehicle of desire). Those who received but a spark
remained destitute of (higher) knowledge. The spark burnt low.
The Third remained mindless. Their Jivas (Monads) were not ready.
These were set apart among the Seven (primitive human species). They
(became the) narrow-headed. The third were ready. In these shall
we dwell, said the Lords of the Flame and of the Dark Wisdom.
(Book II. Stanza VIII.)
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This Stanza contains, in itself, the whole key to the mysteries of
evil, the so-called Fall of the angels, and the many problems that have
puzzled the brains of the philosophers from the time that the memory
of man began. It solves the secret of the subsequent inequalities of
intellectual capacity, of birth or social position, and gives a logical
explanation to the incomprehensible Karmic course throughout the
aeons which followed. (SD II 161)
“The Sons of mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters
falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human
animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life eternal.” . . . . “In the beginning
(in the Second Race) some (of the Lords) only breathed of their essence
into Manushya (men); and some took in man their abode.” This shows that
not all men became incarnations of the “divine Rebels,” but only a few
among them. The remainder had their fifth principle simply quickened
by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference
between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the “sons
of Mahat,” speaking allegorically, skipped the intermediate worlds, in
their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never
have been able to reach upward from this earth, and attain through
self-exertion his ultimate goal. The cyclic pilgrimage would have to be
performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if not
entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this rebellion of
intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure spirit, that we are
what we are – self-conscious, thinking men, with the capabilities and
attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil. Hence the rebels
are our saviours. Let the philosopher ponder well over this, and more
than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by the attractive
force of the contrasts that the two opposites – Spirit and Matter – can be
cemented on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience
and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal the
meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called
“fables.” (SD II 103)
The archaic commentaries explain, as the reader must remember,
that, of the Host of Dhyanis, whose turn it was to incarnate as the
Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless monads – that some
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111
“obeyed” (the law of evolution) immediately when the men of the
Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when
they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious
Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their
inherent Divine purity, created by Kriyasakti the semi-Divine man,
who became the seed on earth for future adepts. Those, on the
other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom (unfettered as
it then was by the bonds of matter), said:– “We can choose . . . we
have wisdom” (See verse 24), and incarnated far later – these had
their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies
(physiologically) inferior to their astral models, because their chhayas
had belonged to progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven classes.
As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who had “deferred” their incarnation
till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with
sin and impurity, they produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result
of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves,
and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for aeons to come,
because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through
their own procrastination. (SD II 228)
[W]hen the “Sons of Wisdom” came to incarnate the first time, some
of them incarnated fully, others projected into the forms only a
spark, while some of the shadows were left over from being filled and
perfected, till the Fourth Race. Those races, then, which “remained
destitute of knowledge,” or those again which were left “mindless,”
remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It
is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred
monsters; and it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans
chose their wives. (SD II 286)
3. Incarnation process had already started in the First and
Second Root Race
[T]here was a time when its language (the Sen-zar) was known to the
Initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the Toltec understood
it as easily as the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, who inherited it, in
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their turn, from the sages of the 3rd Race, the Manushis, who learnt it
direct from the Devas of the 2nd and 1st Races. (SD I xliii)
“The Sons of mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the
Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies
the human animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life eternal.” . . . . “In
the beginning (in the Second Race) some (of the Lords) only breathed of
their essence into Manushya (men); and some took in man their abode.”
