The Secret Doctrine · 60 of 137

Volume II — Anthropogenesis: Stanza VIII

28.From the drops of sweat, from the residue of the substance, matter from dead bodies of men and animals of the Wheel before, and from cast‐off dust, the first animals were produced.

29.Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying Sarpas were added to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the air.

30.During the Third, the boneless animals grew and changed; they became animals with bones, their Chhâyâs became solid.

31.The animals separated the first. They began to breed. The two‐fold man separated also. He said: “Let us as they; let us unite and make creatures.” They did....

32.And those which had no Spark took huge she‐animals unto them. They begat upon them dumb races. Dumb they were themselves. But their tongues untied. The tongues of their progeny remained still. Monsters they bred. A race of crooked red‐hair‐covered monsters going on all fours. A dumb race to keep the shame untold.

Insight

The image of those without Spark taking huge she-animals and breeding dumb races is the Theosophical version of the Genesis 6 episode (the sons of God going in to the daughters of men) joined to the long-running mythologem of the bestial cross. It is also where Volume II is most exposed to the criticism that has dogged it since the early twentieth century: the language of mindless and dumb races, even in this strictly mythic register, was made to do later work by readers who took it as license for biological hierarchy. Blavatsky herself was a vehement anti-imperialist and opposed contemporary scientific racism, and her later expositors (notably Annie Besant) pushed the universalist reading hard. But the question of how the language travels once it leaves her hands is a separate question from her own intent; chapter 82 will be the place to look at the historical reception in detail.