The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception

I read Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception for the Atlantis, Lemuria, flood, and race claims a later writer can set beside other books. The copy is the scan stored under a filename that says 1909. I do not take the year from the filename. The title page prints no year, so the year is not in the title of this review. It reads The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity, an elementary treatise upon man’s past evolution, present constitution and future development, by Max Heindel. Under the motto “Its Message and Mission. A sane mind. A soft heart. A sound body.” it says Third Edition, revised, enlarged and indexed, price one dollar and fifty cents, post free. The publisher is the Rosicrucian Fellowship, P. O. Box 866, Ocean Park, California. The European agents are L. N. Fowler and Co., 7 Imperial Arcade, Ludgate Circus, London, E. C. The leaf after the title page prints Copyright 1911 by Max Heindel, and names M. A. Donohue and Co., printers, binders, publishers, Chicago. That year is before 1929. I treat this edition as public domain and quote his own consecutive sentences. A bookplate in the scan reads Ex Libris C. K. Ogden.

Printed page numbers below are the numbers in the running heads. They are not the file-page numbers of the scan. This file has 620 pages, including blank leaves, the index, an epilogue, and advertisements. The title page is file page 7. The copyright page is file page 8. Neither carries a printed page number. Where a running head is readable, I cite that printed number.

He names H. P. Blavatsky and A. P. Sinnett. I keep his spellings of the Epochs and the Races, and I do not replace his list with anyone else’s. He does not name W. Scott-Elliot. He does not use the name Mu. For Plato’s own dialogues, see Timaeus and Critias. This review stays inside Heindel’s pages.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity.
• Author: Max Heindel.
• Edition I read: Third edition, revised, enlarged and indexed. The title page prints no year. Copyright 1911 by Max Heindel. Rosicrucian Fellowship, Ocean Park, California. L. N. Fowler and Co., London. Printed by M. A. Donohue and Co., Chicago. In a note called “The Reason” he says the first and second editions were sold at one dollar, that the last chapter has been rearranged and amplified from page 515, and that the book is now more than six hundred pages.
• Length: “A Word to the Wise” on printed pages 5 to 10, an introduction on pages 17 to 23, then nineteen chapters in three parts. The contents list the index at page 539 and “The Healing Power” at page 599. The epilogue I read is printed 599 to 602. Advertisements follow.
• What he claims: Human evolution on this Earth runs through Epochs, which he will not call Races. A Race, in his use of the word, begins only at the end of the Lemurian Epoch. He counts sixteen Races in all: one then, seven in the Atlantean Epoch, seven in the present Aryan Epoch, and one at the beginning of a Sixth Epoch. Lemuria is destroyed by volcanic cataclysms. Atlantis rises where the Atlantic Ocean now is, and is later inundated when its fogs condense. He gives no year for either disaster. He does not use the name Mu.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would carry to another book. The chapter notes give the pages. I do not collapse two of his phrases into one, and I do not supply a date he does not print.

• No date. He never gives a year, a century, or a count of years before his own time for Lemuria, for Atlantis, or for the inundation. The only near date in the race chapters is “a few hundred years,” until the Sun, by the precession of the equinoxes, enters Aquarius (p. 305).
• Epochs are not Races. On page 271 the seven stages of this sojourn on Earth are Epochs. Nothing that can correctly be called a Race appears until the end of the Lemurian Epoch. The printed line reads “The toal number of Races,” and the count that follows is sixteen: one at the end of the Lemurian Epoch, seven during the Atlantean Epoch, seven in the Aryan Epoch, and one at the beginning of the Sixth Epoch. After that, nothing can properly be called a Race. Races did not exist in the Periods before the Earth Period and will not exist in the Periods after it.
• Two names for the danger. On page 231 occult scientists call the sixteen Races, of which the Germano-Anglo-Saxon is one, “the sixteen possibilities for destruction.” On pages 306 and 312 the same sixteen are “the sixteen paths to destruction.” I keep both phrases. On page 305 the fifth Aryan Race is the Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon, “to which we belong.” I do not fold that into “Germano-Anglo-Saxon.”
• The seven Atlantean Races, in his spelling and his order. Rmoahals, Tlavatlis, Toltecs, Original Turanians, Original Semites, Akadians, Mongolians (pp. 294 to 303).
• The Aryan Races he is willing to name. The Aryan, which went south to India. The Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean. The Persian-Graeco-Latin. The Celtic. The Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon. Two more are still to come in this Epoch, one of them the Slav. From the Slavs comes the last of the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch. From the people of the United States comes the last of all the Races, at the beginning of the Sixth Epoch (pp. 305 to 306).
• Where the continents are. Atlantis is a continent which once existed between Europe and America, where the Atlantic Ocean now lies (p. 168), and again “where the Atlantic Ocean now is” (p. 291). Lemuria is the continent destroyed by volcanic cataclysms, in whose stead Atlantis rose (p. 291). He does not draw its coasts, and he does not call it Mu. Central Asia, and specifically the Gobi Desert, is the cradle of the Aryan Races (pp. 301, 304, 335).
• Two destructions, and neither is dated. Volcanic cataclysms destroy the greater part of the Lemurian continent (p. 291). Later the fogs of Atlantis condense, the water inundates the continent, and the greater part of the population and the evidences of their civilization are destroyed (pp. 303 to 304). Refugees wander across Europe.
• Who is left. The Mongolian races are the descendants of those Atlantean refugees. The Negroes and the savage races with curly hair are the last remnants of the Lemurians (p. 304). Earlier, the forms inhabited by the greater part of the Lemurians, the animal-like majority, have degenerated into the savages and anthropoids of the present day (p. 289). He asks the reader to keep forms and Egos apart.
• Noah, and a different seed. On page 168 Noah symbolizes the remnant of the Atlantean Epoch, which became the nucleus of the Fifth Race, and therefore our progenitors. In chapters XII to XIV the seed-race of the seven Aryan Races is the Original Semites, led east from Atlantis over Europe to the Gobi, and the faithful remnant of that people, not the cross-breeds, are the ancestors of the present Aryan Races. I do not make those two statements into one.
• What he says he is reconciling. On page 270 he says the next paragraphs are what he has received, and that they show how The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky and Esoteric Buddhism by A. P. Sinnett may be reconciled. On page 275 he says it is true that we have been in Mars and are going to Mercury, as one of those works teaches, and also true that we have never inhabited the planet Mars and are not to leave the Earth to live on Mercury, as the other work states in order to correct the first.