(SD II 103)
They [the kumaras] may indeed mark a “special” or extra creation,
since it is they who, by incarnating themselves within the senseless
human shells of the two first Root-races, and a great portion of the
Third Root-race – create, so to speak, a new race: that of thinking, selfconscious and divine men. (SD 457 fn)
4. The Kumaras (Rudras or Maruts) are the highest class
of Solar Pitris
The Kumaras,” explains an esoteric text, “are the Dhyanis, derived
immediately from the supreme Principle, who reappear in the
Vaivasvata Manu period [the Fourth Round], for the progress of
mankind.” The commentator of the Vishnu Purana corroborates it,
by remarking that “these sages live as long as Brahma; and they are
only created by him in the first Kalpa, although their generation is
very commonly and inconsistently introduced in the Varaha, or Padma
Kalpa” (the secondary). Thus, the Kumaras are, exoterically, “the
creation of Rudra or Nilalohita, a form of Siva, by Brahma, and of
certain other mind-born sons of Brahma. But, in the esoteric teaching,
they are the progenitors of the true spiritual SELF in the physical man
– the higher Prajapati, while the Pitris, or lower Prajapati, are no more
than the fathers of the model, or type of his physical form, made “in
their image.” Four (and occasionally five) are mentioned freely in the
exoteric texts, three Kumaras being secret. (Compare what is said of
“The Fallen Angels” in Book II.). The Exoteric four are: Sanat-Kumara,
Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana; and the esoteric three are: Sana,
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OF MANAS
113
Kapila, and Sanat-sujata. Special attention is once more drawn to this
class of Dhyan Chohans, for herein lies the mystery of generation
and heredity hinted at in Book I. (See the four Orders of Angelic Beings;
Comment on Stanza VII.). (SD I 456-457)
They [the kumaras] may indeed mark a “special” or extra creation,
since it is they who, by incarnating themselves within the senseless
human shells of the two first Root-races, and a great portion of the
Third Root-race – create, so to speak, a new race: that of thinking, selfconscious and divine men. “The four Kumaras (are) the mind-born
Sons of Brahma. Some specify seven” (H. Class. Dict.). All these seven
Vaidhatra, the patronymic of the Kumaras, “the Maker’s Sons,” are
mentioned and described in Iswara Krishna’s “Sankhya Karika” with
the Commentary of Gaudapadacharya (Sankaracharya’s Paraguru)
attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumaras, though it
refrains from mentioning by name all the seven Kumaras, but calls
them instead “the seven sons of Brahma,” which they are, as they are
created by Brahma in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka,
Sanandana, Sanatana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchasikha. But these are
again all aliases. (SD I 457fns)
In Esoteric Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumaras, Adityas, Gandharvas,
Asuras, etc.) are the highest Dhyan Chohans or Devas as regards
intellectuality. They are those who, owing to their having acquired
by self-development the five-fold nature – hence the sacredness of
number five – became independent of the pure Arupa devas. This
is a mystery very difficult to realize and understand correctly. For,
we see that those who were “obedient to law” are, equally with the
rebels, doomed to be reborn in every age. Narada, the Rishi, is cursed
by Brahma to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly
reborn. He is a rebel against Brahma, and yet has no worse fate than
the Jayas – the twelve great creative gods produced by Brahma as his
assistants in the functions of creation. For the latter, lost in meditation,
only forgot to create; and for this, they are equally cursed by Brahma
to be born in every manvantara. And still they are termed – together
with the rebels – Chhandajas, or those born of their own will in human
form! (SD II 585)
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There is not an Archangel that could not be traced back to its
prototype in the sacred land of Aryavarta. These “prototypes”
are all connected with the Kumaras who appear on the scene of
action by refusing – as Sanatkumara and Sananda – to “create
progeny.” Yet they are called the “creators” of (thinking) man. […]
Moreover, all of these, as stated in the Vedas, are Chhandaja (willborn) or incarnated (in different Manvantaras) of their own will;
– and they are shown in exoteric literature as existing age after
age; some being “cursed to be re-born,” others, incarnating as a
duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the seven Kumaras who went
to visit Vishnu on the “White Island” (Sveta-dwipa) the island
inhabited by the Maha Yogins – they are connected with Sakadwipa
and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.
(SD II 584)
[T]he Secret Doctrine teaches that the Fire-Devas, the Rudras, and
the Kumaras, the “Virgin-Angels,” (to whom Michael and Gabriel,
the Archangels, both belong), the divine “Rebels” – called by the
all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or “Deprived” –
preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial
existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery (even if unconscious) of
the beings (evolved as shadows out of their Brethren) through the
semi-passive energy of their too spiritual Creators. If “man’s uses
of life should be such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize,
but to humanize Self,” before he can do so, he must be born human
not angelic. Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogis offering
themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity –
created god-like and perfect at first – and to endow him with human
affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their
natural status and, descending on our globe, take up their abode
on it for the whole cycle of the Mahayuga, thus exchanging their
impersonal individualities for individual personalities – the bliss
of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. This voluntary
sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature was Knowledge and Love,
was construed by the exoteric theologies into a statement that shows
“the rebel angels hurled down from heaven into the darkness of
Hell” – our Earth. (SD II 246)
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It does not seem difficult to perceive what is meant by the
Maruts obtaining “four times seven” emancipations in every
“manvantara,” and by those persons who, being reborn in
that character (of the Maruts in their esoteric meaning), “fill
up their places.” The Maruts represent (a) the passions that
storm and rage within every candidate’s breast, when preparing
for an ascetic life – this mystically; (b) the occult potencies
concealed in the manifold aspects of Akasa’s lower principles
– her body, or sthula sarira, representing the terrestrial, lower,
atmosphere of every inhabited globe – this mystically and
sidereally; (c) actual conscious Existences, Beings of a cosmic
and psychic nature.
