According to the Mahâbhârata, the Râmâyana, and the Purânas, he was the son of Marîchi, the son of Brahmâ, the father of Vivasvat, the father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind.
According to the Shatapatha Brahmâna: Having assumed the form of a tortoise, Prajâpati created offspring. That which he created he made (akarot); hence the word kûrma (tortoise). Kashyapa means tortoise; hence men say, “All creatures are descendants of Kashyapa.”[578]
He was all this; he was also the father of the bird Garuda, the “king of the feathered tribe,” who descends from, and is of one stock with the reptiles, the Nâgas, and who becomes their mortal enemy subsequently—as he is also a cycle, a period of time, when, in the course of evolution, the birds which developed from reptiles in their “struggle for life” and “survival of the fittest,” etc., turned in preference on those from whom they issued to devour them, perhaps prompted by natural law, in order to make room for other and more perfect species.
In that admirable epitome, Modern Science and Modern Thought, a lesson in Natural History is offered to Mr. Gladstone, showing the utter variance of the Bible with it. The author remarks that Geology traces the “dawn of creation” through a line of scientific research:
Commencing with the earliest known fossil, the Eozoon Canadense of the Laurentian, and continued in a chain, every link of which is firmly welded, through the Silurian, with its abundance of molluscous, crustacean, and vermiform life, and first indication of fishes; the Devonian, with its predominance of fish and first appearance of reptiles; the Mesozoic with its batrachians; the Secondary formations, in which reptiles of the sea, land and air preponderated, and the first humble forms of vertebrate land animals began to appear; and finally the Tertiary, in which mammalian life has become abundant, and type succeeding to type and species to species, are gradually differentiated and specialized, through the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, until we arrive at the Glacial and Prehistoric periods, and at positive proof of the existence of man.[579]
The same order, plus the description of animals unknown to Modern Science, is found in the Commentaries on the Purânas in general, and in the Book of Dzyan especially. The only difference—a grave one, no doubt, as implying a spiritual and divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary world, in which the false personality and its cerebral basis alone is known to orthodox Psychology—is as follows. Having been in all the so-called seven “creations,” which stand allegorically for the seven evolutionary changes, or sub-races, as we may call them, of the First Root-Race of Mankind—Man has been on Earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the Kingdoms of Nature in the previous three Rounds,[580] his physical [pg 266] frame—one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods—was ready to receive the Divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, i.e., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid-point of the Third Root-Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the Two and then the Three made One; for though the lower animals, from the amœba to man, received their Monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, these qualities have to remain dormant till the animal reaches its human form, before which stage Manas (mind) has no development in them. In the animals every principle is paralyzed, and in a fœtus-like state, save the second, the Vital, and the third, the Astral, and the rudiments of the fourth, Kâma, which is desire, instinct—whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy-tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it.
As Commentary ix says:
Men are made complete only during their Third, toward the Fourth Cycle [Race]. They are made “Gods” for good and evil, and responsible, only when the two arcs meet [after three and a half Rounds towards the Fifth Race]. They are made so by the Nirmânakâya [Spiritual or Astral remains] of the Rudra-Kumâras, “cursed to be reborn on Earth again”[meaning—doomed in their natural turn to reïncarnation in the higher ascending arc of the terrestrial Cycle].
Now the writer is certain to be met with what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life, and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive stages of specialization—that all this is opposed to the idea of man preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform creature:
From the primitive speck of protoplasm, and the nucleated cell in which all life originates ... and “is developed through stages undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and, last of all, of the human type.”[581]