A Word to the Wise

Printed pages 5 to 10. He takes Mark 10:15, that whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall not enter it, as the occult maxim for a reader. A new philosophy is spoiled, he says, either by the person who wants only a vindication of ideas he already holds, or by the person who rejects whatever he has not already read. The pupil is to keep the mind fluid, to allow that even an “established fact” may look different from another point, and to withhold praise or blame until the book has been studied. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception is not dogmatic, and it appeals to no authority but the student’s reason. He warns that there is no infallible revelation of so complicated a subject. This preface adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Introduction

Printed pages 17 to 23. The Western world is the vanguard of the human race. The Rosicrucian holds that neither Judaism nor “popular Christianity,” but true esoteric Christianity, is to be its world-religion. Buddha may be the Light of Asia, but Christ will yet be acknowledged the Light of the World. He sets the chasm between head and heart, the riddle of a life that seems to begin at birth and end at death, and the claim that first-hand knowledge of the pre-natal and post-mortem states requires occult powers, while second-hand study is still open to the reader, as a traveler’s description of Africa is open to someone who has not been there. The introduction adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim. The reasons he promised for the religion of the West are taken up later, especially in chapters XIII and XV.

Chapter I. The Visible and Invisible Worlds

Printed pages 24 to 55. The first step in occultism is the study of the invisible worlds, unseen because the finer senses are dormant, as color is nonexistent to a man born blind. He divides the physical world into a chemical region and an etheric region, then the desire world and the world of thought, and he diagrams the seven worlds and the material world as a reverse reflection of the spiritual worlds. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter II. The Four Kingdoms

Printed pages 56 to 86. The three worlds of our planet are the present field of evolution. Only four kingdoms concern him here: mineral, plant, animal, and human. Their dense bodies are all chemical compounds. What differs is the vehicles they possess and the consciousness that follows. He also distinguishes a medium from a properly trained clairvoyant. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter III. Man and the Method of Evolution

The contents place the opening section, “Activities of Life; Memory and Soul-Growth,” at page 87, and the chapter runs to the life-cycle diagram on page 146. God permeates the universe, but in the seventh and highest world the Triune God alone is, and the next realm is the world of virgin spirits. He then sets the constitution of the sevenfold man, the silver cord, death and purgatory, a borderland, the first, second, and third heavens, the preparations for rebirth, and the successive births of the dense body, the vital body, the desire body at puberty, and the mind at majority. The blood is the vehicle of the Ego. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter IV. Rebirth and the Law of Consequence

Printed pages 147 to 176. Only three theories of life and death, he says, are worthy of note, and he measures them against laws of nature that all parties admit. The laws of rebirth and consequence have been taught in earlier religions and have been taught secretly all along, but by the command of Christ they have not been publicly taught in the Western world for the past two thousand years. Esoteric Christianity has not yet been taught publicly. Calling rebirth a heathen doctrine does not disprove it.

The outline of the Epochs is given here, before the full account in chapter XII. In the teaching of occult science the stages on the Earth are periods called Epochs. Four have already been passed: the Polarian, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian, the Atlantean. The present Epoch is the Aryan Epoch (p. 165). In the Polarian, humanity had only a dense body and was mineral-like. In the Hyperborean a vital body was added and man-in-the-making was plant-like, not a plant. In the Lemurian he obtained a desire body and was an animal-man. In the Atlantean, mind was unfolded and he steps upon the stage, so far as his principles are concerned, as man. In the Aryan he will in some degree unfold the lowest aspect of the threefold spirit, the Ego.

Food is part of the same outline, and he reads Genesis names as Epochs. The man of the first Epoch was ethereal, and all gases are mineral. In the Bible he is called Adam and is said to have been made of earth. Cain, the agriculturist, symbolizes the man of the second Epoch, with a vital body like the plants that sustained him. In the third Epoch, milk from living animals supplemented plant food and evolved the desire body. That is what he takes the statement “Abel was a shepherd” to mean. It is nowhere stated, he says, that Abel killed animals. In the fourth Epoch man had mind. Thought breaks down nerve cells, so the food of the Atlantean was, by analogy, dead carcasses.

Nimrod represents the man of the Fourth Epoch.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 166

Through the first four Epochs man still knew he did not die. A wasted body was like a leaf drying on a tree. He did not take concrete life seriously enough, as, Heindel says, the people of India do not today, for the same reason. Memory of the higher life had to be closed for a few incarnations. Christianity, as publicly taught, therefore does not embody consequence and rebirth. Because it is the religion of the most advanced Race, it must be the most advanced religion, and the conquest of matter is being made by the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races, in which this phase has been carried furthest (p. 168).

Each Epoch also changed the food. To the earlier foods wine is now added, because it benumbs the spiritual principle. Until then only water had been used as a drink and in the Temple. After the submergence of Atlantis, a continent which once existed between Europe and America, where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, those who escaped began to cultivate the vine and make wine, as in the Bible story of Noah. Noah symbolizes the remnant of the Atlantean Epoch, which became the nucleus of the Fifth Race, and therefore our progenitors (p. 168). The active principle of alcohol is a “spirit.” It paralyzes the spirit of fifth-Epoch man for a time, so that he will cling to this world. Bacchus appears, and none who offer tribute to wine or any alcoholic liquor can know the higher Self. This was preparatory to Christ, whose first act was to change water into wine (John 2:11). In private He taught rebirth to His disciples.

The rest of the chapter, including the section the contents call “A Remarkable Story” at page 172, is about rebirth, memory of a life that ended in childhood, and the law of consequence. It adds no further continent, flood, or race list. He does not yet name the seven Atlantean Races, and he does not date the submergence.

Chapter V. The Relation of Man to God

Printed pages 177 to 181. He has so far set man in three of five worlds, and against the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, through one life cycle under consequence and rebirth. This short chapter places man under God. Diagram 6 is the Supreme Being, the cosmic planes, and God. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter VI. The Scheme of Evolution

The contents place “The Beginning” at page 182. Solar systems are born, die, and are born again in cycles of activity and rest, as man is, on the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below.” A Great Being, called God in the Western world and by other names elsewhere, limits Himself to a portion of space and elects to create a solar system there. Heindel then lays out the seven worlds and the seven Periods, and diagrams the Saturn Period. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim. The Earth Epochs are not this chapter’s subject.