At the same time “Maruts” is, in occult parlance, one of the
names given to those egos of great Adepts who have passed away,
and who are known also as Nirmanakayas; of those Egos for whom
– since they are beyond illusion – there is no Devachan, and who,
having either voluntarily renounced it for the good of mankind, or
not yet reached Nirvana, remain invisible on earth. Therefore are
the Maruts shown firstly – as the sons of Siva-Rudra – the “Patron
Yogi,” whose “third eye,” mystically, must be acquired by the
ascetic before he becomes an adept; then, in their cosmic character,
as the subordinates of Indra and his opponents – variously. The
“four times seven” emancipations have a reference to the four
Rounds, and the four Races that preceded ours, in each of which
Marut-Jivas (monads) have been re-born, and have obtained final
liberation, if they have only availed themselves of it. Instead of
which, preferring the good of mankind, which would struggle
still more hopelessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery, were
it not for this extraneous help – they are re-born over and over again
“in that character,” and thus “fill up their own places.” Who they
are, “on earth” – every student of Occult science knows. And he
also knows that the Maruts are Rudras, among whom also the
family of Twashtri, a synonym of Visvakarman – the great patron
of the Initiates – is included. This gives us an ample knowledge
of their true nature. (SD II 615)
Kumarabudhi (Sk.). An epithet given to the human “Ego”. (TG 182)
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5. Some Solar Pitris, i.e. the Kumaras, are Nirmanakyas
from other Manvantaras
“Men are made complete only during their third, toward the fourth
cycle (race). They are made ‘gods’ for good and evil, and responsible
only when the two arcs meet (after three and a half Rounds towards
the fifth Race). They are made so by the Nirmanakaya (spiritual or
astral remains) of the Rudra-Kumaras, ‘cursed to be reborn on earth
again; meaning – doomed in their natural turn to reincarnation in
the higher ascending arc of the terrestrial cycle.’ (Commentary IX.)
(SD II 255fn)
Esoteric philosophy […] teaches that one third of the Dhyanis – i.e.,
the three classes of the Arupa Pitris, endowed with intelligence,
“which is a formless breath, composed of intellectual not elementary
substances” (see Harivamsa, 932) – was simply doomed by the law of
Karma and evolution to be reborn (or incarnated) on Earth. Some of
these were Nirmanakayas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see
them, in all the Puranas, reappearing on this globe, in the third
Manvantara, as Kings, Rishis and heroes (read Third Root-Race). This
tenet, being too philosophical and metaphysical to be grasped by the
multitudes, was, as already stated, disfigured by the priesthood for
the purpose of preserving a hold over them through superstitious
fear. (SD II 93-94)
The supposed “rebels,” then, were simply those who, compelled
by Karmic law to drink the cup of gall to its last bitter drop, had to
incarnate anew, and thus make responsible thinking entities of the
astral statues projected by their inferior brethren. Some are said to
have refused, because they had not in them the requisite materials –
i.e., an astral body – since they were arupa. The refusal of others had
reference to their having been Adepts and Yogis of long past preceding
Manvantaras; another mystery. But, later on, as Nirmanakayas, they
sacrificed themselves for the good and salvation of the Monads which
were waiting for their turn, and which otherwise would have had
to linger for countless ages in irresponsible, animal-like, though in
appearance human, forms. (SD II 94)
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“When the Third [Root Race] separated and fell into sin by breeding menanimals, these (the animals) became ferocious, and men and they mutually
destructive. Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. After (the separation)
the Satya (Yuga) was at an end. The eternal spring became constant change
and seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing.
Then man appealed to the superior Fathers (the higher gods or angels).
