First, on account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; secondly, on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly [pg 272]representative strata; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to use—nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth's surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says: “For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here and there a few lines.”[593]
It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride, or unreasonable belief in man's representing even here on Earth—in our period, perhaps—the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own; for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” which will prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palæontologists. Believing as we do that man has, during the preceding Rounds, evolved from, and passed through, the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on Earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the Orang Outang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would most irresistibly forward the Occult Doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man. One may even enquire how it is that Biologists and Anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape—how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory—unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a non-precedent in Nature, quite a special and unique case. And that is what all this leads Physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape, not man, which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance. The Pithecoid is an accidental creation, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.
The Occult Doctrine is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying Law in Nature, the latter having no personal “special design,” but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole Manvantaric period and deals with the land-worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence [pg 273] both are under the same Evolutionary Law, and both have to progress according to Karmic Law. Both have started from the same Neutral Centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of the Cycle.
It is not denied that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic ape-like creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only—the middle, or the transition, point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man during the first two and a half Root-Races what he is now. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the Secondary period, as we claim.
Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult Teaching, “a God on Earth who had fallen into Matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma, and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the actual Man and his Inner Nature; the Fall mentioned above having left no “original sin” on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with.
Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc—which is centrifugal for Spirit and centripetal for Matter—and those he is preparing to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces—viz., Matter will become centrifugal and Spirit centripetal—that all such transformations are next in store for the anthropoid apes also; all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round—for these will all be men in the Fifth Round, just as the present men inhabited ape-like forms in the Third, the preceding Round.
Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra the degraded and dwarfed examples—“blurred copies,” as Mr. Huxley has it—of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-Race during the period of what is called the “fall into generation.” The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. As has been shown in the present volume, it is the speechless animal that first began sexual connection, for it was the first to separate into male and female. Nor was it [pg 274] intended by Nature that man should follow this bestial example—as is now shown by the comparatively painless procreation of their species by animals, and the terrible suffering and danger of the same in woman. The ape is, indeed, as remarked in Isis Unveiled:
A transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family-a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter.[594]
The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being, and are the latest contemporaries of our Fifth Race. Thus, it is most important to remember that the “Egos” of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. They are entities who had already reached the “human stage” before this Round. Consequently, they form an exception to the general rule. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal “Eves” were their foremothers, and the human “Adams” their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam's first wife, whom the Talmud describes as a “charming” woman, “with long wavy hair,” i.e.—a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael-Lilith, or man-animal united, a being called, in the Zohar, Hayo Bischat, the Beast or Evil Beast. It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals, or men of a lower order, in the Fifth Round, while the Adepts of a certain School hope that some of the “Egos” of the apes of a higher intelligence will reäppear at the close of the Sixth Root-Race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. The form means nothing. Genera and species of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown—man, change and vary according to the environments and climatic variations, not only with every Round, but every Root-Race likewise, as well as after every geological cataclysm that puts an end to, or produces a turning point in, the latter. In the Sixth Root-Race, the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms—though fewer and ever wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the [pg 275] Manvantara approaches—will develop from the “cast off” types of the human races as they revert once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were no apes before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead on the Monads of the unprogressed men of our Race and lodge them in the newly evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated Baboon.
This will take place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic precession of all that lives and breathes now on Earth, of each species in its turn, is a true one, and needs no “special creation” or miraculous formation of man, beast, and plant ex nihilo.