Ungulate Mammals
At this, the midway point of evolution, Science comes to a standstill.
The root to which these two families lead back is unknown.[1721]
The Root According to Occultism
Schmidt's diagram represents the realm explored by Western Evolutionists, the area in which climatic influences, “natural selection,” and all the other physical causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology and Palæontology find their province here in investigating the many physical agencies which so largely contribute, as has been shown by Darwin, Spencer and others, to the “segregation of species.” But even in this domain the sub-conscious workings of the Dhyân-Chohanic wisdom are at the root of all the “ceaseless striving towards perfection,” though its influence is vastly modified by those purely material causes which de Quatrefages terms the “milieu” and Spencer the “environment.”
The “midway point of evolution” is that stage where the astral prototypes definitely begin to pass into the physical, and thus become subject to the differentiating agencies now operative around us. Physical causation supervenes immediately on the assumption of the “coats of skin”—i.e., the physiological equipment in general. The [pg 778] forms of men and of other mammals previous to the separation of the sexes[1722] are woven out of astral matter, and possess a structure utterly unlike that of the physical organisms which eat, drink, digest, etc. The known physiological contrivances requisite for these functions were almost entirely evolved subsequently to the incipient physicalization of the seven Root-Types out of the astral—during the “midway halt” between the two planes of existence. Hardly had the “ground-plan” of evolution been limned out in these ancestral types, than there supervened the influence of the accessory terrestrial laws, familiar to us, resulting in the whole crop of mammalian species. Æons of slow differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.
The second diagram represents the domain of the purely astral prototypes previous to their descent into gross matter. Astral matter, it must be noted, is fourth-state matter, having, like our gross matter, its own “protyle.” There are several protyles in Nature, corresponding to the various planes of matter. The two sub-physical elemental kingdoms, the plane of mind, Manas, or fifth-state matter, as also that of Buddhi, sixth-state matter, are each and all evolved from one of the six protyles which constitute the basis of the Object-Universe. The three “states” so-called of our terrestrial matter, known as the “solid,” “liquid,” and “gaseous,” are only, in strict accuracy, sub-states. As to the former reality of the descent into the physical, which culminated in physiological man and animal, we have a palpable testimony in the fact of the so-called spiritualistic “materializations.”
In all these instances a complete temporary mergence of the astral into the physical takes place. The evolution of physiological man out of the astral races of the early Lemurian age—the Jurassic age of Geology—is exactly paralleled by the “materialization” of “spirits” (?) in the séance room. In the case of Professor Crookes' “Katie King,” the presence of a physiological mechanism—heart, lungs, etc.—was indubitably demonstrated!
This, in a way, is the Archetype of Goethe. Listen to his words: