Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days [forty-nine, 7 × 7, stages of activity, and forty-nine stages of rest, on the seven Globes of the Chain, and then comes the rest of Sabbath, the fiftieth]; and ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.[1745]
That is, ye shall make an offering of your flesh or “coats of skin,” and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall remain pure spirits. This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages, was an institution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the Hebrews viâ the “Chaldees,” who were the “wise men” of a caste, not of a nation, a community of great Adepts come from their “Serpent-holes,” who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if this interpretation from Leviticus (full of the disfigured Laws of Manu) is found too far-fetched, then turn to Revelation. Whatever interpretation profane mystics may give to the famous chapter xvii, with its riddle of the woman in purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when reading “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,” or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants, the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity—“ceremonial [pg 791] magic” of old, with its terrible effects, and now the harmless, because distorted, farce of ritualistic worship. The “mystery” of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of soul-killing Churchianity and of Superstition.
The beast that ... was, and is not, ... and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains [seven Continents and seven Races] on which the woman sitteth—
the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths which have covered that symbol “with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs” who protested and do protest.
And there are seven kings [seven Races]; five are fallen [our Fifth Race included], and one is [the Fifth continues], and the other [the Sixth and the Seventh Races] is not yet come; and when he [the Race “king”] cometh, he must continue a short space.[1746]
There are many such apocalyptic allusions, but the student has to find them out for himself.
If the Bible combines with Archæology and Geology to show that human civilization has passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological epochs—why should not the statements of The Secret Doctrine be taken into consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific to disbelieve, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the famous Thenay flints[1747] “were carved by the dryopithecus monkey”; or, with the Occultist, that the anthropomorphous monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically demonstrated, that:
There was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a single species of mammal identical with species now extant[1748]
—and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic than we are[1749]—then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene epoch,[1750] is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent Naturalists:
Thus, in the savage of quaternary ages, who had to fight against the mammoth with stone weapons for arms, we find all those craniological characters generally considered as the sign of great intellectual development.[1751]