The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

Ἡ ἐμὴ διδαχὴ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμή, ἀλλὰ τοῦ πέμψαντός με.

My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.

JOHN vii. 16.

Modern Science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human reason and the Secret Doctrine, and the idea is corroborated by the ancient legends and myths, and even by the Bible itself, when it is read between the lines. We see a flower slowly developing from a bud, and the bud from its seed. But whence the latter, with all its predetermined programme of physical transformation, and its invisible, therefore spiritual, forces which gradually develop its form, colour, and odour? The word evolution speaks for itself. The germ of the present human race must have preëxisted in the parent of this race, as the seed, in which lies hidden the flower of next summer, was developed in the capsule of its parent flower; the parent may be but slightly different, but it still differs from its future progeny. The antediluvian ancestors of the present elephant and lizard were, perhaps, the mammoth and the plesiosaurus; why should not the progenitors of our human race have been the “giants” of the Vedas, the Voluspa, and the Book of Genesis? While it is positively absurd to believe the “transformation of species” to have taken place according to some of the more materialistic views of the Evolutionists, it is but natural to think that each genus, beginning with the molluscs and ending with monkey‐man, has modified from its own primordial and distinctive form.—ISIS UNVEILED, I. 152‐3.

PRELIMINARY NOTES ON THE ARCHAIC STANZAS, AND THE FOUR PRE‐HISTORIC CONTINENTS.

Facies totius universi, quamvis infinitis modis variet, Manet tamen semper eadem.—SPINOZA.

The Stanzas, with the Commentaries thereon, in this Volume, are drawn from the same Archaic Records as the Stanzas on Cosmogony in Volume I. As far as possible a verbatim translation is given: but some of the Stanzas are too obscure to be understood without explanation, and therefore, as in Volume I, they are first given in full as they stand, and then, when taken verse by verse with their Commentaries, an attempt is made to make them clearer, by words added in foot‐notes, in anticipation of the fuller explanation of the Commentary.

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.(1)

The Secret Doctrine is not alone in speaking of primeval Men born simultaneously on the seven divisions of our Globe. In the Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, we find the same seven primeval Men(2) evolving from Nature and the Heavenly Man, in the collective sense of the word, namely, from the Creative Spirits; and in the fragments of Chaldæan tablets, collected by George Smith, on which is inscribed the Babylonian Legend of Creation, in the first column of the Cutha tablet, seven human Beings “with the faces of ravens,” that is to say, of black swarthy complexions, whom “the [seven] Great Gods created,” are mentioned. Or, as explained in lines 16, 17 and 18:

In the midst of the earth they grew up and became great, And increased in number, Seven kings, brothers of the same family.(3)

These are the seven Kings of Edom to whom reference is made in the Kabalah; the First Race, which was imperfect, that is to say, was born before the “balance” (sexes) existed, and which was therefore destroyed.(4)

Seven Kings, brethren, appeared and begat children, 6,000 in number were their peoples. The God Nergas [death] destroyed them. “How did he destroy them?” By bringing into equilibrium [or balance] those who did not yet exist.(5)

They were “destroyed,” as a Race, by being merged in their own progeny (by exudation): that is to say, the sexless Race reïncarnated in the (potentially) bisexual; the latter, in the androgynes; these again, in the sexual, the later Third Race. Were the tablets less mutilated, they would be found to contain word for word the same account as is given in the Archaic Records and in Hermes, at least as regards the fundamental facts, if not as regards minute details; for Hermes is a good deal disfigured by mistranslations.

It is quite certain that the seeming supernaturalism of these teachings, although allegorical, is so diametrically opposed to the dead‐letter statements of the Bible,(6) as well as to the latest hypotheses of Science, that it will evoke passionate denial. The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty. Besides, we have the Egyptian Books of Thoth, and Book of the Dead, and the Hindû Purânas with their seven Manus, as well as the Chaldæo‐ Assyrian accounts, whose tiles mention seven primitive Men, or Adams, the real meaning of which name may be ascertained by means of the Kabalah. Those who know anything of the Samothracian Mysteries will also remember that the generic name of the Kabiri was the “Holy Fires,” which created on seven localities of the island of Electria, or Samothrace, the “Kabir born of the Holy Lemnos”—the island sacred to Vulcan.