Chapter VII. The Path of Evolution

Printed pages 194 to 200. Diagrams of superphysical matters are less true than a picture of a house, because a Period or a World is not merely a solid object reduced by one dimension. He warns the reader not to take the lines as the reality. The path itself is revolutions and cosmic nights, diagrammed as seven worlds, seven globes, and seven Periods. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter VIII. The Work of Evolution

The contents place “Ariadne’s Thread” at page 201. The thread through globes, worlds, revolutions, and Periods is that the virgin spirits became entirely unconscious when they began the pilgrimage through the five worlds denser than the world of virgin spirits. He then describes the work of the Saturn Period, a recapitulation, the Sun Period, and the Moon Period, and diagrams the twelve creative hierarchies. The chapter adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter IX. Stragglers and Newcomers

Printed pages 223 to 232. He follows the triple evolution of life, consciousness, and form, and sorts the beings who failed to keep the pace. Some stragglers of an earlier Period can take a step upward later. Others fall so far behind that they become a drag. Diagram 10, on page 230, is his table of classes at the beginning of the Earth Period, the vehicles they then had, and their present state. In the present-state column he puts the Aryan Races as the pioneers. He puts the Mongolians, Africans, and all lower Races as the stragglers of the Moon Period. Anthropoids are marked as belonging to the human life wave, with the animals in the same broad class of stragglers and newcomers. I report the column as he prints it. I do not invent the vehicles the broken type of the diagram makes uncertain.

On page 231 the present period is the most critical of all, because a failure here wastes the work done since the dawn of the Saturn Period and holds a being in inertia for inconceivable milliards of years.

Therefore occult scientists speak of the sixteen Races, of which the Germano-Anglo-Saxon is one, as "the sixteen possibilities for destruction."

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 231

He does not name the sixteen here. The list, and the other phrase “sixteen paths to destruction,” are in chapter XII. This chapter does not describe Lemuria, Atlantis, or a flood. It does fix the Aryan Races, the Mongolians, and the Africans in his table of who is ahead and who is behind.

Chapter X. The Earth Period

Printed pages 233 to 245. The globes of the Earth Period lie in the four densest states of matter: the region of concrete thought, the desire world, the etheric region, and the chemical region. Globe D is our present Earth. “Densest” is relative. He then takes the Saturn, Sun, and Moon revolutions of the Earth Period, the rest between revolutions, and the fourth revolution, which is the present one. The elements accumulate: fire alone in the Saturn Period, fire and air in the Sun Period, and a third in the Moon Period.

The race claim in this chapter is about sight, not about a continent’s shape. During the Lemurian and Atlantean Epochs, already mentioned, man was involuntarily clairvoyant, because the vital body was not yet firmly tied to the dense body. Initiators of that time helped a candidate loosen the tie still further. Since then the two bodies are closely woven in most people, and loose in sensitives. Everyone must pass through the close connection and the limitation of consciousness that follows. He then splits sensitives into those who were never firmly enmeshed, “such as the majority of the Hindoos, the Indians, etc.,” who have a low grade of clairvoyance or hear the sounds of nature, and those in the vanguard who are emerging from the acme of materiality. Of the latter, some reawaken the solar plexus with the help of others and become mediums, a retrogression. Others train the organs of the voluntary nervous system and become occultists under their own will (pp. 241 to 242). He does not, on these pages, call the Hindoos or the Indians Lemurian remnants. That identification, for other peoples, is in chapter XII. This chapter names no flood and no Mu.

Chapter XI. Genesis and Evolution of Our Solar System

The contents place “Chaos” at page 246. Nothing has yet been said of the solar system and its planets, because the present differentiation was not made until the Earth Period, which is the acme of diversification. There are seven rays or streams of life, not only the one class of virgin spirits concerned with the Earth in the strictest sense. He describes chaos, the birth of the planets, and a diagram of vibrations, and diagram 12, man’s past, present, and future form. The throwing off of planets is the frame he will use in the next chapter, when Mars, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury leave the central mass. This chapter itself adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim.

Chapter XII. Evolution on the Earth

The contents place the Polarian Epoch at page 261. This is the chapter that carries the continents and the Races. I keep his section order.

The Polarian Epoch

While the material of the Earth was still part of the Sun, and fiery, human evolution began at once, particularly in the polar region of the Sun, because fire does not burn spirit. The highest beings who were to become human appeared first. Man, helped by the Lords of Form, built his first mineral body unconsciously, as a mother builds the body of a babe. That body was not like ours. It was a large baggy object with an opening at the top and a projecting organ, a kind of organ of orientation. If the body came too near a heat it could not endure, it disintegrated. In time the organ sensed the danger and the body moved. Heindel says that organ has degenerated into the pineal gland. It is sometimes called the third eye, and he says that is a misnomer: it was never an eye, but the localized sense of heat and cold, a sense now spread over the whole dense body. During the Polarian Epoch that sense was as localized as sight is now in the eye. He takes the later spreading of touch as the pattern for a future in which sight and hearing will also belong to the whole body. Propagation was a division in half, like a cell, but the halves did not grow. They each remained half the size of the parent (pp. 261 to 262).

The Hyperborean Epoch

Crust-islands formed in a sea of fire. The Lords of Form appeared with the Angels, who are the humanity of the Moon Period, and clothed the dense form with a vital body. The baggy bodies then grew by drawing material from outside, by a kind of osmosis. Propagation was no longer a split into equal halves. The parts were unequal, and each grew to the parent’s original size. The Polarian Epoch recapitulated the Saturn Period: mineral state, dense body only, a trance consciousness. The Hyperborean Epoch was the plant state: dense body and vital body, and a dreamless-sleep consciousness (p. 263).

Man began on the Earth after Mars had been thrown off, while the Earth was still undetached from the Sun. At the close of the Hyperborean Epoch the incrustation hindered some of the higher beings in the Sun, and the fire hindered lower grades such as man, who needed a denser world. The part which is now the Earth was thrown off and revolved about the parent body in an orbit somewhat different from the present one. Shortly afterwards Venus and Mercury were thrown off for similar reasons. Crystallization begins at the pole, where motion is slow, and works toward the equator. If centrifugal force is stronger than cohesion, the consolidated mass is thrown into space (pp. 263 to 264).

When the Earth-globe separated, it still included what is now the Moon. On that globe were the present human life-wave and the life-waves now in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. Some stragglers had been given a chance to step upward and had not taken it. They crystallized their part of the Earth into a huge cinder in an otherwise soft and fiery globe. In the beginning of the Lemurian Epoch they, and the part they had crystallized, were thrown into space beyond recall. That is his genesis of the Moon (p. 264). He then calls the Moon the eighth sphere, the field of disintegration, while globes A to G are the field of evolution. Had the Earth stayed in the Sun, man would have grown and aged too fast, as growth is faster in the tropics than in the north. Had the Moon stayed with the Earth, man would have crystallized into a statue. The Sun works in the vital body and makes for life. The Moon builds form and, by the same work continued, crystallizes the tissues and causes death (pp. 265 to 266).

