The Secret Doctrine · 52 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Part I. Anthropogenesis

Twelve Stanzas From the “Book Of Dzyan,”(27)

Context

Volume II of The Secret Doctrine carries the Sanskrit-pattern subtitle Anthropogenesis, the genesis of the human, paired with Volume I’s Cosmogenesis. The structural claim of this volume is that the human story does not begin in the Pleistocene with proto-hominids gradually walking upright but in a long planetary descent through seven Rounds and seven Root Races, of which present humanity is the fifth. The opening epigraph from the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lonnrot, 1835 and 1849) is doing the comparative-religion move that Volume II runs constantly: cosmic egg, primal mother, sevenfold creation, all surfacing in a Baltic source, in Hindu sources, in Genesis. Whether one credits Blavatsky’s deeper claim that these are fragments of a single archaic doctrine or one prefers Frazer’s later view of independent mythopoetic faculty arriving at similar images, the parallels she gathers in this volume are real. The doctrines built on top of those parallels are where the disagreements begin.

With Commentaries.

In primeval times, a maiden, Beauteous Daughter of the Ether, Passed for ages her existence In the great expanse of Heaven.

Seven hundred years she wandered,

Seven hundred years she laboured, Ere her first‐born was delivered.

Ere a beauteous duck descending, Hastens toward the water‐mother,

Lightly on the knee she settles, Finds a nesting‐place befitting, Where to lay her eggs in safety.

Lays her eggs within, at pleasure, Six, the golden eggs she lays there, Then a Seventh, an egg of iron.

Kalevala (CRAWFORD).

Text.