According to Pindar, this Kabir, whose name was Adamas,(7) was, in the traditions of Lemnos, the type of the primitive man born from the bosom of the Earth. He was the archetype of the first males in the order of generation, and was one of the seven autochthonous ancestors or progenitors of mankind.(8) If, coupling with this the fact that Samothrace was colonized by the Phœnicians, and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, we also remember the identity of the “Mystery” Gods of the Phœnicians, Chaldæans, and Israelites, it will be easy to discover whence came also the confused account of the Noachian Deluge. It has become undeniable of late that the Jews, who obtained their primitive ideas about creation from Moses, who had them from the Egyptians, compiled their Genesis and first cosmogonic traditions, when rewritten by Ezra and others, from the Chaldæo‐Akkadian account. It is, therefore, sufficient to examine the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform and other inscriptions to find also therein, scattered here and there, not only the original meaning of the name Adam, Admi, or Adami, but also the creation of seven Adams or roots of Men, born of Mother Earth, physically, and of the Divine Fire of the Progenitors, spiritually or astrally. The Assyriologists, ignorant of the Esoteric teachings, could hardly be expected to pay any greater attention to the mysterious and ever‐recurring number seven on the Babylonian cylinders, than they pay to it on finding it in Genesis and the rest of the Bible. Yet the numbers of the ancestral spirits and their seven groups of human progeny are on the cylinders, notwithstanding the dilapidated condition of the fragments, and are to be found as plainly, as they are in Pymander and in the Book of the Concealed Mystery of the Kabalah. In the latter Adam Kadmon is the Sephirothal Tree, as also the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” And that Tree, says verse 32, “hath around it seven columns,” or palaces, of the seven creative Angels operating in the Spheres of the seven Planets on our Globe. As Adam Kadmon is a collective name, so also is the name of the man Adam. Says George Smith, in his Chaldean Account of Genesis:

The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is evidently not a proper name, but is only used as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in Genesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the Assyrian word.(9)

Moreover, neither the Chaldæan nor the Biblical Deluge, with their stories of Xisuthrus and Noah, is based on the universal or even on the Atlantean Deluges, recorded in the Indian allegory of Vaivasvata Manu. They are the exoteric allegories based on the Esoteric Mysteries of Samothrace. If the older Chaldæans knew the Esoteric truth concealed in the Purânic legends, the other nations were aware only of the Samothracian Mystery, and allegorized it. They adapted it to their astronomical and anthropological, or rather phallic, notions. Samothrace is known historically to have been famous in antiquity for a deluge, which submerged the country and reached the top of the highest mountains; an event which happened before the age of the Argonauts. It was overflowed very suddenly by waters from the Euxine, which had been regarded up to that time as a lake.(10) But the Israelites had, moreover, another legend upon which to base their allegory, the legend of the Deluge, that transformed the present Gobi Desert into a sea for the last time, some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, and which drove many Noahs and their families to the surrounding mountains. As the Babylonian accounts are only now restored from hundreds of thousands of broken fragments—the mound of Kouyunjik alone having yielded from Layard’s excavations upwards of twenty thousand fragments of inscriptions—the proofs here cited are comparatively scanty; yet such as they are, they corroborate almost every one of our teachings; three most certainty, at the very least. These are:

(1) That the race which was the first to fall into generation was a dark race (zalmat‐qaqadi), which they call the Adamu or Dark Race, and that Sarku, or the Light Race, remained pure for a long while subsequently.

(2) That the Babylonians recognized two principal Races at the time of the Fall, the Race of the Gods, the Ethereal Doubles of the Pitris, having preceded these two. This is Sir H. Rawlinson’s opinion. These Races are our Second and Third Root‐Races.

(3) That these seven Gods, each of whom created a Man, or Group of men, were “the Gods imprisoned or incarnated.” These Gods were: the God Zi; the God Zi‐ku, Noble Life, Director of Purity; the God Mir‐ku, Noble Crown, “Saviour from death of the Gods [later on] imprisoned,” and the creator of “the dark races which his hand has made”; the God Libzu, “wise among the Gods”; the God Nissi; the God Suhhab; and Hea or Sa, their synthesis, the God of Wisdom and of the Deep, identified with Oannes‐Dagon, at the time of the Fall, and called, collectively, the Demiurge, or Creator.(11)

There are two “Creations” so‐called, in the Babylonian fragments, and as Genesis has adhered to this, we find its first two chapters distinguished as the Elohite and the Jehovite Creations. Their proper order, however, is not preserved in these or in any other exoteric accounts. Now these “Creations,” according to the Occult Teachings, refer respectively to the formation of the primordial seven Men by the Progenitors, the Pitris, or Elohim, and to that of the human Groups after the Fall.