The Secret Doctrine · 59 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza VII

24.The Sons of Wisdom, the Sons of Night, ready for rebirth, came down. They saw the vile forms of the First Third. “We can choose,” said the Lords, “we have wisdom.” Some entered the Chhâyâs. Some projected a Spark. Some deferred till the Fourth. From their own Rûpa they filled the Kâma. Those who entered became Arhats. Those who received but a Spark, remained destitute of knowledge; the Spark burned low. The Third remained mind‐ less. Their Jîvas were not ready. These were set apart among the Seven. They became narrow‐headed. The Third were ready. “In these shall we dwell,” said the Lords of the Flame and of the Dark Wisdom.

25.How did the Mânasa, the Sons of Wisdom, act? They rejected the Self‐ born. They are not ready. They spurned the Sweat‐born. They are not quite ready. They would not enter the first Egg‐born.

26.When the Sweat‐born produced the Egg‐born, the twofold, the mighty, the powerful with bones, the Lords of Wisdom said: “Now shall we create.”

27.The Third Race became the Vâhan of the Lords of Wisdom. It created Sons of Will and Yoga, by Kriyâshakti it created them, the Holy Fathers, Ancestors of the Arhats....

Insight

The line about the spark-less taking she-animals and breeding crooked dumb monsters is one of the passages in Volume II that has aged worst, and a careful reader needs to see what is rhetorically happening. Blavatsky is recasting Genesis 6:1-4 (sons of God and daughters of men) joined to the mythologem of the bestial cross, and locating the result as the cosmic origin of the higher apes — degenerate human-animal hybrids rather than ancestors. The language of dumb races and monsters reads brutally in a register Blavatsky did not intend it for; she was a vehement anti-imperialist who opposed contemporary scientific racism, and the mythic vocabulary she inherits from nineteenth-century esoteric writers (Hargrave Jennings, Eliphas Levi) was meant cosmologically rather than ethnologically. What the language does once it leaves her hands is a separate question, taken up properly in chapter 82’s longer note on the Ariosophy reception. The exegetical move underneath the offensive imagery is structurally Origenian (the Fall as failure of higher beings to maintain their station, with cosmic consequences); the moral risk of mythic language about lesser races is unavoidably real.