THEOSOPHY, Vol. 45, No. 8, June, 1957
(Pages 353-358; Size: 18K)REMNANTS OF THE SUB-RACES(1)
SINCE Vaivasvata Manu's Humanity appeared on this Earth, there have already been four axial disturbances. The old continents -- save the first one -- were sucked in by the oceans, other lands appeared, huge mountain chains arose where there had been none before. The face of the Globe was completely changed each time. The survival of the fittest nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones -- the failures -- were disposed of by being swept off the earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is in order. The Sub-races are subject to the cleansing process, as also the side-branchlets (the family races).
We are told that it is after the destruction of "Lemuria" by subterranean fires that men went on steadily decreasing in stature -- a process already commenced after their physical Fall; and that finally, some millions of years after, they reached between six and seven feet, and are now dwindling (as the older Asiatic races) to nearer five than six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a sub-race of the fourth root-race) a singular diversity of stature. The members of the Polynesian family (Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders) are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the Indo-Chinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest stock of the surviving sub-races, the others to the very last and transitory stock. The Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians are rapidly dying out. So will the other old races soon follow.
The light yellow is the color of the first Solid human race, which appeared after the middle of the third root-race (after its fall into generation) bringing on the final changes. This race gave birth to the fourth race; "Siva" gradually transforming that portion of Humanity which became "black with sin" into red-yellow (the red Indians and the Mongolians being the descendants of these) and finally into brown-white races -- which now, together with the yellow races, form the great bulk of Humanity. The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the fourth root-race ... [inland] Chinamen and their off-shoots and branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hungarians, Finns, and even the Esquimaux are all remnants of this last offshoot). The present yellow races are the descendants however of the early branches of the fourth race. Of the third race, the only pure and direct descendants are a portion of the fallen and degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors belonged to a division of the seventh sub-race of the third. The rest are of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in stature and intellectual capacities.
Mankind is obviously divided into the god-informed and the lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training and civilization could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The "sacred spark" is missing in them, and it is just they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily fast dying out. Verily mankind is "of one blood," but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent. The phrase used in the Stanzas, "They were not ready," signifies that the Karmic development of these Monads had not yet fitted them to occupy the forms of men destined for incarnation in higher intellectual races.
Those races which "remained destitute of knowledge," or those again which were left mindless, remained as they were, even after the natural separation of the sexes. It is these who committed the first cross-breeding, so to speak, and bred monsters. And it is from the descendants of these that the Atlanteans chose their wives. Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians, and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc. The Australians of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighborhood of Adelaide are very hairy, and brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men -- not the closest approximation to the "pithecoid man," as Haeckel so sweepingly affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic.
The survivors of the later Lemurians, who escaped the destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being of a very low sub-race, begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment strongly subjected to the Law of Retardation. In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the "Lords of Wisdom" did not incarnate. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural "sexual-selection"), originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes later. There are naturalists who have sincerely considered the problem whether some savage tribes, like the Bushmen for instance, can be regarded as men at all. The Commentary says, in describing that species (or race) of animals "fair to look at" as a biped: "Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the waist down, covered with hair." Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.
The Malays and Papuans (of New Guinea) are a mixed stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub-race with the Seventh sub-race of the third root-race. Like the Hottentots, they are of indirect Lemuro-Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact -- to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma -- that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the globe, among those races whose "time is up" -- among just those stocks, be it remembered, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists.
... Further, is not the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to account for on materialistic lines? Whence the "destined cycle" and the order here testified? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their "appointed hour"? The answer that it is due to a "mental disproportion" between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden "checks to fertility" which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks, "the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three great human types" (before the sixth root-race dawns), the white (Aryan, fifth root-race), the yellow, and the African negro -- with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc., etc., -- all are dying out. Those who realize that every root-race runs through a gamut of seven sub-races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the "why." The tide-wave of incarnating egos has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity.
The human is the only species which, however unequal in its race, can breed together. "There is no question of selection between human races," say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument -- one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultists insist that a portion of the fourth race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginning of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. But we have to this day proofs of this. The Secret Doctrine teaches that the specific unity of mankind is not without exceptions even now. For there are, rather still were a few years ago, descendants of these half-animal tribes or races, both of remote Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin. Tasmanians (now extinct), Australians, Andaman Islanders. The descent of the Tasmanians can be almost proved by a fact, which struck Darwin a good deal, without his being able to make anything of it. This fact deserved notice.
Now de Quatrefages and other naturalists, who seek to prove Monogenesis by the very fact of every race of mankind being capable of crossing with every other, have left out of their calculations exceptions, which do not in this case confirm the rule. Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of the sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to choose a member of such mixed tribes. "Crossing," as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e., the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless" and mindless monster and a real human, though still a mindless man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric philosophy, let us remember, only fills in the gaps made by science and corrects her false premises. Thus, in calling the animal soulless, it is not depriving the beast, from the humblest to the highest species, of a "soul," but only of a conscious surviving Ego-soul, i.e., that principle which survives after the man, and reincarnates in a like man. The animal has an astral body, that survives the physical form for a short period; but its (animal) Monad does not reincarnate in the same, but in a higher species, and has no "Devachan" of course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are latent.
The theory which would judge of the intellectual capacity of a man according to his cranial capacity, seems absurdly illogical to one who has studied the subject. The skulls of the stone period, as well as those of African races (Bushmen included) show that the first are above rather than below the average of the brain capacity of the modern man, and the skulls of the last are on the whole (as in the case of Papuans and Polynesians generally) larger by one cubic inch than that of the average Frenchman. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Bernard Davis, the Craniologist, worked out in 1868, with regard to the internal capacity of the skull -- its volume being taken as the standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities -- Dr. Pfaff finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest rank of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus "perceptibly smaller than that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches"; which shows that it is the quality and not the quantity of the brain that is the cause of intellectual capacity. And figures in relation to the size of the respective brain of man and ape show how deep is the gulf that separates the two. Vogt says that the brain of the largest ape, the gorilla, measures no more than 30.51 cubic inches; while the average brains of the flat-headed Australian natives -- the lowest now in the human races -- amount to 99.35 cubic inches! Figures are awkward witnesses and can not lie.
Even in the coming Seventh Race, at the close of this fourth Round, while our four lower principles will be fully developed, that of Manas will be only proportionately so. This limitation, however, refers solely to the spiritual development. The intellectual, on the physical plane, was reached during the fourth root-race. Thus, those who were "half-ready," who received "but a spark," constitute the average humanity which has to acquire its intellectuality during the present Manvantaric evolution after which they will be ready in the next for the full reception of the "Sons of Wisdom." While those which "were not ready" at all, the latest Monads, which had hardly evolved from their latest transitional and lower animal forms at the close of the third Round, remained the "narrow-brained" of the Stanzas of Dzyan.
This explains the otherwise unaccountable degrees of intellectuality among the various races of men -- the savage Bushman and the European -- even now. Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are very little above the level of the animals, are not the unjustly disinherited, or the unfavored, as some may think -- nothing of the kind. They are simply those latest arrivals among the human Monads, which were not ready: which have to evolve during the present Round, as on the three remaining globes (hence on four different planes of being) so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth Round. One remark may prove useful, as food for thought to the student in this connection. The MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the "narrow-brained" savage South Sea Islanders, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had. The former are spinning out Karma only now; the latter are burdened with past, present, and future Karma. In this respect the poor savage is more fortunate than the greatest genius of civilised countries.
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