The Secret Doctrine · 58 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza VI

22.Then the Second evolved the Egg‐born, the Third. The Sweat grew, its Drops grew, and the Drops became hard and round. The Sun warmed it; the Moon cooled and shaped it; the Wind fed it until its ripeness. The White Swan from the Starry Vault overshadowed the big Drop. The Egg of the Future Race, the Man‐swan of the later Third. First male‐female, then man and woman.

Insight

Stanza VII is the load-bearing one for Volume II’s anthropology — the descent of the Sons of Wisdom, the Manasaputras, into the mindless Third Race. The Mânasas (from manas, mind) are the cosmic intelligences who do what the Pitris could not: install the principle of self-aware mind in the human form. Some entered the chhâyâs and became the Arhats. Some only sparked the lower humans, leaving them with rudimentary mind. Some refused and deferred till the Fourth Race. The Promethean parallel that chapter 72 develops is set up here — fire from heaven gifted to a humanity that did not have it before, with the giver paying a cost. The same structural move appears in 1 Enoch 6-16 (the Watchers descend, teach the arts, are punished), in Genesis 6:1-4 (sons of God and daughters of men), in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John (Sophia’s descent and the awakening of the human spark). Blavatsky’s specific contribution is the integration: she reads the Watchers and Prometheus and the Manasaputras as the same cosmic event preserved in different traditional vocabularies. The reading has obvious appeal and obvious risks; she develops it cautiously enough that the doctrine works at the level of allegory whatever one makes of the literal claim.

23.The Self‐born were the Chhâyâs, the Shadows from the Bodies of the Sons of Twilight. Neither water nor fire could destroy them. Their sons were.