The Nirmanakaya of the Nagas, the wise Serpents and Dragons of Light
came, and the precursors of the Enlightened (Buddhas). Divine Kings
descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer in
the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first Races), which had turned
into a white frozen corpse.” (SD II 201)
6. Some Solar Pitris were returing Nirvanees (Pratyeka Buddhas?)
If the reader were told, as in the semi-esoteric allegories, that these
Beings were returning Nirvanees, from preceding Maha-Manvantaras –
ages of incalculable duration which have rolled away in the Eternity,
a still more incalculable time ago – he would hardly understand the
text correctly; while some Vedantins might say: “This is not so; the
Nirvanee can never return”; which is true during the Manvantara
he belongs to, and erroneous where Eternity is concerned. For it is
said in the Sacred Slokas: “The thread of radiance which is imperishable
and dissolves only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the
day when the Great Law calls all things back into action. . . .” Hence, as
the higher “Pitris or Dhyanis” had no hand in his physical creation,
we find primeval man, issued from the bodies of his spiritually fireless
progenitors, described as aeriform, devoid of compactness, and
Mindless. He had no middle principle to serve him as a medium
between the highest and the lowest, the spiritual man and the physical
brain, for he lacked Manas. The Monads which incarnated in those
empty Shells, remained as unconscious as when separated from their
previous incomplete forms and vehicles. There is no potentiality for
creation, or self-Consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless
its too homogeneous, perfect, because divine, nature is, so to say,
mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It
is only the lower line of the Triangle – representing the first triad that
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emanates from the Universal Monad – that can furnish this needed
consciousness on the plane of differentiated Nature. (SD II 78-80)
There is an eternal cyclic law of re-births, and the series is headed at
every new Manvantaric dawn by those who had enjoyed their rest
from re-incarnations in previous Kalpas for incalculable Æons – by
the highest and the earliest Nirvanees. It was the turn of those “Gods”
to incarnate in the present Manvantara […] (SD II 232)
7. Some Solar Pitris were “Failures”
We have a passage from a Master’s letter which has a direct bearing
upon these incarnating angels. Says the letter: “Now there are, and
there must be, failures in the ethereal races of the many classes of
Dhyan-Chohans, or Devas (progressed entities of a previous planetary
period), as well as among men. But still, as the failures are too far
progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from DhyanChohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through
the lower Kingdoms, this then happens. Where a new solar system
has to be evolved these Dhyan-Chohans are borne in by influx ‘ahead’
of the Elementals (Entities . . . to be developed into humanity at a
future time) and remain as a latent or inactive spiritual force, in the
aura of a nascent world . . . until the stage of human evolution is
reached. . . . Then they become an active force and commingle with the
Elementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity.” That is to
say, to develop in, and endow man with his Self-conscious mind, or
Manas. (SD II 232fn + SD I 188)
8. Differences in men
It is not in the course of natural law that man should become a perfect
septenary being, before the seventh race in the seventh Round. Yet
he has all these principles latent in him from his birth. Nor is it part
of the evolutionary law that the Fifth principle (Manas), should
receive its complete development before the Fifth Round. All such
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prematurely developed intellects (on the spiritual plane) in our Race
are abnormal; they are those whom we call the “Fifth-Rounders.” Even
in the coming seventh Race, at the close of this Fourth Round, while
our four lower principles will be fully developed, that of Manas will
be only proportionately so. This limitation, however, refers solely to
the spiritual development. The intellectual, on the physical plane,
was reached during the Fourth Root-Race. Thus, those who were
“half ready,” who received “but a spark,” constitute the average
humanity which has to acquire its intellectuality during the present
Manvantaric evolution, after which they will be ready in the next for
the full reception of the “Sons of Wisdom.” (SD II 167-168)
Strictly speaking, esoteric philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis.
For, while it assigns to humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its
forefathers or “Creators” were all divine beings – though of different
classes or degrees of perfection in their hierarchy – men were
nevertheless born on seven different centres of the continent of that
period. Though all of one common origin, yet for reasons given their
potentialities and mental capabilities, outward or physical forms, and
future characteristics, were very different […] Some superior, others
inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reincarnating Monads which
could not be all of the same degree of purity in their last births in
other worlds. (SD II 249 + fn)
While incarnating, and in other cases only informing the human
vehicles evolved by the first brainless (manasless) race, the incarnating
Powers and Principles had to make their choice between, and take
into account, the past Karmas of the Monads, between which and
their bodies they had to become the connecting link. Besides which,
as correctly stated in “Esoteric Buddhism” (p. 30), “the fifth principle,
or human (intellectual) soul, in the majority of mankind is not even
yet fully developed.” (SD II 318 +fn)
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9. The sons of Kriyasakti and the descent of The Great Sacrifice
(The Silent Watcher)
26. When the Sweat-born produced the Egg-born, the Two-fold
(androgyne Third Race), the Mighty, the Powerful with Bones, the
Lords of Wisdom said: “Now we shall create” (a). (Book II. Stanza
VII.) (SD II 172)
27. (Then) The Third (race) became the vahan (vehicle) of the Lords
of Wisdom. It created Sons of “Will and Yoga,” by Kriyasakti (b),
it created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats. . . .