The Lemurian Epoch

The Archangels, humanity of the Sun Period, and the Lords of Mind, humanity of the Saturn Period, appeared, assisted by the Lords of Form. They helped man build the desire body. The Lords of Mind gave the germ of mind to the greater part of the pioneers, class 1 on diagram 10. They vivified the human spirit in as many Moon-Period stragglers as had made the necessary progress, but they could not yet give those stragglers the germ of mind. A great part of nascent humanity was left without the link between the threefold spirit and the threefold body. The Lords of Mind impregnated the higher desire body and the germinal mind with separate selfhood. Heindel calls that the birth of the individual (pp. 265 to 266).

The personality is the reflected picture of the spirit, the mind being the mirror. As trees reflected in a pond look inverted, the divine spirit corresponds to the dense body, the life spirit to the vital body, and the human spirit to the desire body. The meeting of the descending spirit and the ascending bodies in the mind is the birth of the Ego. It did not make the man of that day a thinking being. Organs were rudimentary, there was no brain to use as an instrument, and the consciousness was the dimmest imaginable. He was far from being as intelligent as our present animals. The first improvement was a brain, and that was achieved by separating humanity into sexes (p. 267).

The Ego is bisexual. If it were sexless, the body would be sexless, because the body is the symbol of the spirit. In the inner worlds sex is two qualities: Will, the male power, allied to the Sun, and Imagination, the female power, linked to the Moon. That, he says, is why the Moon has a special power over the female organism, and why woman tends to imagination. While the matter of Earth and Moon was still part of the Sun, the body was plastic and both forces worked in every body. The man of the Hyperborean Epoch was hermaphrodite, able to produce another being from himself. After the Earth left the Sun and threw off the Moon, some bodies answered more to one force and some to the other (pp. 267 to 268).

Mars, before the separation of the sexes, traveled in a different orbit, and its aura permeated the central planet and polarized the iron. Iron is essential to warm red blood, so creatures were cold-blooded, or rather no warmer than the surrounding atmosphere. When the Earth was set free, the orbits changed, Mars withdrew the remainder of that influence, and iron became available on our planet. Iron is the basis of separate existence. Without it the Ego could have no hold on the body. When red blood developed, in the latter part of the Lemurian Epoch, the body became upright and the Ego could begin to dwell within it and control it (pp. 268 to 269).

Dwelling within is a means, not the end. Sense organs, a larynx, and above all a brain had to be built. While the Earth was united with the Sun, solar forces fed man and he unconsciously radiated the surplus for propagation. When the Ego took possession, part of that force had to build the brain and the larynx. The larynx was built while the dense body was still bent in the bag-like shape of the human embryo. As the body straightened, part of the creative organ stayed with the upper body and became the larynx. The dual creative force was divided. One part went upward for thought and speech. One individual then had only half the force needed to create another being, and had to seek a partner who had the other half. Brain consciousness of the outside world was bought at the cost of half the creative power. Before that, man was a creator in the physical world only. Since then he can create in three worlds (pp. 269 to 270).

The races and their leaders

Before the Lemurians in detail, he surveys the Races and their leaders. Valuable books of the Eastern Wisdom have contained mistakes, because the people who received the teachings misunderstood them. Any book not written directly by the Elder Brothers is liable to error. He does not presume to criticize. He sets down what he has received, which he says shows how the differing teachings of The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky and Esoteric Buddhism by A. P. Sinnett may be reconciled (p. 270).

The part of human evolution to be accomplished during the present sojourn of the life wave on our Earth is divisible into seven great stages or Epochs, and these cannot appropriately be called Races.

Nothing to which that name could be correctly applied appears until the end of the Lemurian Epoch.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 271

From that time different Races succeed one another through the Atlantean and Aryan Epochs, and will extend slightly into the Sixth great Epoch. The printed count, under the misprinted word “toal,” is sixteen: one at the end of the Lemurian Epoch, seven during the Atlantean Epoch, seven more in the Aryan Epoch, and one in the beginning of the Sixth Epoch.

After that time there will be nothing that can properly be called a Race.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 271

Races did not exist in the Periods which have preceded the Earth Period and they will not exist in those Periods which follow it.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 271

Only here, at the nadir of material existence, is the difference between man and man great enough to warrant the separation into Races.

The immediate leaders, apart from the creative hierarchies, came from Venus and Mercury, the two planets between the Earth and the Sun. They are not so far advanced as the Sun beings, but much further advanced than our humanity. Venus was thrown off first, then Mercury. The inhabitants of Mercury are the furthest advanced, and so are closer to the Sun. Some of each were sent to the Earth. Occult scientists know them as the Lords of Venus and the Lords of Mercury. The Lords of Venus were inferior beings of the Venus evolution. They led the masses and were known as messengers of the Gods. There was no rebellion, because man had not yet evolved an independent will. They were held in deep reverence. Their commands were obeyed without question (pp. 271 to 272).

When mankind had reached a certain stage, the most advanced were placed under the Lords of Mercury, who initiated them into higher truths so that they could lead the people. These initiates were exalted to kingship and founded the dynasties of divine rulers, kings by the grace of God, that is, by the grace of the Lords of Venus and Mercury. A king then held a sacred trust. While those kings reigned, all things prospered, and it was a Golden Age. The present phase is not a golden age except in a material sense, but it is necessary if man is to reach self-mastery, which is the end of all rulership (pp. 272 to 273).

The purpose of the Lords of Mercury, of all hierophants since, and of the occult schools of our day, is to teach self-mastery. A man is qualified to govern others only in the measure that he has mastered himself. If present rulers could govern themselves, we should again have the millennium or Golden Age. The Lords of Venus worked on the masses of a long-past age. The Lords of Mercury now work on the individual. Their influence will increase through the remaining three and one-half revolutions. During the first three and one-half, Mars held sway, polarized the iron, and kept the Ego from immuring itself until the body was ready. During the last three and one-half, Mercury will operate to extricate the Ego by initiation. He offers syphilis and the metal mercury as an incidental picture of the same polarity: enough mercury lessens the body’s hold, and an overdose paralyzes. The Lords of Mercury taught man to leave and re-enter the body at will. Occult science therefore speaks of the Earth Period as Mars-Mercury. It may truly be said that we have been in Mars and are going to Mercury, as taught in one of the occult works just mentioned. It is also true that we have never inhabited the planet Mars, and are not to leave the Earth to take up our abode on Mercury, as the other work states with the intention of correcting an error in the first. Mercury is now in obscuration and has little influence, but it is emerging from rest. The coming Races will have much help from the Mercurians (pp. 273 to 275).

