COULD MEN EXIST 18,000,000 YEARS AGO?
To this Occultism answers in the affirmative, notwithstanding all scientific objectors. Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivasvata-Manu Man, i.e., the male and female entity already separated into distinct sexes. The two and a half Races that preceded that event may have lived 300,000,000 years ago for all that Science can tell. For the geological and physical difficulties in the way of the theory could not exist for the primeval, ethereal Man of the Occult Teachings. The whole issue of the quarrel between the Profane and the Esoteric Sciences depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an Astral Body within the Physical, the former independent of the latter. Paul d'Assier, the Positivist, seems to have proven the fact pretty plainly,[350] not to speak of the accumulated testimony of the ages, and that of the [pg 158] modern “Spiritualists” and Mystics. It will be found difficult to reject this fact in our age of proofs, tests, and ocular demonstrations.
The Secret Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms and disturbances of the Fourth Round of our Globe, which—owing to its being the period of its greatest physical development, for the Fourth Round is the middle-point of the Life Cycle allotted to it—were far more terrible and intense than during any of the three preceding Rounds—the Cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual life and of its semi-ethereal conditions—Physical Humanity has existed upon it for the last 18,000,000 years.[351] This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to accept the theory of a “boneless,” purely ethereal, man, will object. Science, which knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic Theology still more so. The former will object on logical and reasonable grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the latter on a tissue of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought forward by Theologians is based on the virtual assumption that mankind (read Christians) on this Planet have the honour of being the only human beings in the whole Kosmos, who dwell on a Globe, and that they are consequently, the best of their kind.[352]
The Occultists, who believe firmly in the teachings of the Mother-Philosophy, repel the objections of both Theologians and Scientists. They maintain, on their side, that, even during those periods when there must have been insufferable heat, even at the two poles, with [pg 159] successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an impediment to human life and organization, such as is assigned by them to early mankind. Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious gases, nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First and Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous, or the Silurian Age itself.
Thus the Monads destined to animate future Races were ready for the new transformation. They had passed their phases of “immetalization,” of plant and animal life, from the lowest to the highest, and were waiting for their human, more intelligent form. Yet what could the Plastic Modellers do but follow the laws of evolutionary Nature? Could they, as claimed by the biblical dead-letter, form, “Lord-God”-like, or as Pygmalion in the Greek allegory, Adam-Galatea out of volcanic dust, and breathe a “Living Soul” into Man? No; because the Soul was already there, latent in its Monad, and needed but a “coating.” Pygmalion, who fails to animate his statue, and Bahak Zivo of the Nazaræan Gnostics, who fails to construct “a human soul in the creature,” are, as conceptions, far more philosophical and scientific than Adam, taken in the dead-letter sense, or the biblical Elohim-Creators. Esoteric Philosophy, which teaches spontaneous generation—after the Shishta and Prajâpati have thrown the seed of life on the Earth—shows the Lower Angels able to construct physical man only, even with the help of Nature, after having evolved the Ethereal Form out of themselves, and leaving the physical form to evolve gradually from its ethereal, or what would now be called, protoplasmic, model.
This will again be objected to; “spontaneous generation” is an exploded theory, we shall be told. Pasteur's experiments disposed of it twenty years ago, and Professor Tyndall is against it. Well, suppose he is? He ought to know that, should spontaneous generation be indeed proven impossible in our present world-period and actual conditions—which the Occultists deny—still it would be no demonstration that it could not have taken place under different cosmic conditions, not only in the seas of the Laurentian Period, but even on the then convulsed Earth. It would be interesting to know how Science could ever account for the appearance of species and life on Earth, especially of Man, once that she rejects both the biblical teachings and spontaneous generation. Pasteur's observations, however, are far from being perfect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud reject their importance, [pg 160] and, in fact, show that they have none. The question is so far left sub judice, as well as the other as to when, at what period, life appeared on the Earth? As to the idea that Hæckel's Moneron—a pinch of salt!—has solved the problem of the origin of life; it is simply absurd. Those Materialists, who feel inclined to pooh-pooh the theory of the “Self-existent,” the “Self-born Heavenly Man,” represented as an Ethereal, Astral Man, must excuse even a tyro in Occultism laughing, in his turn, at some speculations of Modern Thought. After proving most learnedly that the primitive speck of Protoplasm (Moneron) is neither animal nor plant, but both, and that it has no ancestors among either of these, since it is that Moneron which serves as a point of departure for all organized existence, we are finally told that the Monera are their own ancestors. This may be very scientific, but it is very metaphysical also; too much so, even for the Occultist.
If spontaneous generation has changed its methods now—owing, perhaps, to accumulated material on hand—so as to almost escape detection, it was, nevertheless, in full swing in the genesis of terrestrial life. Even the simple physical form and the evolution of species show how Nature proceeds. The scale-bound, gigantic Saurian, the winged Pterodactyl, the Megalosaurus, and the hundred feet long Iguanodon of the later period, are the transformations of the earliest representatives of the animal kingdom found in the sediments of the primary epoch. There was a time when all the above enumerated “antediluvian” monsters appeared as filamentoid Infusoria without shell or crust, with neither nerves, muscles, organs nor sex, and reproduced their kind by gemmation; as do microscopical animals also, the architects and builders of our mountain ranges, agreeably to the teachings of Science. Why not man in this case? Why should he not have followed the same law in his growth, i.e., gradual condensation? Every unprejudiced person would prefer to believe that Primeval Humanity had at first an Ethereal—or, if so preferred, a huge filamentoid, jelly-like Form, evolved by Gods or natural “Forces,” which grew, condensed throughout millions of ages, and became gigantic in its physical impulse and tendency, until it settled into the huge, physical form of the Fourth Race Man—rather than believe him created of the dust of the Earth (literally), or from some unknown anthropoid ancestor.
Nor does our Esoteric theory clash with scientific data, except on first appearance, as Dr. A. Wilson, F.R.S., says, in a letter to Knowledge (Dec. 23, 1881):
Evolution—rather nature, in the light of evolution—has only been studied for some twenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional space in the history of human thought.
And just because of this we do not lose all hope that Materialistic Science will amend its ways, and will gradually accept the Esoteric Teachings—if even at first divorced from their (to Science) too metaphysical elements.