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 [pg 002] Men2 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:

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

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, [pg 003] 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 Phoenicians, and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, we also remember the identity of the “Mystery” Gods of the Phoenicians, 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 [pg 004] 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:

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 [pg 005] 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.

All this will be examined in the light of Science and comparisons drawn from the scriptures of all the ancient nations, the Bible included, as we proceed. Meanwhile, before we turn to the Anthropogenesis of the prehistoric Races, it may be useful to agree upon the names to be given to the Continents on which the four great Races, which preceded our Adamic Race, were born, lived, and died. Their archaic and Esoteric names were many, and varied with the language of the nation which mentioned them in its annals and scriptures. That which in the VendÎdÂd, for instance, is referred to as Airyana VaÊjÔ12 wherein was born the original Zoroaster,13 is called in the PurÂnic literature Shveta DvÎpa, Mount Meru, the Abode of Vishnu, etc.; and in the Secret [pg 006] Doctrine is simply named the “Land of the Gods,” under their chiefs, the “Spirits of this Planet.”

Therefore, in view of the possible, and even very probable confusion, that may arise, it is considered more convenient to adopt, for each of the four Continents constantly referred to, a name more familiar to the cultured reader. 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 Progenitors:

I. The Imperishable Sacred Land.

The reason for the name is that it is stated that: this “Imperishable Sacred Land” never 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 Shishta 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.”14

II. The Hyperborean.

This will be the name chosen for the second Continent, the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia. Such was the name given by the oldest Greeks to the far-off and mysterious region, whither their tradition made Apollo, the Hyperborean, travel every year. Astronomically, Apollo is, of course, the Sun, who, abandoning his Hellenic sanctuaries, loved to annually visit his far-away country, where the Sun was said to never set for one half of the year. “Ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματος εἰσι κέλευθοι,” says a verse in the Odyssey.15

But historically, or better, perhaps, ethnologically and geologically, the meaning is different. The land of the Hyperboreans, the country that extended beyond Boreas, the frozen-hearted God of snows and hurricanes, who loved to slumber heavily on the chain of Mount RhipÆus, was neither an ideal country, as surmized by the Mythologists, nor yet a land in the neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube.16 [pg 007] It was a real Continent, a bon fide land, which knew no winter in those early days, nor have its sorry remains more than one night and day during the year, even now. The nocturnal shadows never fall upon it, said the Greeks; for it is the “Land of the Gods,” the favourite abode of Apollo, the God of light, and its inhabitants are his beloved priests and servants. This may be regarded as poetized fiction now; but it was poetized truth then.

III. Lemuria.

The third Continent, we propose to call Lemuria. The name is an invention, or an idea, of Mr. P. L. Sclater, who, between 1850 and 1860, asserted on zoological grounds the actual existence, in prehistoric times, of a Continent which he showed to have extended from Madagascar to Ceylon and Sumatra. It included some portions of what is now Africa; but otherwise this gigantic Continent, which stretched from the Indian Ocean to Australia, has now wholly disappeared beneath the waters of the Pacific, leaving here and there only some of its highland tops which are now islands. Mr. A. R. Wallace, the Naturalist, writes Mr. Charles Gould:

The subject is treated at length elsewhere.18

IV. Atlantis.

Thus we name the fourth Continent. It would be the first historical land, were the traditions of the Ancients to receive more attention than they have hitherto. The famous island of Plato of that name was but a fragment of this great Continent.19

V. Europe.

The fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Antipodes, it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coËval with it, which are [pg 008] generally referred to by the Indo-Aryan Occultists as the fifth. If their teaching followed the appearance of the Continents in their geological and geographical order, then this classification would have to be altered. But as the sequence of the Continents is made to follow the order of evolution of the Races, from the First to the Fifth, our Âryan Root-Race, Europe must be called the fifth great Continent. The Secret Doctrine takes no account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern geographical distribution of land and sea. Since the day of its earliest teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the Earth has changed more than once. There was a time when the delta of Egypt and Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of Gibraltar and a further upheaval of the Continent entirely changed the face of the map of Europe. The last serious change occurred some 12,000 years ago,20 and was followed by the submersion of Plato's little Atlantic island, which he calls Atlantis after its parent continent. Geography was part of the Mysteries, in days of old. Says the Zohar:

The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre-tertiary giant, and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear preposterous to admirers of, and believers in, modern learning. The whole posse comitatus of Biologists will turn away from the conception of this Third Race Titan of the Secondary Age, a being fit to fight successfully with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and land; so his forefathers, the ethereal prototypes of the Atlantean, had little need to fear that which could not hurt them. The modern Anthropologist is quite welcome to laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as the Theologian laughs at the former's pithecoid ancestor. The Occultists and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually squared their accounts by this time. Occult Sciences claim less and give more, at all events, than either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical Theology.