The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4 / The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

by H. P. Blavatsky

The Secret Doctrine is not alone in speaking of primeval Men born simultaneously on the seven divisions of our Globe. In the Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, we find the same seven primeval [pg 002] Men[2] evolving from Nature and the Heavenly Man, in the collective sense of the word, namely, from the Creative Spirits; and in the fragments of Chaldæan tablets, collected by George Smith, on which is inscribed the Babylonian Legend of Creation, in the first column of the Cutha tablet, seven human Beings “with the faces of ravens,” that is to say, of black swarthy complexions, whom “the [seven] Great Gods created,” are mentioned. Or, as explained in lines 16, 17 and 18:

In the midst of the earth they grew up and became great,

And increased in number,

Seven kings, brothers of the same family.[3]

These are the seven Kings of Edom to whom reference is made in the Kabalah; the First Race, which was imperfect, that is to say, was born before the “balance” (sexes) existed, and which was therefore destroyed.[4]

Seven Kings, brethren, appeared and begat children, 6,000 in number were their peoples. The God Nergas [death] destroyed them. “How did he destroy them?” By bringing into equilibrium [or balance] those who did not yet exist.[5]

They were “destroyed,” as a Race, by being merged in their own progeny (by exudation): that is to say, the sexless Race reïncarnated in the (potentially) bisexual; the latter, in the androgynes; these again, in the sexual, the later Third Race. Were the tablets less mutilated, they would be found to contain word for word the same account as is given in the Archaic Records and in Hermes, at least as regards the fundamental facts, if not as regards minute details; for Hermes is a good deal disfigured by mistranslations.

It is quite certain that the seeming supernaturalism of these teachings, although allegorical, is so diametrically opposed to the dead-letter statements of the Bible,[6] as well as to the latest hypotheses of Science, [pg 003] that it will evoke passionate denial. The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty. Besides, we have the Egyptian Books of Thoth, and Book of the Dead, and the Hindû Purânas with their seven Manus, as well as the Chaldæo-Assyrian accounts, whose tiles mention seven primitive Men, or Adams, the real meaning of which name may be ascertained by means of the Kabalah. Those who know anything of the Samothracian Mysteries will also remember that the generic name of the Kabiri was the “Holy Fires,” which created on seven localities of the island of Electria, or Samothrace, the “Kabir born of the Holy Lemnos”—the island sacred to Vulcan.

According to Pindar, this Kabir, whose name was Adamas,[7] was, in the traditions of Lemnos, the type of the primitive man born from the bosom of the Earth. He was the archetype of the first males in the order of generation, and was one of the seven autochthonous ancestors or progenitors of mankind.[8] If, coupling with this the fact that Samothrace was colonized by the Phœnicians, and before them by the mysterious Pelasgians who came from the East, we also remember the identity of the “Mystery” Gods of the Phœnicians, Chaldæans, and Israelites, it will be easy to discover whence came also the confused account of the Noachian Deluge. It has become undeniable of late that the Jews, who obtained their primitive ideas about creation from Moses, who had them from the Egyptians, compiled their Genesis and first cosmogonic traditions, when rewritten by Ezra and others, from the Chaldæo-Akkadian account. It is, therefore, sufficient to examine the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform and other inscriptions to find also therein, scattered here and there, not only the original meaning of the name Adam, Admi, or Adami, but also the creation of seven Adams or roots of Men, born of Mother Earth, physically, and of the Divine Fire of the Progenitors, spiritually or astrally. The Assyriologists, ignorant of the Esoteric teachings, could hardly be expected to pay any greater attention to the mysterious and ever-recurring number seven on the Babylonian cylinders, than they pay to it on finding it in Genesis and the rest of the Bible. Yet the numbers of the ancestral spirits and their seven groups of human progeny are on the cylinders, notwithstanding the dilapidated condition of the fragments, and are to [pg 004] be found as plainly, as they are in Pymander and in the Book of the Concealed Mystery of the Kabalah. In the latter Adam Kadmon is the Sephirothal Tree, as also the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” And that Tree, says verse 32, “hath around it seven columns,” or palaces, of the seven creative Angels operating in the Spheres of the seven Planets on our Globe. As Adam Kadmon is a collective name, so also is the name of the man Adam. Says George Smith, in his Chaldean Account of Genesis:

The word Adam used in these legends for the first human being is evidently not a proper name, but is only used as a term for mankind. Adam appears as a proper name in Genesis, but certainly in some passages is only used in the same sense as the Assyrian word.[9]