The Lemurian Race

The people of the latter part of the Lemurian Epoch are the ones he will call the Lemurian Race. The atmosphere of Lemuria was still very dense, somewhat like the fire-fog of the Moon Period, but denser. The crust was starting to harden in some places and was still fiery in others. Between islands of crust was a sea of boiling water. Volcanic outbursts and cataclysms marked the fight of the nether fires against the wall that was to imprison them. On the harder and comparatively cool spots, man lived surrounded by giant fern-forests and animals of enormous size. The forms of both man and animal were still plastic. The skeleton had formed, but man had great power to mold the flesh of his own body and of the animals about him (p. 275).

He could hear and feel at birth. Perception of light came later, as sight comes after birth in the young of cats and dogs. The Lemurian had no eyes. He had two sensitive spots, affected by the Sun as it shone dimly through the fiery atmosphere. It was not until nearly the close of the Atlantean Epoch that he had sight as we have it. While the Sun was within, and the Earth was part of the light-giving mass, man was luminous himself and needed no external illuminant. After the dark Earth separated, light had to be perceived, and nature built the eye in response to a function that already existed. He cites Professor Huxley: the necessity for digesting food built the stomach, but digestion happened before the alimentary canal. Animals that withdrew into caves lost their eyes. The Lemurian needed eyes, and the light was commencing to build them (pp. 276 to 277).

His language was sounds like those of nature. Lemuria was storm-swept. Wind, brook, tempest, waterfall, and volcano were voices of the Gods from whom he knew himself to have descended. He knew nothing of the birth of his body. He could not see it. He perceived his fellow beings by an inner perception, like a dream, except that the dream-perception was clear and rational. He did not know he had a body, any more than we know we have a stomach while it is healthy. Pain was what made him aware of the body and of the world without (p. 277).

Propagation and birth were directed by the Angels under Jehovah, the regent of the Moon. The function was performed at stated times of the year, when lines of force from planet to planet were focused at proper angles. Parturition was painless. Man was unaware of birth, because he was as unconscious of the physical world as we are in sleep. Only in the intimate contact of sex did the spirit become aware of the flesh, and the man “knew” his wife. He reads “Adam knew Eve and she bore Seth,” “Elkanah knew Hannah and she bore Samuel,” and Mary’s question, “How shall I conceive, seeing I know no man?” as the same key. It is also the key to the Tree of Knowledge. Previously they had known only good. When they began to use the creative function independently, they were ignorant of stellar influences, as their descendants are. Jehovah’s supposed curse was not a curse, but a statement of what must follow if generation ignores the stellar rays. The ignorant use of the generative force is primarily responsible for pain, sickness, and sorrow (pp. 277 to 278).

The Lemurian knew no death. When, in the course of long ages, a body dropped away, he entered another, unconscious of the change. His consciousness was not focused in the physical world. Laying one body aside was no more than a leaf falling from a tree. Their language was holy. It was not a dead language like ours. Each sound had power over fellow beings, over animals, and over nature. Under the Lords of Venus, the messengers of God, speech was used with great reverence (p. 278).

Education of boys and girls differed, and he says the methods seem shocking. He will touch only the least cruel, and he asks the reader to remember that the Lemurian body was not nearly so high-strung as ours, and that only the harshest measures could touch so dim a consciousness. Boys were trained in Will. They fought, and the fights were extremely brutal. They were impaled upon spits, with full power to release themselves, and by will they were to remain there despite the pain. They learned to tense the muscles and to carry immense burdens by Will. Girls were trained in imagination. They were put out in the great forests to hear the wind and the outbursts of flood and tempest, and to learn not to fear them. Volcanic outbursts were valued because they awakened memory (p. 279).

Those methods would be out of the question now, but they did not make the Lemurian morbid, because he had no memory. Everything was forgotten as soon as past. The violent impacts were repeated in order to imprint memory on the brain, so that past experience could guide action. The girls developed the first germinal, flickering memory, and the first idea of good and evil. Experiences likely to leave a recollection were thought good. The others were thought evil. Woman became the pioneer in culture, the first to develop the idea of a good life. Egos incarnate alternately as male and female, so there is no pre-eminence. Those in a feminine dense body have a positive vital body and are more responsive to spiritual impacts than when the vital body is negative, as in the male (pp. 279 to 280).

The Lemurian was a born magician. He felt himself a descendant of the Gods, so his advancement was by material knowledge, not by being told his high origin. The temples of initiation for the most advanced did not need to teach him magic or how to function in the desire world. He already had that, in his own way. He was ignorant of the laws of the cosmos and of physical facts that are commonplace to us. At the school he was taught art, the laws of nature, and facts of the physical universe. Will was strengthened, and imagination and memory were wakened. The temples of the Lemurian times were high schools for will and imagination, with post-graduate courses in art and science. He never misused the powers, because he felt related to the Gods. Under the messengers, his forces were directed to molding forms in the animal and plant worlds. He could not “see” as we see. Like the purest of our children, who are clairvoyant while they remain in sinless innocence, the Lemurians had an internal perception that gave only a dim idea of outward shape and a brighter apprehension of inner nature (pp. 280 to 282).

Innocence is not virtue. It is the child of ignorance, and it cannot be kept in a universe whose purpose is wisdom. Knowledge of good and evil, and choice, are required. Wrong action is a seed. Sorrow waters it, and virtue can blossom. The Fall, with its pain, is a temporary state. The pure in heart will again behold the God within and without (p. 282).

The Fall of man

This is cabalistically described as the experience of one pair, who represent humanity. The key is the messenger’s word to the woman, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” and the sentence of death pronounced at the same time. Before the Fall, consciousness was not focused in the physical world. Man was unconscious of propagation, birth, and death. The Angels, who work in the vital body, brought the sexes together at the seasons when solar and lunar forces were most propitious. The union was at first unconscious, and later produced a momentary physical cognition. Gestation caused no inconvenience. Parturition was painless, the parent in deep sleep. Birth and death made no break in consciousness and were therefore nonexistent to the Lemurians (p. 283).

When their eyes were opened and consciousness turned outward, man directed propagation, ignorant of the Sun and Moon forces, and abused sex for sense gratification. Pain attended childbearing. Consciousness focused in the physical world, though things did not appear with clearly defined outlines until the latter part of the Atlantean Epoch. He came by degrees to know death, because consciousness broke when it shifted to the higher worlds at death and back at rebirth (pp. 283 to 284).

The opening of the eyes is tied to the split of the soul-force. Will and imagination are both necessary to propagate bodies. Since the separation of the sexes, one force remains in each individual, and only the part given out is available for propagation. The part not used for propagation is appropriated by the spirit to build the brain and the larynx. Man built on through the latter part of the Lemurian Epoch and the first two-thirds of the Atlantean Epoch, until, by that use of half his sex-force, he became a fully conscious, thinking, reasoning being (p. 284).