(Book II. Stanza VII.) (SD II 172).
(a) How did they create, since the “Lords of Wisdom” are identical
with the Hindu Devas, who refuse “to create”? Clearly they are the
Kumaras of the Hindu Pantheon and Puranas, those elder sons of
Brahma, “Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas,” who, previously
created by him “without desire or passion, remained chaste, full of
holy wisdom and undesirous of progeny?” The power, by which they
first created, is just that which has since caused them to be degraded
from their high status to the position of evil spirits, of Satan and his
Host, created in their turn by the unclean fancy of exoteric creeds.
It was by Kriyasakti, that mysterious and divine power latent in the
will of every man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and
developed by Yogi-training, remains dormant in 999,999 men out of
a million, and gets atrophied. This power is explained in the “Twelve
Signs of the Zodiac,”as follows:–
(b) “Kriyasakti – the mysterious power of thought which enables it
to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own
inherent energy. The ancients held that any idea will manifest itself
externally, if one’s attention (and Will) is deeply concentrated upon it;
similarly, an intense volition will be followed by the desired result.
A Yogi generally performs his wonders by means of Itchasakti (Willpower) and Kriyasakti.” (SD II 172-173)
The Third Race had thus created the so-called Sons of Will and Yoga,
or the “ancestors” (the spiritual forefathers) of all the subsequent and
present Arhats, or Mahatmas, in a truly immaculate way. They were
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indeed created, not begotten, as were their brethren of the Fourth Race,
who were generated sexually after the separation of sexes, the Fall
of Man. For creation is but the result of will acting on phenomenal
matter, the calling forth out of it the primordial divine Light and
eternal Life. They were the “holy seed-grain” of the future Saviours of
Humanity. (SD II 173)
The Arhats of the “fire-mist” of the 7th rung are but one remove
from the Root-Base of their Hierarchy – the highest on Earth, and
our Terrestrial chain. This “Root-Base” has a name which can only
be translated by several compound words into English” – “the everliving-human-Banyan.” This “Wondrous Being” descended from a
“high region,” they say, in the early part of the Third Age, before the
separation of the sexes of the Third Race. This Third Race is sometimes
called collectively “the Sons of Passive Yoga,” i.e., it was produced
unconsciously by the second Race, which, as it was intellectually
inactive, is supposed to have been constantly plunged in a kind of
blank or abstract contemplation, as required by the conditions of the
Yoga state. In the first or earlier portion of the existence of this third
race, while it was yet in its state of purity, the “Sons of Wisdom,” who,
as will be seen, incarnated in this Third Race, produced by Kriyasakti
a progeny called the “Sons of Ad” or “of the Fire-Mist,” the “Sons of
Will and Yoga,” etc. They were a conscious production, as a portion
of the race was already animated with the divine spark of spiritual,
superior intelligence. It was not a Race, this progeny. It was at first
a wondrous Being, called the “Initiator,” and after him a group of
semi-divine and semi-human beings. “Set apart” in Archaic genesis for
certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated
the highest Dhyanis, “Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras”
– to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during
the present cycle. These “Sons of Will and Yoga” born, so to speak, in
an immaculate way, remained, it is explained, entirely apart from the
rest of mankind. The “Being” just referred to, which has to remain
nameless, is the Tree from which, in subsequent ages, all the great
historically known Sages and Hierophants, such as the Rishi Kapila,
Hermes, Enoch, Orpheus, etc., etc., have branched off. As objective
man, he is the mysterious (to the profane – the ever invisible) yet ever
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present Personage about whom legends are rife in the East, especially
among the Occultists and the students of the Sacred Science. It is
he who changes form, yet remains ever the same. And it is he again
who holds spiritual sway over the initiated Adepts throughout the
whole world. He is, as said, the “Nameless One” who has so many
names, and yet whose names and whose very nature are unknown.
He is the “Initiator,” called the “great sacrifice.” For, sitting at the
threshold of light, he looks into it from within the circle of Darkness,
which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last day of
this life-cycle. Why does the solitary Watcher remain at his selfchosen post? Why does he sit by the fountain of primeval Wisdom,
of which he drinks no longer, as he has naught to learn which he
does not know – aye, neither on this Earth, nor in its heaven? Because
the lonely, sore-footed pilgrims on their way back to their home are
never sure to the last moment of not losing their way in this limitless
desert of illusion and matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain
show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he
is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in
liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in
short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, though but
a few Elect may profit by the great sacrifice. It is under the direct,
silent guidance of this Maha – (great) – Guru that all the other less
divine Teachers and instructors of mankind became, from the first
awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity.
