Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky

WHAT MAY BE THE OBJECTIONS TO THE FOREGOING.
Thus Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but
traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this
proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all that are needed at present. For greater
clearness, however, we shall repeat in brief what was said previously in Book I., Stanza VI.
Our teachings show that, while it is quite correct to say that nature had built, at one time, around the human astral form an
ape-like external shape, yet it is as correct that this shape was no more that of the "missing link," than were the coverings
of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through all the kingdoms of nature. Nor was it, as shown in
the proper place, on this Fourth Round planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First, Second, and Third
Rounds, when MAN was, in turn, "a stone, a plant, and an animal" until he became what he was in the First Root-Race of
present humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, except
when the latter is divorced from the dogma of "Natural Selection" and the like. Indeed, between the Monera of Haeckel
and the Sarisripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape of the Jiva; for the "human" Monad, whether
immetallized in the stone-atom, or invegetallized in the plant, or inanimalized in the animal, is still and ever a divine,
hence also a HUMAN Monad. It ceases to be human only when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms "mineral,"
"vegetable" and "animal" monad are meant to create a superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (jiva)
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 186 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
other than divine, and consequently having been, or having to become, human. And the latter term has to remain
meaningless unless the difference is well understood. The Monad is a drop out of the shoreless Ocean beyond, or, to be
correct, within the plane of primeval differentiation. It is divine in its higher and human in its lower condition -- the
adjectives "higher" and "lower" being used for lack of better words -- and a monad it remains at all times, save in the
Nirvanic state, under whatever conditions, or whatever external forms. As the Logos reflects the Universe in the Divine
Mind, and the manifested Universe reflects itself in each of its Monads, as Leibnitz put it, repeating an Eastern teaching,
so the MONAD has, during the cycle of its incarnations, to reflect in itself every root-form of each kingdom. Therefore, the
Kabalists say correctly that "MAN becomes a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, a Spirit, and finally God. Thus
accomplishing his cycle or circuit and returning to the point from which he had started as the heavenly MAN." But by
"Man" the divine Monad is meant, and not the thinking Entity, much less his physical body. While rejecting the immortal
Soul, the men of Science now try to trace the latter through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest;
whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak.
The animals -- the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded man in this Fourth Round, as well as those
contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races -- all are
either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product (physically) of man. It is correct to say that the man of this
Manvantara, i.e., during the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of nature. That he was "a
stone, a plant, an animal." But (a) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those
of the Fourth Round; and (b) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows of the present, as
the Occultists express it. And finally the forms and genera of neither man, animal, nor plant were what they became later.
Thus the astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which preceded (the chhayas
of) Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms or models produced at
the close of the Third Round on Globe D.* "Produced from the residue of the substance matter; from dead bodies of men
and (other extinct) animals of the wheel before," or the previous Third Round -- as Stanza 24 tells us. Hence, while the
nondescript "animals"
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* Vide "Esoteric Buddhism."
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 187 THE DARWINISTS MISTAKEN.
that preceded the astral man at the beginning of this life-cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the man
of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to man again. Moreover, the
"ancestor" of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his
human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal.
The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought forward by the anthropologists as a
demonstration of the descent of man from the animals.
The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, "The history of the embryo is an epitome of that of the race."
That "every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a series of forms, through which, in like succession,
its ancestors have passed in the long course of Earth's history.* The history of the embryo . . . . is a picture in little, and
outline of that of the race. This conception forms the gist of our fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place
at the head of the study of the fundamental law of organic development."**
This modern theory was known as a fact to, and far more philosophically expressed by, the Sages and Occultists from the
remotest ages. A passage from "Isis Unveiled" may here be cited to furnish a few points of comparison. In Vol. I., pp. 388-
9, it was asked why, with all their great learning, physiologists were unable to explain teratological phenomena? Any
anatomist who has made the development and growth of the embryo "a subject of special study," can tell, without much
brain-work, what daily experience and the evidence of his own eyes show him, viz., that up to a certain period, the human
embryo is facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the spawn -- tadpole. But no physiologist or anatomist
seems to have had the idea of applying to the development of the human being -- from the first
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