The brain is the link between the spirit and the outside world. The sense organs only carry impacts. The Angels never had a physical brain. Their lowest vehicle is the vital body. Wisdom came to them as a gift. Man had to fall into generation and work for knowledge. The force that goes outward to create another being is love. The Angels sent out their whole love, without selfishness, and cosmic wisdom flowed in. Man sends out only part. The residue builds his inner organs. His love becomes selfish and sensual. The Angels helped him propagate even after the subversion of part of the soul-force, and they helped him build the physical brain, but they had no knowledge that could be transmitted by means of it, and they could not speak directly to a brain-being. They could only guide the physical expression of love through the emotions, in a loving, innocent way. Had that regime lasted, man would have remained a God-guided automaton and would never have become an individual (pp. 285 to 286).

The Lucifer Spirits

That he has become an individual is due to a class of stragglers in the life wave of the Angels. In the Moon Period they worked themselves far ahead of the mass of those who are now the most advanced of our humanity. They have not progressed as far as the Angels, the pioneer humanity of the Moon, but they were so far ahead of our present humanity that they could not take a dense body as we have, and yet they could not gain knowledge without a physical brain. They were demi-gods, halfway between man, who has a brain, and the Angels, who need none. The only avenue was man’s physical brain, because they could make themselves understood by a being who had one, which the Angels could not (pp. 286 to 287).

In the latter part of the Lemurian Epoch man did not see the physical world as we do. The desire world was much more real. He had the dream-consciousness of the Moon Period, an inner picture-consciousness, and he was unconscious of the world outside. The Lucifers had no difficulty manifesting to that inner consciousness and calling his attention to his outward shape, which he had not perceived. They told him how he could cease to be simply the servant of external powers, become his own master, and, like the gods, know good and evil. They told him he need not fear if his body died, because he had within himself the creative ability to form new bodies without the Angels. The purpose of the information was to turn his consciousness outward so that they themselves might profit by the knowledge he acquired. They brought pain and suffering where there was none, and also emancipation from outside guidance (p. 287).

Before that enlightenment he had not known sickness, pain, or death. All of these resulted from the unwise use of the propagative faculty. Wild animals are exempt, because the group-spirit directs propagation only at propitious times, and the sex function is solely for perpetuation of the species. Had man remained a God-guided automaton, he would have known none of the three unto this day, and he would also have lacked brain-consciousness and independence. The Lucifer Spirits are the light-givers. From that time two forces work in man. The Angels build new beings in the womb by the love turned downward, and are the perpetuators of the race. The Lucifers are the instigators of mental activity, by the part of the sex-force carried upward for the brain. They are also called serpents, and are variously represented in different mythologies. He postpones the rest to the analysis of Genesis (pp. 287 to 288).

What has been said about the enlightenment of the Lemurians applies only to a minor portion of those who lived in the latter part of that Epoch, and who became the seed for the seven Atlantean Races. The greater part of the Lemurians were animal-like, and the forms inhabited by them have degenerated into the savages and anthropoids of the present day. He asks the student to note that it was the forms which degenerated. A race-body is ensouled by a certain group of spirits and can evolve only to a certain stage. There is no standing still. When the limit is reached, the forms degenerate until the race dies out. New race-bodies are flexible. The most advanced Egos are brought to birth in them and, being only apprentices, gradually crystallize them. Forms for another race are then created. The old bodies are left to less advanced Egos, and at last no Ego is low enough to profit by them. The women become sterile and the race-forms die (pp. 289 to 290).

His present examples are not given as a map of Lemuria. The Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon race, particularly the American branch, has a softer, more flexible body and a more high-strung nervous system than any other race on earth now. The Indian and the Negro have much harder bodies and, because of a duller nervous system, are less sensitive to lacerations. An Indian will continue to fight after wounds whose shock would prostrate or kill a white man, and will recover quickly. The Australian aborigines, or Bushmen, are his example of a race dying out from sterility, despite what the British government is doing to perpetuate them. He does not, in this paragraph, call them Lemurians. White men have said that wherever the white race goes, other races die out. He grants fearful oppression, including the conduct of the Spaniards toward the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, and he says the obligations will have to be paid to the last iota. He also says that even without massacre, starvation, enslavement, and expatriation, those older races would have died out, more slowly, because such is the law of evolution. At some future time the white race-bodies, when inhabited by the Egos now embodied in red, black, yellow, or brown skins, will also degenerate and disappear. Science, he says, speaks only of evolution and fails to consider the lines of degeneration (pp. 290 to 291).

The Atlantean Epoch

Volcanic cataclysms destroyed the greater part of the Lemurian continent and in its stead rose the Atlantean continent, where the Atlantic Ocean now is.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 291

Material scientists, impelled by the story of Plato to undertake researches regarding Atlantis, have demonstrated that there is ample foundation for the story that such a continent did exist.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 291

Occult scientists know that it existed, and know the conditions he is about to describe. The greatest difference from our world was the constitution of the atmosphere and the water. From the south came the hot fiery breath of volcanoes still abundantly active. From the north swept the icy blasts of the polar region.

The continent of Atlantis was the meeting-place of those two currents, consequently its atmosphere was always filled with a thick and murky fog.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 291

The water was not so dense as now, but contained a greater proportion of air. Much water was also held in the heavy foggy atmosphere. Through it the Sun never clearly shone. It appeared surrounded by an aura of light-mist, as street-lamps do in a dense fog. It was possible to see only a few feet, and the outlines of objects not close at hand were dim, hazy, and uncertain. Man was guided more by internal perception than by external vision (pp. 291 to 292).

The man of that time had a head, but scarcely any forehead. The brain had no frontal development. The head sloped almost abruptly back from a point just above the eyes. Compared with present humanity he was a giant. His arms and legs were much longer in proportion to his body. Instead of walking, he progressed by a series of flying leaps, not unlike those of the kangaroo. He had small blinking eyes, and his hair was round in section. That last peculiarity, if no other, distinguishes the descendants of the Atlantean races who remain with us. Their hair was straight, glossy, black, and round in section. The hair of the Aryan, though it may differ in color, is always oval in section. The ears of the Atlantean sat much further back upon the head than do those of the Aryan (p. 292).