It is through these “Sons of God” that infant humanity got its first
notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge;
and it is they who have laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient
civilizations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students
and scholars. (SD I 207-208)
When, moved by the law of Evolution, the Lords of Wisdom infused
into him [man] the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to
life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual
creators. As the child’s first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the
first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man
were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet
were outside, and independent of him. Devotion arose out of that
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feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for
it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us,
and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.
This feeling of irrepressible, instinctive aspiration in primitive man
is beautifully, and one may say intuitionally, described by Carlyle.
“The great antique heart,” he exclaims, “how like a child’s in its
simplicity, like a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth! heaven
lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making
all the earth a mystic temple to him, the earth’s business all a kind of
worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight;
angels yet hover, doing God’s messages among men . . . . . Wonder,
miracle, encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle . .
. . A great law of duty, high as these two infinitudes (heaven and
hell), dwarfing all else, annihilating all else – it was a reality, and it
is one: the garment only of it is dead; the essence of it lives through
all times and all eternity!” It lives undeniably, and has settled in all
its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Aryan heart from
the Third Race direct through its first “mind-born” sons, – the fruits
of Kriyasakti. As time rolled on the holy caste of Initiates produced
but rarely, and from age to age, such perfect creatures: beings apart,
inwardly, though the same as those who produced them, outwardly.
While in the infancy of the third primitive race:–
“A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and therefore was designed;
Conscious of thought,of more capacious breast
For empire formed and fit to rule the rest. . . . .“
It was called into being, a ready and perfect vehicle for the incarnating
denizens of higher spheres, who took forthwith their abodes in these
forms born of Spiritual WILL and the natural divine power in man.
It was a child of pure Spirit, mentally unalloyed with any tincture
of earthly element. Its physical frame alone was of time and of life,
as it drew its intelligence direct from above. It was the living tree of
divine wisdom; and may therefore be likened to the Mundane Tree
of the Norse Legend, which cannot wither and die until the last battle
of life shall be fought, while its roots are gnawed all the time by the
dragon Nidhogg; for even so, the first and holy Son of Kriyasakti had
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his body gnawed by the tooth of time, but the roots of his inner being
remained for ever undecaying and strong, because they grew and
expanded in heaven not on earth. He was the first of the First, and he
was the seed of all the others. There were other “Sons of Kriyasakti”
produced by a second Spiritual effort, but the first one has remained
to this day the Seed of divine Knowledge, the One and the Supreme
among the terrestrial “Sons of Wisdom.” (SD II 210-211)
In the Secret Doctrine, the first Nagas – beings wiser than Serpents –
are the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” born before the complete separation
of the sexes, “matured in the man-bearing eggs produced by the
power (Kriyasakti) of the holy sages” of the early Third Race. “. . . . . In
these were incarnated the Lords of the three (upper) worlds, the
various classes of Rudras, who had been Tushitas, who had been Jayas,
who are Adityas;” for, as explained by Parasara, “There are a hundred
appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras.” (SD II 181-182)
The legend given in Isis in relation to a portion of the globe which
science now concedes to have been the cradle of humanity – though
it is but one of the seven cradles, in truth – ran, condensed, and now
explained, as follows:–
“Tradition says, and the records of the Great Book (the Book of
Dzyan) explain, that long before the days of Ad-am, and his inquisitive
wife, He-va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren
deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia,
north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western prolongation.
An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the world,
was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours.”
“The last remnant” meant the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” who, with a
few tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it is the Third Race which
inhabited the great Lemurian continent, that preceded the veritable
and complete human races – the fourth and the fifth. Therefore it was
said in Isis that –
“This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it
had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the ‘Sons of
God’; not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real Elohim,
though in the oriental Kabala they have another name. It was they
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who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men, and revealed to
them the ineffable, and now lost ‘word.’ ”
The “Island,” according to belief, exists to the present hour; now, as
an oasis surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Desert,
the Gobi – whose sands “no foot hath crossed in the memory of man.”
