Humanity’s Relation To The Apes

At first glance it may seem rather odd to see a picture such as the above on a Theosophy website.

Yet it relates to one of the most interesting of the Theosophical teachings, one which is emphasised repeatedly throughout “The Secret Doctrine” by H. P. Blavatsky, particularly the second volume on “Anthropogenesis.”

That is the teaching of the Gupta Vidya (the archaic Esoteric Doctrine of the East) that man is not descended and evolved from the apes but that the apes are descended and evolved from man.

Simply put, in the Third Root Race – known as the Lemurian – and prior to the mass incarnation of the Manasaputras into humanity (which turned “animal man” into “human man” since the Manasaputras/Kumaras/Agnishvattas/Solar Pitris etc. are our Higher Egos, our inner spiritual Individuality, the Human Soul), some of the Lemurian men engaged in sexual relations with “huge she-animals,” large monstrous creatures, long since extinct.

Stanza VIII from the Book of Dzyan states: “MONSTERS THEY BRED. A RACE OF CROOKED RED-HAIR-COVERED MONSTERS GOING ON ALL FOURS. A DUMB RACE TO KEEP THE SHAME UNTOLD.” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 19)

Those were the distant forefathers of our modern day apes. After this tragedy, the Manasaputras incarnated, saying “LET US TEACH THEM BETTER, LEST WORSE SHOULD HAPPEN.” . . . THEN ALL MEN BECAME ENDOWED WITH MANAS. THEY SAW THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS.” (Stanza IX, “The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 20)

However, it is taught that the “Sin of the Mindless” was repeated in the subsequent Root Race, the Fourth, referred to as the Atlantean, albeit this time with knowledge and awareness of the sinfulness and wrong of it all. Men took female descendants of the Lemurian sin as their “wives” and bred further.

“. . . the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal – whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality – which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “Mind-less” races of the middle Third Race period.” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 683)

“The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 193)

“The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has gradually and with every generation and variety tended more and more to return to the original type of its male forefather – the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 201)

It doesn’t take spiritual genius or profound intuition to be able to see and sense – especially when looking at photos such as the one at the top of this page – the existence of some mysterious and far-distant relation and link between ourselves and these creatures – perhaps the Orang Utans particularly – who could be legitimately described as half-human, half-animal.

Theosophy maintains that the “door into the human kingdom” closed in the middle of the Fourth Race, meaning that those monads still journeying through the animal kingdom will not and cannot enter the human kingdom until the next Planetary Chain comes into being, evolved from our own Earth Chain after the completion of its Seventh Round, i.e. many many millions of years from now.

The one and only exception to this are these apes. Unlike the other animals, the ape bodies are already inhabited by some sort of Egos, seeing as they are of partly human descent, and it is said that the various species of ape are “destined to die out in this our race,” i.e. the present Fifth Root Race. (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 1, p. 184)

“The latter are truly “speechless men,” and will become speaking animals (or men of a lower order) in the Fifth Round, while the adepts of a certain school hope that some of the Egos of the apes of a higher intelligence will reappear at the close of the Sixth Root-race. What their form will be is of secondary consideration. . . .

“The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man. . . .

“Thus, it is most important to remember that the Egos of the apes are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms, which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and the earliest Fourth Race men. . . . It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended. . . . There were none before man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. . . . This is how Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows the former evolving from the latter.” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 262, 263)

William Q. Judge writes that “The karmic effect of this, including as it does all races, has yet to be fully felt and understood – at a much later day than now.” (“The Ocean of Theosophy” p. 130)

This teaching – greatly expanded, as it is, throughout the pages of “The Secret Doctrine” – deserves to be far better known than it is at present.

But the teachings of Theosophy are not simply sheer assertions which people are asked to believe and accept “on faith.” The Eastern Initiates who were the Teachers of H. P. Blavatsky knew that many of Their teachings would sound strange, implausible, or even ridiculous, to the modern mind, especially the modern Western mind which is educated in such a way as to make it automatically and unthinkingly sceptical and dismissive about anything which sounds remotely out of the ordinary.

This teaching about the apes is a case in point and flies in the face of the theories widely known and accepted as the Darwinian system of evolution.

And so, in “The Secret Doctrine,” HPB produces verifiable and referenced evidence after evidence from an array of different sources, scientific and archaeological included, to support and back up these assertions and demonstrates how if one is impartially minded there is in fact just as much reason, if not more so, to accept the likeliness of this as the Darwinian assertions. Truth may in fact be stranger than fiction!