The higher vehicles of the early Atlanteans were not concentric with the dense body, as ours are. The spirit was partly outside, and could not control its vehicles with the same facility. The head of the vital body was outside and far above the physical head. There is a point between the eyebrows, about half an inch below the surface of the skin, with a corresponding point in the vital body. It is not the pituitary body, which lies much deeper. He calls it the root of the nose. When the two points correspond, as they do in man today, the trained clairvoyant sees them as a black spot, or a vacant space, like the invisible core of a gas flame. That is the seat of the indwelling spirit, the Holy of Holies, barred to all but that Ego. The clairvoyant can see the bodies of the aura with more or less distinctness. This spot alone is hidden. It is the Isis whose veil none may lift. Not even the highest being on earth can unveil the Ego of the least developed creature (pp. 292 to 293).

In early Atlantean days those two points were far apart, as they are in animals now. The head of the horse’s vital body is far outside the head of the dense body. The points are closer in the dog than in any other animal except perhaps the elephant. When they correspond, the animal is a prodigy, able to count, spell, and so on. Because of the distance, the Atlantean’s perception was much keener in the inner worlds than in the foggy physical world. As the atmosphere slowly cleared, the point in the vital body came closer to the point in the dense body, and man gradually lost touch with the inner worlds. Finally, in the last third of the Atlantean Epoch, the points were united. Not until then did man become fully awake in the dense physical world, and at the same time the capability of perceiving the inner worlds was gradually lost to most of the people (pp. 293 to 294).

Earlier, the Atlantean did not clearly perceive the outline of an object or a person, but he saw the soul and knew at once whether its attributes were beneficial or inimical. He knew whether a man or an animal was kindly or hostile. When the spiritual world faded, great was his sorrow at the loss (p. 294).

The Rmoahals were the first of the Atlantean Races.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 294

They had little memory, and that little was chiefly connected with sensation. They remembered colors and tones, and thus to some extent evolved Feeling. The Lemurian had entirely lacked Feeling in the finer sense. He had touch, and the physical sensations of pain, ease, and comfort, but not joy, sorrow, sympathy, and antipathy. With memory the Atlanteans got the rudiments of a language. They evolved words and no longer used mere sounds, as the Lemurians did. The Rmoahals began to give names to things. They were yet a spiritual race, and their soul-powers were like the forces of nature. In their words was power over the things they named. Like the last of the Lemurians, their feelings as spirits inspired them, and no harm was ever done to one another. Language was holy, the highest direct expression of the spirit. The power was never abused by gossip or small talk. By definite language the soul in this race first became able to contact the soul of things in the outside world (pp. 294 to 295).

The Tlavatlis were the second Atlantean Race.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 295

They began to feel their worth as separate human beings. They became ambitious and demanded that their works be remembered. Memory became a factor in the life of the community. Remembrance of deeds caused a group to choose as leader one who had done great deeds. That was the germ of royalty. The remembrance was carried beyond the death of such leaders. Mankind began to honor the memory of ancestors and to worship them and others who had shown great merit. That was the beginning of a form of worship which is practiced to this day by some Asiatics (p. 295).

The Toltecs were the third Atlantean Race.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 295

They carried the ideas further, inaugurating monarchy and hereditary succession. They originated the custom of honoring men for the deeds of their ancestors, and there was then a reason. Because of the peculiar training, the father could bestow his qualities upon his son in a way impossible now. Education called up pictures of the phases of life before the soul of the child. The consciousness of the early Atlantean was still principally an internal picture-consciousness. Instinct, not reason, was aroused, and in the great majority of cases the son readily absorbed the qualities of the father. We still honor the sons of great men, and he says we have no reason whatever for doing so. Among the Toltecs, experience was highly valued. Memory was so great and accurate that our present memory is nothing in comparison. In an emergency a Toltec of wide experience was likely to remember similar cases and to become a valuable adviser. If no such person was available, they had to experiment (pp. 295 to 296).

In the middle third of Atlantis we find the beginning of separate nations. Groups who found similar tastes in one another left their old homes and founded a new colony. They remembered the old customs and followed them as far as they suited, and formed new ones for their own necessities. The leaders initiated great kings, to whom they gave great power. The masses honored them as kings by the grace of God. The happy state had the germ of disintegration. In time the kings became intoxicated with power, forgot the sacred trust, and used the power for selfish ends, oppression, and revenge. This was true of the nobles and the higher classes as well. Considering the power they had over the less developed classes, its misuse would bring about terrible conditions (pp. 296 to 297).

The Original Turanians were the fourth Atlantean Race.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 297

They were especially vile in their abominable selfishness. They erected temples where the kings were worshiped as gods, and caused the extreme oppression of the helpless lower classes. Black magic of the worst and most nauseating kind flourished, and all their efforts were directed toward vanity and external display (p. 297).

The Original Semites were the fifth and most important of the seven Atlantean Races, because in them we find the first germ of the corrective quality of Thought.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 297

The Original Semitic Race therefore became the seed-race for the seven Races of the present Aryan Epoch (p. 298).

He recapitulates the vehicles. In the Polarian Epoch man acquired the dense body as an instrument of action. In the Hyperborean Epoch the vital body gave the power of motion. In the Lemurian Epoch the desire body furnished the incentive. The mind was given in the Atlantean Epoch to give purpose to action. The Ego was exceedingly weak and the desire nature strong, so the nascent mind coalesced with the desire body. The faculty of cunning resulted, and was the cause of all the wickedness of the middle third of the Atlantean Epoch. In the Aryan Epoch, thought and reason were to be evolved by the work of the Ego in the mind, to conduct desire toward spiritual perfection. That faculty was gained at the expense of control over the vital forces, that is, power over nature. With thought, man can at present exercise power over chemicals and minerals only, because his mind is in the first or mineral stage of its evolution, as his dense body was in the Saturn Period. He can exercise no power over plant or animal life. Wood and animal substances used in industry are, in the final analysis, chemical matter ensouled by mineral life. Dominion will not extend to life until the Jupiter Period, when he will work with plant life as the Angels do now. Material scientists will not “create” life until they approach the laboratory with the reverence due an altar, with purity of heart and holy hands, devoid of greed. That is the decision of the Elder Brothers, who guard the secrets until man will use them for the uplifting of the race and the glory of God, not for personal profit (pp. 298 to 299).

The very loss of power over the vital forces made further evolution possible. Had the growing selfishness been accompanied by the old power, it could have destroyed man and nature. Thought that works only in man cannot command nature. The Original Semites regulated their desires to some extent by the mind. Instead of mere desire came cunning and craftiness. They were a very turbulent people, but they learned to curb their passions and to accomplish their purposes by cunning, as more subtle than brute strength. They were the first to discover that brain is superior to brawn (p. 299).