“This word, which is no word, has travelled once around the
globe, and still lingers as a far-off dying echo in the hearts of some
privileged men. The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges were
aware of the existence of this island; but the ‘word’ was known only
to the Java Aleim (Maha Chohan in another tongue), or chief lord of
every college, and was passed to his successor only at the moment
of death. There were many such colleges, and the old classic authors
speak of them.
“There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but
subterranean passages, known only to the chiefs, communicated with
it in all directions.” (SD II 220)
Not being in a position to give out a full and detailed history of the
Third and Fourth Races, as many isolated facts concerning them as are
permitted must be now collated together; especially those corroborated
by direct as well as by inferential evidence found in ancient literature
and history. As the “coats of skin” of men thickened, and they fell
more and more into physical sin, the intercourse between physical
and ethereal divine man was stopped. The veil of matter between the
two planes became too dense for even the inner man to penetrate.
The mysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by
their celestial teachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus
of light, the rays from which became necessarily weakened as they
were diffused and shed upon an uncongenial, because too material
soil. With the masses they degenerated into Sorcery, taking later on
the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full of superstitions, and
man-, or hero-worship. Alone a handful of primitive men – in whom
the spark of divine Wisdom burnt bright, and only strengthened in
its intensity as it got dimmer and dimmer with every age in those
who turned it to bad purposes – remained the elect custodians of the
Mysteries revealed to mankind by the divine Teachers. There were
those among them, who remained in their Kumaric condition from the
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beginning; and tradition whispers, what the secret teachings affirm,
namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which never died
since that period:–
“The inner man of the first * * * only changes his body from time to time;
he is ever the same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvana, spurning Devachan
and remaining constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind. . . . . .”
“Out of the seven virgin-men (Kumara) four sacrificed themselves for the
sins of the world and the instruction of the ignorant, to remain till the end of
the present Manvantara. Though unseen, they are ever present. When people
say of one of them, “He is dead”; behold, he is alive and under another form.
These are the Head, the Heart, the Soul, and the Seed of undying knowledge
(Gnyana). Thou shalt never speak, O Lanoo, of these great ones (Maha . . .)
before a multitude, mentioning them by their names. The wise alone will
understand.” . . . (Catechism of the inner Schools.)
It is these sacred “Four” who have been allegorized and symbolized
in the “Linga Purana,” which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as Kumara is
reborn in each Kalpa (Race in this instance), as four youths – four, white;
four, red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that
Siva is pre-eminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogis and
Adepts, and the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the
spirit of Divine Wisdom and chaste asceticism itself which incarnates
in these Elect. It is only after getting married and being dragged by the
gods from his terrible ascetic life, that Rudra becomes Siva, a god, and
not one of a very virtuous or merciful type, in the Hindu Pantheon.
Higher than the “Four” [kumaras] is only One on Earth as in Heavens
– that still more mysterious and solitary Being described in Book I.
(SD II 281-282)
It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root
Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another,
to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion; as it is the
Disciples of the Initiates of the 4th, the Atlanteans, who handed it over
to their Cyclopes, the “Sons of Cycles” or of the “Infinite,” from whom
the name passed to the still later generations of Gnostic priests. (SD
I 208fn)
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10. The abuse of the creative powers
Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete: that of disposing of that
most pernicious of all the theological dogmas – the curse under
which mankind is alleged to have suffered ever since the supposed
disobedience of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden.
Creative powers in man were the gift of divine wisdom, not the
result of sin. This is clearly instanced in the paradoxical behaviour
of Jehovah, who first curses Adam and Eve (or Humanity) for the
supposed committed crime, and then blesses his “chosen people”
by saying “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Gen.
ix. 1). The curse was not brought on mankind by the Fourth Race,
for the comparatively sinless Third Race, the still more gigantic
Antediluvians, had perished in the same way; hence the Deluge was
no punishment, but simply a result of a periodical and geological
law. Nor was the curse of Karma called down upon them for seeking
natural union, as all the mindless animal-world does in its proper
seasons; but, for abusing the creative power, for desecrating the
divine gift, and wasting the life-essence for no purpose except bestial
personal gratification. When understood, the third chapter of Genesis
will be found to refer to the Adam and Eve of the closing Third and
the commencing Fourth Races. In the beginning, conception was as
easy for woman as it was for all animal creation. Nature had never
intended that woman should bring forth her young ones “in sorrow.”
