The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 The Synthesis of...

The foregoing teachings of the Secret Doctrine, supplemented by universal traditions, must now have demonstrated that the Brâhmanas and Purânas, the Vendîdâd and other Mazdean scriptures, down to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, and finally to the Jewish sacred records, all have the same origin. None are meaningless and baseless stories, invented to entrap the unwary profane; all are allegories intended to convey, under a more or less fantastic veil, the great truths gathered in the same field of pre-historic tradition. Space forbids us, in these volumes, from entering into further and more minute details with respect to the four Races which preceded our own. But before offering to the student the history of the psychic and spiritual evolution of the direct antediluvian fathers of our Fifth (Âryan) Humanity, and before demonstrating its bearing upon all the other side branches grown from the same trunk, we have to elucidate a few more facts. It has been shown, on the evidence of the whole ancient literary world, and the intuitional speculations of more than one Philosopher and Scientist of the later ages, that the tenets of our Esoteric Doctrine are, in almost every case, corroborated by inferential as well as by direct proof, that neither the “legendary” Giants, nor the lost Continents, nor yet the evolution of the preceding Races, are quite baseless tales.

In the Addenda which close this volume, Science will find itself more than once unable to reply; these Addenda, will, it is hoped, finally dispose of every sceptical remark with regard to the sacred number in nature, and our figures in general.

Meanwhile, one task is left incomplete—the disposing of that most pernicious of all the theological dogmas, the Curse under which man-kind 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 crime committed, and then blesses his “chosen people” by saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”967 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 [pg 429] 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,968 until, from being the healthy king of animal creation in 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!969

This is the real Curse from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in 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 Pramlochâ), nascent, physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described as—

Our Saviours, the Agnishvâtta and other divine “Sons of the Flame of Wisdom”—personified by the Greeks in Prometheus970—may well be left unrecognized and unthanked, in the injustice of the human heart. They may, in our ignorance of the truth, be indirectly cursed for Pandora's gift; but to find themselves proclaimed and declared by the mouth of the clergy, as the Evil Ones, is too heavy a Karma for “Him” who, when Zeus “ardently desired” to quench the entire human race, “dared alone” to save that “mortal race” from perdition, or, as the suffering Titan is make to say:

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.971 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;

Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's Protagoras, with that “wisdom which ministers to physical well-being,” but the lower aspect of Manas of the animal (Kâma) having remained unchanged, instead of “an untainted mind, heaven's first gift,” there was created the eternal vulture of ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair, coupled with “the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals” (556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.

Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name (Pro-me-theus, “he who sees before him” or futurity) shows973—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological [pg 432] insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanus:

Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early Races, this will be no real digression.

The subject of Æschylus' trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to all cultured readers. The Demi-god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their secret—the mystery of the Creative Fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by Cronus974 and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a Personal Deity, which will not see Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light-giver,” is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—

On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning—on the authority of the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the daughter of Inachus, persecuted by Zeus—a whole prophecy is constructed by some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan: