The Secret Doctrine · 56 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza IV

14. The Seven Hosts, the Will‐Born Lords, propelled by the Spirit of Life‐ Giving, separate Men from themselves, each on his own Zone.

15. Seven times seven Shadows of Future Men were born, each of his own Colour and Kind. Each inferior to his Father. The Fathers, the Boneless, could give no Life to Beings with Bones. Their progeny were Bhûta, with neither Form nor Mind. Therefore they are called the Chhâyâ Race.

Insight

The line that the Fathers, the Boneless, could give no Life to Beings with Bones is a compressed version of one of Volume II's load-bearing claims: that the densification of physical form is itself a phase of cosmic evolution, not its starting point. Bodies become bones late. This puts Blavatsky in direct contradiction with the then-emerging Darwinian story, in which density and skeleton come first and consciousness emerges from them, and into rough alignment with what the Vedantic tradition does with the koshas (the body of bliss innermost, the food-body outermost, in the Taittiriya Upanishad). Whether one finds the metaphysical claim plausible or not, it is worth seeing what is rhetorically at stake: Blavatsky is asking the reader to imagine that nineteenth-century materialism has the arrow of cosmic time pointed the wrong way.Taittiriya Upanishad II.1-5 on the five koshas; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) for the alternative being argued against.

16. How are the Manushya born? The Manus with minds, how are they made? The Fathers called to their help their own Fire, which is the Fire that burns in Earth. The Spirit of the Earth called to his help the Solar Fire. These Three produced in their joint efforts a good Rûpa. It could stand, walk, run, recline, or fly. Yet it was still but a Chhâyâ, a Shadow with no Sense....

17. The Breath needed a Form; the Fathers gave it. The Breath needed a Gross Body; the Earth moulded it. The Breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it into its Form. The Breath needed a Mirror of its Body; “We gave it our own!”—said the Dhyânis. The Breath needed a Vehicle of Desires; “It has it!”—said the Drainer of Waters. But Breath needs a Mind to embrace the Universe; “We cannot give that!”—said the Fathers. “I never had it!”—said the Spirit of the Earth. “The Form would be consumed were I to give it mine!”—said the Great Fire.... Man remained an empty senseless Bhûta.... Thus have the Boneless given Life to those who became Men with Bones in the Third.