To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

20 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
result of a series of miscegenations, that is, mating of humans
with animals; and that this occurred during the very
early stages of humanity’s racial experience, before the line
of demarcation between human and animal stocks had
become sharply drawn.
In Man in Evolution, a critique of the evolutionary theories
that scientists since Darwin had propounded through
the 1930s, Purucker analyzed the biological and anatomical
evidence and showed that the physical form of man is beyond
doubt far more primitive than that of the simians or
other primates. As scientists have never found any anatomical
characteristic to go backwards, but always forwards, obviously
the most primitive features are the oldest; and as the
bodies of monkeys and apes in significant ways are more
specialized or evolved anatomically than man’s body is, they
must have come after man.
Rather than looking for fossil links, Purucker suggested
that the real missing link in scientific theory is that of consciousness,
the dynamic element behind the evolution of
forms, human or other; further, that man was the origin,
the parent and source of all species lower than himself. In
brief, he takes man back to some prototype or original parent
when the human stock had a semi-ethereal or astral
form, from which over the ages many cells were cast o¤.
These cast-o¤ cells later developed along their individual
lines to form the lower stocks.
It is ironic that since the publication of The Descent of
Man most scientists along with the general public have
taken Darwin’s hypotheses as facts, instead of regarding
them, as he had hoped, as theories to be tested and proved or