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

Thus, had it not been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine, and even by exoteric Hindûism and its traditions, we should to this day be left to float in perplexed uncertainty between the indefinite “Ages” of one school of Science, the “tens of thousands” of years of the other, and the 6,000 years of the Bible interpreters. This is one [pg 075] of the several reasons why, with all the respect due to the conclusions of the men of learning of our modern day, we are forced to ignore them in all such questions of pre-historic antiquity.

Occultism will prove, scientific confessions in hand, that Geology is very much in error, and very often even more so than Astronomy. In this very passage by Mr. Laing, which gives to Geology preëminence for correctness over Astronomy, we find a passage in flagrant contradiction to the admissions of the best Geologists themselves. Says the author:

In short, the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian period153when the present order of things was fairly inaugurated, are approximate [truly so]factsand nottheories, while the astronomical conclusions aretheoriesbased ondataso uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly short, ... in others they give results almost incredibly long.154

Seems to be to assume that Geology really proves the duration of the present order of things to have been somewhere over 100 millions of years, and that Astronomy gives an enormous though unknown time beyond in the past, and to come in the future, for the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death of the solar system, of which our earth is a small planet now passing through the habitable phase.155

Judging from past experience, we do not entertain the slightest doubt that, once called upon to answer “the absurd unscientific and preposterous claims of exoteric (and Esoteric) Âryan chronology,” the Scientist of the “results incredibly short,” i.e., only 15,000,000 years, and the Scientist, who “would require 600,000,000 years,” together with those who accept Mr. Huxley's figures of 1,000,000,000156 “since sedimentation began in Europe,” would all be as dogmatic the one as the [pg 076] other. Nor would they fail to remind the Occultist and the Brâhman, that it is the modern men of Science alone who represent exact Science, whose duty it is to fight “inaccuracy” and “superstition.”

We are ready to concede the 100 millions of years offered by Geology, since we are taught that our present physical mankind—or the Vaivasvata Humanity—began only eighteen millions of years ago. But Geology has no facts to give us for the duration of geological periods, as we have shown, no more indeed than has Astronomy. The authentic letter from Mr. W. Pengelly, F.R.S., quoted elsewhere, says:

And having never, hitherto, excavated a fossil man of any other than the present form—what does Geology know of him? It has traced zones or strata and, with these, primordial zoological life, down to the Silurian. When it has, in the same way, traced man down to his primordial protoplasmic form, then we will admit that it may know something of primordial man. If it is not very material to “the bearings of modern scientific discovery on modern thought,” whether

as Mr. S. Laing tells his readers, it is very much so for the claims of the Occultists. Unless the latter show that it is a possibility, if not a perfect certainty, that man lived eighteen millions of years ago, the Secret Doctrine might as well have remained unwritten. An attempt must, therefore, be made in this direction, and it is our modern Geologists and men of Science generally who will be brought to testify to this fact in the Third Part of this Volume. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the fact that Hindû Chronology is constantly represented by the Orientalists as a fiction based on no “actual” computation,158 but simply a “childish boasting,” it is nevertheless often twisted out of recognition to make it yield to, and fit in with, Western theories. No figures have ever been more meddled with and tortured than the famous 4, 3, 2, followed by cyphers, of the Yugas and Mahâ Yugas.

As the whole Cycle of pre-historic events, such as the evolution and transformation of Races and the extreme antiquity of man, hangs upon the said Chronology, it becomes extremely important to check it by other existing calculations. If the Eastern Chronology is rejected, we shall at least have the consolation of proving that no other—whether in the figures of Science or of the Churches—is one whit more reliable. As Professor Max Müller expresses it, it is often as useful to prove what a thing is not as to show what it may be. And once we succeed in pointing out the fallacies of both Christian and Scientific computations—by allowing them a fair chance of comparison with our Chronology—neither of these will have a reasonable ground to stand upon, in pronouncing the Esoteric figures less reliable than its own.

To-day a few more facts may be added to the information there given, which is already known to every Orientalist. The sacredness of the cycle of 4,320, with additional cyphers, lies in the fact that the figures which compose it, taken separately or joined in various combinations, are each and all symbolical of the greatest mysteries in Nature. Indeed, whether one takes the 4 separately, or the 3 by itself, or the two together making 7, or again the three, 4, 3, 2, added together and yielding 9, all these numbers have their application in the most sacred and Occult matters, and record the workings of Nature in her eternally periodical phenomena. They are never erring, perpetually recurring numbers, unveiling, to him who studies the secrets of Nature, a truly divine System, an intelligent plan in Cosmogony, which results in natural cosmic divisions of times, seasons, invisible influences, astronomical phenomena, with their action and reäction on terrestrial and even moral nature; on birth, death, and growth, on health and disease. All these natural events are based and depend upon cyclical processes in the Kosmos itself, producing periodic agencies which, acting from without, affect the Earth and all that lives and breathes on it, from the one end to the other of any Manvantara. Causes and effects are esoteric, exoteric and “endexoteric,” so to say.

In Isis Unveiled we wrote that which we now repeat: We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the Universe during every Cycle into fertile [pg 078] and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the Divine Nature, he says; “but their parts,” owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is Matter, and therefore the realm of evil), “are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (Divine) Nature.” When those circulations—which Éliphas Lévi calls “currents of the Astral Light”—in the universal Ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the Divine Spirit, our Earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The Occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the “superior natures,” and the Divine Soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these “inferior” ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own Divine Spirit. We are in a barren period; the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of scepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as a hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone “philosophizes.” And philosophizing alone, how can it understand the “Soul Doctrine”?