Since that period, however, during the evolution of the Fourth Race,
there came enmity between its seed, and the “Serpent’s” seed, the
seed or product of Karma and divine wisdom. For the seed of woman
or lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge,
by turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification;
hence the law of Karma “bruised the heel” of the Atlantean race,
by gradually changing physiologically, morally, physically, and
mentally, the whole nature of the Fourth Race of mankind,* until,
from the healthy King of animal creation of the Third Race, man
became in the Fifth, our race, a helpless, scrofulous being, and has
now become the wealthiest heir on the globe to constitutional and
hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of
all animals!
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This is the real curse from the physiological standpoint, almost the
only one touched upon in the Kabalistic esotericism. Viewed from
this aspect, the curse is undeniable, for it is evident. The intellectual
evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand with the physical, has
certainly been a curse instead of a blessing – a gift quickened by
the “Lords of Wisdom,” who have poured on the human manas the
fresh dew of their own spirit and essence. The divine Titan has then
suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction
to mankind, and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by
Æschylus, in his “Prometheus Bound,” when, at the close of the first
Titanic age (the age that followed that of ethereal man, of the pious
Kandu and Pramlocha), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless
and (physiologically) senseless, is described as – “Seeing, they saw in
vain; Hearing, they heard not; but like shapes in dreams, Through the
long time all things at random mixed.” (SD II 411)
Our Saviours, the Agnishwatta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of
Wisdom” (personified by the Greeks in Prometheus), may well, in the
injustice of the human heart, be left unrecognized and unthanked […]
But, with the arts, the fire received has turned into the greatest curse:
the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed
periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.*
*The animal world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its seasons
of procreation, and the sexes become neutralized during the rest of the
year. Therefore, the free animal knows sickness but once in its life –
before it dies.
It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall.
Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which
represent humanity in its darkest aspect; “the restless insatiability of
the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence,
they bid defiance to the restraints of law.” (SD II 412 + fn)
In its final revelation, the old myth of Prometheus – his proto- and antitypes being found in every ancient theogony – stands in each of them
at the very origin of physical evil, because at the threshold of human
physical life. Kronos is “Time,” whose first law is that the order of the
successive and harmonious phases in the process of evolution during
XI. THE SOLAR PITRIS AND THE GRADUAL AWAKENING
OF MANAS
129
cyclic development should be strictly preserved – under the severe
penalty of abnormal growth with all its ensuing results. It was not
in the programme of natural development that man – higher animal
though he may be – should become at once – intellectually, spiritually,
and psychically – the demi-god he is on earth, while his physical
frame remains weaker and more helpless and ephemeral than that of
almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent;
the tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling god. The gift of
Prometheus thus became a curse – though foreknown and foreseen by
the host personified in that personage, as his name well shows. It is in
this that rests, at one and the same time, its sin and its redemption. For
the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led to it by
Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual
self-conscious pain and even torture “while myriad time shall flow” –
to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation
was premature and not in the programme of nature, the heavenly
host, “Prometheus,” still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least,
one portion of mankind.But while saving man from mental darkness,
they inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his
responsibility – the result of his free will – besides every ill to which
mortal man and flesh are heir to. This torture Prometheus accepted
for himself, since the Host became henceforward blended with the
tabernacle prepared for them, which was still unachieved at that
period of formation. (SD II 420-421)
Spiritual evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical,
once its homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became
the chief cause, if not the sole origin of Evil. The allegory which shows
Kronos cursing Zeus for dethroning him (in the primitive “golden”
age of Saturn, when all men were demi-gods), and for creating a
physical race of men weak and helpless in comparison; and then as
delivering to his (Zeus’) revenge the culprit, who despoiled the gods
of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man to their
level, intellectually and spiritually – is highly philosophical. In the case
of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the primeval progenitors,
of the pitar, the “Fathers” who created man senseless and without
any mind; while the divine Titan stands for the Spiritual creators, the
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devas who “fell” into generation. The former are spiritually lower, but
physically stronger, than the “Prometheans”: therefore, the latter are
shown conquered. “The lower Host, whose work the Titan spoiled
and thus defeated the plans of Zeus,” was on this earth in its own
sphere and plane of action; whereas, the superior Host was an exile
from Heaven, who had got entangled in the meshes of matter. They
(the inferior “Host”) were masters of all the Cosmic and lower titanic
forces; the higher Titan possessed only the intellectual and spiritual
fire. This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic
tyrant and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our
actual mankind: the lower passions chain the higher aspirations to
the rock of matter, to generate in many a case the vulture of sorrow,
pain, and repentance. (SD II 421-422)
**********