“_The teachings were imparted under protest.... They were, so to say, smuggled goods ... and when I remained face to face with only one correspondent, the other, Mr. ... had so far tossed all the cards into confusion, that little remained to be said without trespassing upon law._”
Theosophists “whom it may concern” will understand what is meant.
The outcome of all this is, that nothing had ever been said in the letters to warrant the assurance, that the Occult doctrine has ever taught, or any Adept believed in, unless metaphorically, the preposterous modern theory of the descent of man from a common ancestor with the ape—an anthropoid of the actual animal kind. To this day the world is more full of ape‐like men than the woods are of men‐like apes. The ape is sacred in India because its origin is well known to the Initiates, though concealed under a thick veil of allegory. Hanumâna is the son of Pavana (Vâyu, “God of the wind”) by Anjanâ, wife of a monster called Kesarî, though his genealogy varies. The reader who bears this in mind, will find in Volume II, _passim_, the whole explanation of this ingenious allegory. The “men” of the Third Race (who separated) were “Gods,” by their spirituality and purity, though senseless, and as yet destitute of mind, as men.
These “men” of the Third Race, the ancestors of the Atlanteans, were just such ape‐like, intellectually senseless, giants as were those beings, who, during the Third Round, represented Humanity. Morally irresponsible, it was these Third Race “men” who, through promiscuous connection with animal species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages later (in the Tertiary period only), the remote ancestor of the real ape, as we find it now in the pithecoid family.
And if this is found clashing with the statement which shows the animal later than man, then the reader is asked to bear in mind that the _placental mammal_ only is meant. In those days, there were animals of which Zoölogy does not even dream in our own; _and the modes of reproduction were not identical_ with the notions which modern Physiology has upon the subject. It is not altogether convenient to touch upon such questions in public, but there is _no_ contradiction or impossibility in this whatever.