The nymph went from tree to tree, and, as, with the dusky shoots that crowned their summits, she dried her limbs, the child she had conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores of her skin in drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and the winds collected them into one mass. “This,” said Soma [the Moon], “I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till the exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely girl named Mârishâ.”[402]
Now Kandu stands for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one “devoid of mind,” a fact hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image of clay, into which the “Lord God” breathes the “breath of life” but not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose terrestrial aspect is of the earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect it with Spirit and the Divine Soul. Pramlochâ is the Hindû Lilith of the Âryan Adam; and Mârishâ, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the “Sweat-born,” and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of mankind.
It is not Indra, who in this case figures in the Purânas, but Kâmadeva, the God of love and desire, who sends Pramlochâ on Earth. Logic, as well as the Esoteric Doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kâma is the king and lord of the Apsarases, of whom Pramlochâ is one; and, therefore, when Kandu, cursing her, exclaims: “Thou hast performed the office assigned by the monarch of the gods, go!”—he must mean by that monarch Kâma, and not Indra, to whom the Apsarases are not subservient. For Kâma, again, is in the Rig Veda[403] the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation. He was the First Movement that stirred the One, after its manifestation from the purely Abstract Principle, to create.
Desire first arose in It, which was the Primal Germ of Mind; and which Sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.
A Hymn in the Atharva Veda exalts Kâma into a supreme God and Creator, and says:
Kâma was born the first. Him, neither Gods nor Fathers [Pitris] nor Men have equalled.
The Atharva Veda identifies him with Agni, but makes him superior to that God. The Taittirîya Brâhmana makes him allegorically the son of Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Shraddhâ (faith). Elsewhere Kâma is born from the heart of Brahmâ; therefore he is Âtmabhû “Self-Existent,” and Aja, the “Unborn.” His sending Pramlochâ has a deep philosophical meaning; sent by Indra—the narrative has none. As Erôs was connected in early Greek mythology with the world's creation, and only afterwards became the sexual Cupid, so was Kâma in his original Vedic character; the Harivamsha making him a son of Lakshmî, who is Venus. The allegory, as said, shows the psychic element developing the physiological, before the birth of Daksha—the progenitor of real physical men—who is made to be born from Mârishâ and before whose time living beings and men were procreated “by the will, by sight, by touch, and by yoga,” as will be shown.
This, then, is the allegory on the mode of procreation of the Second or the “Sweat-born.” The same for the Third Race in its final development.
Mârishâ, through the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the Prachetases, the production of the “Mind-born” sons of Brahmâ also,[404] from whom they beget the Patriarch Daksha—a son of Brahmâ also in a former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Purânas, in order to mislead, yet speaking the truth.
3. The early Third Race, then, is formed from drops of “Sweat,” which, after many a transformation, grow into human bodies. This is not more difficult to imagine or realize than the growth of the fœtus [pg 187] from an imperceptible germ, and its subsequent development into a child, and then into a strong, heavy man. But the Third Race changes yet again its mode of procreation according to the Commentaries. It is said to have emanated a vis formativa, which changed the drops of perspiration into greater drops, which grew, expanded, and became ovoid bodies—huge eggs. In these the human fœtus gestated for several years. In the Purânas, Mârishâ, the daughter of Kandu, the sage, becomes the wife of the Prachetases, and the mother of Daksha. Now Daksha is the father of the first human-like Progenitors, having been born in this way. He is mentioned later on. The evolution of man, the microcosm, is analogous to that of the universe, the macrocosm. His evolution stands between that of the latter and that of the animal, for which man, in his turn, is a macrocosm.