Enough has been said to show that evolution in general, events, mankind, and everything else in Nature proceed in cycles. We have spoken of seven Races, five of which have nearly completed their earthly career, and have claimed that every Root-Race, with its sub-races and innumerable family divisions and tribes, was entirely distinct from its preceding and succeeding Race. This will be objected to, on the authority of uniform experience, in the question of Anthropology and Ethnology. Man—save in colour and type, and perhaps a difference in facial peculiarities and cranial capacity—has been ever the same under every climate and in every part of the world, say the Naturalists; ay, even in stature—this, while maintaining that man descends from the same unknown ancestor as the ape; a claim that is logically impossible without an infinite variation of stature and form from his first evolution into a biped. The very logical persons who maintain both propositions are welcome to their paradoxical views. Once more we address only those who, doubting the general derivation of myths from “the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature,” think it
Less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demi-gods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions, are transformations, than to believe them to be inventions.
It is only such “transformations” in physical nature, as much as in the memory and conceptions of our present mankind, that the Secret Doctrine teaches. It confronts the purely speculative hypotheses of Modern Science, based upon the experience and exact observations of [pg 463] barely a few centuries, with the unbroken tradition and records of its Sanctuaries; and brushing away that tissue of cobweb-like theories, spun in the darkness that covers a period of hardly a few millenniums, which Europeans call their “history,” the Old Science says to us: Listen, now, to my version of the memoirs of Humanity.
The Human Races are born one from the other, grow, develop, become old, and die. Their sub-races and nations follow the same rule. If your all-denying Modern Science and so-called Philosophy do not contest that the human family is composed of a variety of well-defined types and races, it is only because the fact is undeniable; no one would say that there was no external difference between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand, it is formally denied by most Naturalists that mixed human races, i.e., the seeds for entirely new races, are any longer formed in our days, although indeed the latter is maintained on good grounds by De Quatrefages and some others.
Nevertheless our general proposition will not be accepted. It will be said that whatever forms man has passed through in the long pre-historic past there are no more changes for him—save certain variations, as at present—in the future. Hence that our Sixth and Seventh Root-Races are fictions.
To this it is again answered: How do you know? Your experience is limited to a few thousand years, to less than a day in the whole age of Humanity and to the present types of the actual continents and isles of our Fifth Race. How can you tell what will or will not be? Meanwhile, such is the prophecy of the Secret Books and their not uncertain statements.
Since the beginning of the Atlantean Race many million years have passed, yet we find the last of the Atlanteans still mixed up with the Âryan element, 11,000 years ago. This shows the enormous overlapping of one Race over the Race which succeeds it, though in characters and external type the elder loses its characteristics, and assumes the new features of the younger Race. This is proved in all the formations of mixed human races. Now, Occult Philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.
Pure Anglo-Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already become a nation apart, and, owing [pg 464] to a strong admixture of various nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis, not only mentally, but also physically. To quote from De Quatrefages:
Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings. Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly for the greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of races at present undetermined.[1027]
Thus the Americans have become in only three centuries a “primary race,” temporarily, before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all other now existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the sixth sub-race, and in some few hundred years more, will become most decidedly the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present European or fifth sub-race, in all its new characteristics. After this, in about 25,000 years, they will launch into preparations for the seventh sub-race; until, in consequence of cataclysms—the first series of those which must one day destroy Europe, and still later the whole Âryan Race (and thus affect both Americas), as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines of our continent and isles—the Sixth Root-Race will have appeared on the stage of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them. All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums will its pioneers—the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women—be regarded as anomalous lusûs naturæ, abnormal oddities physically and mentally. Then, as they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find themselves in a majority. Then the present men will begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until they die out in their turn in civilized lands, surviving only in small groups on islands—the mountain peaks of to-day—where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All these are the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection of whose existence has entirely died out of the remembrance of modern generations, just as we shall vanish from the memory of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap the Sixth Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it more slowly than its new successor, [pg 465] still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality, just as the Fourth overlapped our Âryan Race, and the Third had overlapped the Atlanteans.