Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky
Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky
Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky
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the monopoly of puzzled materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was<br />
deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary Age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a<br />
period when the Haeckelian man-ape is conceived to have roamed through the primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen's<br />
putative ancestor to have swung himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third<br />
Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a<br />
mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean giants, "blurred<br />
copies" of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man (Huxley), now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative<br />
Anthropologist of European Science.<br />
Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some in Southern Asia, others, again, believe in an<br />
independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a Simian ancestry (Vogt). Haeckel, however, advances<br />
gaily to the charge. Starting from his "prosimiae" . . . "the ancestor common to all other catarrhini, including man" -- a<br />
"link" now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries! -- he endeavours to find a habitat for the<br />
primeval Pithecanthropus alalus. "In all probability it (the transformation of animal into man) occurred in Southern Asia, in<br />
which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of men. Probably<br />
Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but LEMURIA, a continent that lay to the south of Asia,<br />
and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. (Vide infra, "Scientific and geological proofs of the former<br />
existence of several<br />
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 680 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.<br />
submerged continents.") "The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into apelike men took place was<br />
probably the last part of the tertiary period, the Pliocene Age, and perhaps the Miocene, its forerunner." (Pedigree of Man,<br />
p. 73.)<br />
Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind -- of<br />
the physical sexual creature who materialized through long aeons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved<br />
that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Haeckel the "dumb ape-men," just<br />
removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, some of which are now in the British<br />
Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Haeckelian doctrines "abominable, revolutionary, immoral" -- though materialism<br />
is the legitimate outcome of the ape-ancestor myth -- they are simply too absurd to demand disproof.<br />
-------<br />
B.<br />
WESTERN EVOLUTIONISM: THE COMPARATIVE ANATOMY OF MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID IN NO WAY A<br />
CONFIRMATION OF DARWINISM.<br />
We are told that while every other heresy against modern science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian<br />
theory as applied to Man, will be the one "unpardonable" sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of<br />
similarity of structure between the ape and the man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this<br />
case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.<br />
Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Ramayana, the poets who sang the<br />
prowess and valour of Hanuman, the monkey-God, "whose feats were great and Wisdom never rivalled," must have<br />
known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Haeckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes<br />
were written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new whatever given to<br />
the world or to philosophy, in such volumes as Mivart's "Man and Apes," or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of<br />
Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not<br />
the true one -- we are told -- if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we are called upon to explain<br />
the reason of:--<br />
(I.) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the<br />
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[[Vol. 2, Page 681]] HUXLEY CALLS THE DARWINISTS TO ORDER.<br />
higher animal world -- man and beast -- is physically of one type or pattern.<br />
(II.) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these<br />
organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except for a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster.<br />
Why, again, do we find in Man those "rudimentary" organs (as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the Apteryx of<br />
Australia), the vermiform appendix of the coecum, the ear muscles,* the "rudimentary tail" (with which children are still<br />
sometimes born), etc., etc.?<br />
Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the<br />
scientific Evolutionists themselves!<br />
Furthermore, the latter themselves -- with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent zoologists as Mr. Romanes<br />
and others -- while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of<br />
its final demonstration. And there are as great men of science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the<br />
uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed<br />
similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, of Owen, Pruner-Bey, and finally, at the last great work<br />
of de Quatrefages, "Introduction a l'Etude des Races humaines, Questions generales," to discover the fallacy of the<br />
Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning such similarity of structure between man and the<br />
anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley found himself forced to protest