The Secret Doctrine · 57 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza V

18.The First were the Sons of Yoga. Their sons, the children of the Yellow Father and the White Mother.

Insight

The progression from Self-born to Sweat-born to Egg-born to androgyne to man-and-woman is one of the more striking features of Volume II and is doing several things at once. It maps a cross-cultural mythologem (the gradual sexualization of an originally undifferentiated humanity — Plato’s Symposium 189c-193d on the round primal humans is the locus classicus, and Genesis 1:27’s male-and-female-created-he-them Adam runs the same shape in Hebrew). It also tracks what nineteenth-century embryology was discovering about the recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny — Haeckel’s biogenetic law was contemporary with Blavatsky’s writing, and the egg-then-androgyne-then-sexed progression of the Stanzas reads as a cosmic mirror of vertebrate embryonic development. Whether or not the synthesis works as cosmology, it works as a way of asking what the embryo is doing in its earliest weeks: it really does run through forms more ancient than its eventual one. Modern evolutionary developmental biology has refined Haeckel without abandoning the underlying observation.

19.The Second Race was the product by budding and expansion, the A‐sexual from the Sexless.(28) Thus was, O Lanoo, the Second Race produced.

20.Their Fathers were the Self‐born. The Self‐born, the Chhâyâ from the brilliant Bodies of the Lords, the Fathers, the Sons of Twilight.

21.When the Race became old, the old Waters mixed with the fresher Waters. When its Drops became turbid, they vanished and disappeared in the new Stream, in the hot Stream of Life. The Outer of the First became the Inner of the Second. The old Wing became the new Shadow, and the Shadow of the Wing.