H. P. Blavatsky

“ Thus man was transformed into the darkness of a material Hell; his divine consciousness, obtained from his indwelling Principle, the Mânasa, or the incarnated Deva, became the glaring flames of the Infernal Region, and our Globe that Hell itself. Pippala, Haoma, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, were denounced as the forbidden fruit, and the “Serpent of Wisdom,” the voice of reason and consciousness, remained identified for ages with the Fallen Angel, which is the old Dragon, the Devil! ”

“ 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. Absolute Light is absolute Darkness, and vice versâ. In fact, there is neither Light nor Darkness in the realms of Truth. Good and Evil are twins, the progeny of Space and Time, under the sway of Mâyâ. ”

“ What is human mind in its higher aspect, whence comes it, if it be 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? ”

“ It is true that Science can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, in the Cimmerian darkness of the prehistoric ages, the explorers are lost in a labyrinth, whose great corridors are doorless, allowing no visible exit into the archaic past. Lost in the maze of their own conflicting speculations, rejecting, as they have always done, the evidence of Eastern tradition, without any clue, or one single certain milestone to guide them, what can Geologists or Anthropologists do but pick up the slender thread of Ariadne where they first perceive it, and then proceed at perfect random? ”

“ 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 be 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? ”

“ Manas, Mind and Self-consciousness. In each of us that golden thread of continuous Life—periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in Devachan—is from the beginning of our appearance upon this Earth. It is the Sûtrâtmâ, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal Monadship, on which our earthly “lives” or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads—according to the beautiful expression of the Vedântic Philosophy. ”

“ Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinize its mysteries. On the contrary, he who through study and meditation unveils its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life—is working for the good of his fellow-men. Karma is an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of Manifestation ”

“ How is it to be expected that the merely profane thinker, however great may be his erudition in orthodox symbolism, so to say—i.e., in that symbolism which can never get out of the old grooves of solar myth and sexual worship—how is it to be expected that the profane scholar should penetrate into the arcana behind the veil? One who deals with the husk or shell of the dead-letter, and devotes himself to the kaleidoscopic transformation of barren word-symbols, can never expect to get beyond the vagaries of modern Mythologists. ”

“ But this is the limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot carry him. Many are the romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others bristling with scientific knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and describe life on other Globes. But one and all they give but some distorted copy of the drama of life around us. It is either, with Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope, or, with de Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find that at bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. ”

“ The pendulum of thought oscillates between extremes. Having now finally emancipated herself from the shackles of Theology, Science has embraced the opposite fallacy; and in the attempt to interpret Nature on purely materialistic lines, she has built up that most extravagant theory of the ages—the derivation of man from a ferocious and brutal ape. So rooted has this doctrine now become, in one form and another, that the most Herculean efforts will be needed to bring about its final rejection. ”

“ 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 together on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. ”

“ Once that Androgyne Humanity separated into sexes, transformed by Nature into child-bearing engines, it ceased to procreate its like through drops of vital energy oozing out of the body. But while man was still ignorant of his procreative powers on the human plane—before his Fall, as a believer in Adam would say—all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammal-animal forms. Evolution is an eternal cycle of becoming, we are taught; and Nature never leaves an atom unused. ”

“ After the third time, Ahura Mazda warns Yima in an assembly of “celestial gods” and “excellent mortals” that upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, and all life will perish. This is the old Mazdean symbolism for the “Flood,” and the coming cataclysm to Atlantis, which sweeps away every Race in its turn. Like Vaivasvata Manu and Noah, Yima makes a Vara—an Enclosure, an Ark—under the God's direction, and brings thither the seed of every living creature, animals and “Fires.”
It is of this “Earth” or new Continent that Zarathushtra became the law-giver and ruler. ”

“ The Occultists have been accused of worshipping Gods or Devils! We deny this. Among the numberless hosts of Spirits—entities that have been or that will be men—there are some immeasurably superior to the human race, higher and holier than the highest saint on Earth, and wiser than any mortal without exception. And there are those again who are no better than we are, and some also who are far worse and inferior to the lowest savage. It is these last that command the readiest communication with our Earth, who perceive and sense us, as the clairvoyants perceive and sense them. ”

“ It is an absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned Manas, the Ego, to liberate itself from the thraldom of sensuous perception, and see in the light of the one eternal present Reality. ”

“ Let us pause before giving any more such strange teachings. Let us try and find out how far any ancient Scriptures, and even Science, permit the possibility of, or even distinctly corroborate, such wild notions as are found in our Anthropogenesis.
Recapitulating that which has been said, we find that the Secret Doctrine claims for man: (1) a polygenetic origin; (2) a variety of modes of procreation before humanity fell into the ordinary method of generation; (3) that the evolution of animals—of the mammalians at any rate—follows that of man instead of preceding it. ”

“ There can be no objective form on Earth, nor in the Universe either, without its astral prototype being first formed in Space. From Phidias down to the humblest workman in the ceramic art, a sculptor has had to create first of all a model in his mind, then sketch it in dimensional lines, and then only can he reproduce it in a three dimensional or objective figure. And if the human mind is a living demonstration of such successive stages in the process of Evolution, how can it be otherwise when Nature's Mind and creative powers are concerned? ”

“ Hence, tradition shows the celestial Yogîs offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god-like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Mahâyuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life. ”

“ The “Fallen Angels,” so-called, are Humanity itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, had no being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten and nurtured the fiend, and allowed it to develop in his heart; it is he, again, who has contaminated the Indwelling God in himself, by linking the pure Spirit with the impure Demon of Matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, “Demon est Deus inversus,” finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual manifested Nature, nevertheless, its practical application is found in Mankind alone. ”

“ 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”? ”

“ And even if they had so fallen; if our Earth got its supply of life-germs from other Planets; who, or what, had carried them on to these Planets? Here, again, unless the Occult Teaching is accepted, we are compelled once more to face a miracle—to accept the theory of a personal, anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade the ideal of an infinite Universal Deity, before whose incomprehensible awful grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. ”

“ In treating of Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show that on religion, from the very earliest, has ever been based entirely on fiction, that none was the object of special revelation, and that it is dogma alone which has ever been killing primeval truth; finally, that no human-born doctrine, no creed, however sanctified by custom and antiquity, can compare in sacredness with the religion of Nature. ”

“ The Secret Doctrine teaches that every event of universal importance, such as geological cataclysms at the end of one Race and the beginning of a new one, involving a great change each time in mankind, spiritual, moral and physical—is precogitated and preconcerted, so to say, in the sidereal regions of our planetary system. Astrology is built wholly upon this mystic and intimate connection between the heavenly bodies and mankind; and it is one of the great secrets of Initiation and Occult Mysteries. ”

“ Do not the relics we treasure in our museums—last mementoes of the long “lost arts”—speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century. ”

“ Without this key to Âryan Wisdom, the Cosmogony of the Rishis and the Arhats is in danger of remaining a dead letter to the average Orientalist. Asat is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it the “not yet existing”; for Sat is in itself neither the “existent,” nor “being.” Sat is the immutable, the ever-present, changeless, and eternal Root, from and through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the seed, which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called evolution. ”