38. The birth of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race. 39. The sub-races of the Fourth Humanity begin to divide and interblend; they form the first mixed races of various colours. 40. The superiority of the Atlantean over other Races. 41. They fall into sin and beget children and monsters. 42. The first germs of anthropomorphism and sexual religion. They lose their “third eye.”
38. Thus, two by two, on the seven Zones, the Third Race gave birth to the Fourth; the Sura became A-sura.[522]
39. The First,[523] on every Zone, was moon-coloured;[524] the Second yellow like gold; the Third red; the Fourth brown, which became black with sin.[525] The first seven human shoots were all of one complexion.[526] The next seven,[527] began mixing.[528]
To understand Shloka 38, it must be read together with the Shlokas of Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical [pg 238] than physical Nature. It is only after the so-called “Fall,” that the Races began to develop rapidly into a purely human shape. In order that the student may correctly comprehend the full meaning of the Fall—so mystic and transcendental in its real significance—he must at once be told the details which preceded it, seeing that modern Theology has made of the event a pivot on which its most pernicious and absurd dogmas and beliefs are made to turn.
The Archaic Commentaries, as the reader may remember, explain that, of the Host of Dhyânîs, whose turn it was to incarnate as the Egos of the immortal, but, on this plane, senseless Monads—some “obeyed” (the Law of Evolution) immediately the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when they had separated into sexes. These were those early conscious Beings who, now adding conscious knowledge and will to their inherent divine purity, “created” by Kriyâshakti the semi-divine man, who became the Seed on Earth for future Adepts. Those, on the other hand, who, jealous of their intellectual freedom—unfettered as it then was by the bonds of Matter—said: “We can choose, ... we have wisdom,”[529] and so incarnated far later—these had their first Karmic punishment prepared for them. They got bodies inferior (physiologically) to their Astral Models, because their Chhâyâs had belonged to Progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven Classes. As to those “Sons of Wisdom” who “deferred” their incarnation till the Fourth Race, which was already tainted (physiologically) with sin and impurity, these produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for æons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination.[530]
This was the “Fall of the Angels,” owing to their rebellion against Karmic Law. The “fall of man” was no fall, for he was irresponsible. But “creation” having been invented on the dualistic system as the “prerogative of God alone”—the legitimate attribute patented by Theology in the name of an infinite Deity of their own making—the power of Kriyâshakti had to be regarded as “Satanic,” and as a usurpation of divine rights. Thus, in the light of such narrow views, the foregoing must naturally be considered as a terrible slander on man, “created in the image of God,” and a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-letter dogma. “Your doctrine,” the [pg 239] Occultists have already been told, “makes of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil, from the first.” “Why do you make of your God a Devil—both, moreover, created in your own image?”—is our reply. The Esoteric interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous invention of Theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma of the Churches—more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.
The true meaning of the old doctrine of the “Fallen Angels,” in its anthropological and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabalah, and explains the Bible. It is found preëminently in Genesis when the latter is read in a spirit of research for truth, with no eye to dogma, and in no mood of preconception. This is easily proven. In Genesis (vi), the “Sons of God”—B'ne Aleim—become enamoured of the daughters of men, marry, and reveal to their wives the mysteries unlawfully learnt by them in Heaven, according to Enoch; and this is the “Fall of the Angels.”[531] But what, in reality, is the Book of Enoch itself, from which the author of Revelation and even the St. John of the Fourth Gospel[532] have so profusely quoted? Simply a Book of Initiation, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology the programme of certain Archaic Mysteries performed in the inner Temples. The author of the Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quichés very justly suggests that the so-called [pg 240] “Visions” of Enoch relate to his (Enoch's) experience at Initiation, and what he learned in the Mysteries; while he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being converted to Christianity (! !); furthermore, he believes that this book was written “at the beginning of the Christian era, when ... the customs and religion of the Egyptians fell into decadency”! This is hardly possible, since Jude, in his Epistle,[533] quotes from the Book of Enoch; and, therefore, as Archbishop Laurence, the translator of the Book of Enoch from the Ethiopic version, remarks, it “could not have been the production of a writer who lived after ... or was even coëval with” the writers of the New Testament, unless, indeed, Jude and the Gospels, and all that follows, were also a production of the already established Church—which, some critics say, is not impossible. But we are now concerned with the “Fallen Angels” of Enoch, rather than with Enoch himself.
In Indian exotericism, these Angels (Asuras) are also denounced as the “enemies of the Gods”; those who oppose sacrificial worship offered to the Devas. In Christian Theology they are broadly referred to as the “Fallen Spirits,” the heroes of various conflicting and contradictory legends, gathered from Pagan sources. The coluber tortuosus, the “tortuous snake”—a qualification said to have originated with the Jews—had quite another meaning before the Roman Church distorted it; among others, a purely astronomical signification.
The “Serpent” fallen from on high (deorsum fluens) was credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead (τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή) to the day when Jesus saw it fall “as lightning ... from heaven,”[534] notwithstanding the Roman Catholic interpretation of “cadebat ut fulgur.” It means indeed that even “the devils are subject” to the Logos—who is Wisdom, but at the same time, as the opponent of ignorance, Satan or Lucifer. This remark refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and so quickening, the intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of Mahat, descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious life—Humanity, if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state, was of course doomed to moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the Logos, the Christian Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or Logos, [pg 241] may be said to have saved those who believed in the Secret Teachings, from “eternal death,” and to have conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This is the human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also—because the Logos is Christos—that “principle” of our inner nature which develops in us into the Spiritual Ego—the Higher Self—formed of the indissoluble union of Buddhi, the sixth, and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the fifth “principle.”[535] “The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and conscious, self-active Wisdom on Earth,” we are taught. It is the Marriage of the “Heavenly Man” with the “Virgin of the World,” or Nature, as described in Pymander; the result of which is their progeny—immortal man. It is this which is called in St. John's Revelation[536] the marriage of the Lamb with his Bride. This “wife” is now identified with the Church of Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to forget that her “linen” may be “clean and white” outwardly, like the “whited sepulchre,” but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not the “righteousness of saints,”[537] but rather the blood of the saints she has “slain upon the earth.”[538] Thus the remark made by the great Initiate, in Luke—referring allegorically to the ray of enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to the old Wisdom-Religion, then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adept[539]—was [pg 242] distorted out of all recognition, as was also his own personality, and made to fit in with one of the most cruel and the most pernicious of all theological dogmas.
But if Western Theology alone holds the patent and copyright of Satan—in all the dogmatic horror of that fiction—other nationalities and religions have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of a tenet, which is one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient thought. They have both disfigured, and hinted at, the correct meaning of it in their numerous allegories on the subject. Nor have the semi-esoteric dogmas of Paurânic Hindûism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen Gods. The Purânas teem with them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of Parâshara, in the Vishnu Purâna, to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumâras and Munis, who have to be born in every age—to reïncarnate in every Manvantara. This, Esoterically, is equivalent to saying that the “Flames” born of the Universal Mind, or Mahat, owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and the impulse of Evolutionary Law, had—without any gradual transition—landed on this Earth, after having, as in Pymander, broken through the “Seven Circles of Fire,” or, in short, the seven intermediate Worlds.