The Secret Doctrine · 62 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza X

38.Thus, two by two, on the seven Zones, the Third Race gave birth to the Fourth; the Sura became A‐sura.

39.The First, on every Zone, was moon‐coloured; the Second yellow like gold; the Third red; the Fourth brown, which became black with sin. The first seven human shoots were all of one complexion. The next seven began mixing.

40.Then the Third and Fourth became tall with pride. “We are the kings; we are the gods.”

Insight

The Stanza’s flood that swallows the seven great islands is Volume II’s Atlantis-deluge, and the cross-traditional gathering of deluge myths is one of the better-supported pieces of comparative mythology. The Mesopotamian Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh tablet XI (with Utnapishtim), the Genesis flood of Noah, the Greek Deucalion and Pyrrha (Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2), the Hindu Manu and the fish-avatāra of Vishnu (Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1, Matsya Purana), the Chinese Yu, the Mesoamerican Popol Vuh’s wood-people destroyed by rain — Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index catalogs hundreds. Whether they preserve memory of a specific catastrophe (the Black Sea deluge hypothesis of Ryan and Pitman, 1997, made one case; the end of the Younger Dryas around 11,700 BCE is another candidate) or whether the flood is a near-universal mythopoetic shape that human cultures arrive at for their own reasons, the pattern is real. Blavatsky reads it as memory of the Fourth Race continent’s destruction; modern comparative mythology reads it more cautiously. The convergence itself is what The Secret Doctrine keeps pointing at.

41.They took wives fair to look upon. Wives from the mindless, the narrow‐headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and female, also Khado, with little minds.

42.They built temples for the human body. Male and female they worshipped. Then the Third Eye acted no longer.