During the existence of this Race, the atmosphere of Atlantis commenced to clear definitely, and the point in the vital body came into correspondence with its companion point in the dense body. Man could see objects with sharp contours, and lost the sight of the inner worlds. He states it as a law that no progress is made that is not gained at the cost of some previously possessed faculty, later regained in a higher form. Man built the brain at the expense of the temporary loss of the power to bring forth offspring from himself alone, and obtained reasoning at the cost of the temporary loss of spiritual insight. The Atlantean at first sadly contemplated the intellect, and mourned the loss of spiritual sight and power. The exchange was necessary so that he could function, independent of outside guidance, in the physical world he must conquer. The higher powers will be regained when experience has taught him to use them properly. When he possessed them, he had no such knowledge, and they were too dangerous to be used as toys (pp. 300 to 301).

Under the guidance of a great Entity, the Original Semitic Race was led eastward from the continent of Atlantis, over Europe, to the great waste in Central Asia known as the Gobi Desert. There they were prepared to be the seed of the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch, potentially imbued with the qualities their descendants were to evolve (p. 301).

From the Saturn Period through the Sun and Moon Periods, and through the three and one-half revolutions of the Earth Period, that is the Polarian, Hyperborean, Lemurian, and earlier part of the Atlantean Epochs, man had been led by higher beings without the slightest choice. He had no mind of his own. The time had come to begin to guide himself. Hitherto he had been compelled to obey his ruler. Now his thoughts were to be turned from the visible leaders, the Lords of Venus, whom he worshipped as messengers from the gods, to the true God, the invisible creator of the system. He must learn to worship and obey a God he could not see. Their leader called the people together and delivered an oration which, Heindel says, might be thus expressed. I condense his rendering, and I do not print it as a recovered speech. Hitherto they had seen those who led them. There are higher leaders whom they have not seen. Exalted above all stands the invisible God who created the heaven and the earth, and who has willed to give them dominion over all this land, that they may be fruitful and multiply. Him only must they worship, in spirit and in truth, and they must make no graven image and use no likeness, because He is everywhere present and beyond comparison. If they follow His precepts He will bless them. If they stray, evil will follow. They are free, and they must endure the consequences of their own actions (pp. 301 to 302).

Education proceeds by four steps. First, man is worked upon from without, unconsciously. Then he is placed under divine messengers and kings whom he sees and must obey. Next he is taught to revere the commands of a God whom he does not see. Finally he learns to rise above commands, to become a law unto himself, and, by conquering himself of his own free will, to live in harmony with the order of nature, which is the law of God. Worship also has four steps: fear and propitiation, as among fetish-worshipers; looking to God as the giver of material benefits here and now; prayer, a good life, and faith in a future heaven and hell; and at last doing right with no thought of reward or punishment, because it is right. The Original Semites had reached the second of these steps. They were taught to worship an invisible God and to expect material reward or painful affliction. Popular Christianity is at the third step. Esoteric Christians and the pupils of all occult schools are trying to reach the highest step, which will be generally achieved in the Sixth Epoch, the New Galilee, when the unifying Christian religion will open the hearts of men, as their understanding is being opened now (pp. 302 to 303).

The Akadians were the sixth and the Mongolians the seventh of the Atlantean Races.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 303

They evolved thought still further, but followed lines of reasoning which deviated more and more from the main trend. The Chinese Mongolians maintain to this day that the old ways are the best. Progress requires new methods and ideas kept fluid, so those races fell behind and are degenerating, with the remainder of the Atlantean Races (p. 303).

As the heavy fogs of Atlantis condensed more and more, the increased quantity of water gradually inundated that continent, destroying the greater part of the population and the evidences of their civilization.

Great numbers were driven from the doomed continent by the floods, and wandered across Europe.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 304

The Mongolian races are the descendants of those Atlantean refugees.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 304

The Negroes and the savage races with curly hair, are the last remnants of the Lemurians.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 304

He does not say that every Mongolian is only a refugee, or that every African is a Lemurian. The two sentences above are the identifications he prints. Diagram 10 had already classed Mongolians and Africans together as Moon-Period stragglers. I leave both statements standing.

The Aryan Epoch

Central Asia was the cradle of the Aryan Races, who descended from the Original Semites.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 304

Thence the different Races have gone out. He says it is unnecessary to describe them, as historical researches have sufficiently revealed their main features. In the present, the fifth or Aryan, Epoch, man came to know the use of fire and other forces, the divine origin of which was purposely withheld, so that he might be free to use them for higher purposes or for his own development. There are therefore two classes. One looks upon this Earth and upon man as of divine origin. The other sees all things from a purely utilitarian viewpoint (p. 304).

The most advanced at the beginning of the Aryan Epoch were given the higher initiations, so that they might take the place of the messengers of God, the Lords of Venus. Such human initiates were from this time the only mediators between God and man. Even they do not appear publicly, or show signs and wonders that they are leaders. Man was left entirely free to seek them or not. At the end of the present Epoch the highest initiate will appear publicly, when a sufficient number of ordinary humanity desire it and will voluntarily subject themselves to such a leader. They will form the nucleus for the last Race, which will appear at the beginning of the Sixth Epoch. After that, races and nations will cease to exist. Humanity will form one spiritual fellowship, as before the end of the Lemurian Epoch (pp. 304 to 305).

The names of the Races which have spread over the Earth during the fifth Epoch, up to the present time, are these. I print his names without the dashes he sets after the numerals.

1. The Aryan, which went south to India.
2. The Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean.
3. The Persian-Graeco-Latin.
4. The Celtic.
5. The Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon, to which, he says, we belong.

From the mixture of the different nations now taking place in the United States will come the seed for the last Race, in the beginning of the Sixth Epoch. Two more Races will be evolved in our present Epoch, one of them being the Slav. When, in the course of a few hundred years, the Sun, because of the precession of the equinoxes, shall have entered the sign Aquarius, the Russian people and the Slav Races in general will reach a degree of spiritual development which will advance them far beyond their present condition. Music will be the chief factor. Development attained in that manner is not permanent, because it is one-sided. Spirituality must evolve through, or at least equally with, intellect. For this reason the Slavic civilization will be short-lived, but it will be great and joyful while it lasts, for it is being born of deep sorrow and untold suffering, and the law of compensation will bring the opposite in due time (pp. 305 to 306).

From the Slavs will descend a people which will form the last of the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch, and from the people of the United States will descend the last of all the Races in this scheme of evolution, which will run its course in the beginning of the Sixth Epoch.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 306

The sixteen paths to destruction

The sixteen Races are called the "Sixteen paths to destruction" because there is always, in each Race, a danger that the soul may become too much attached to the Race; that it may become so enmeshed in Race-characteristics it cannot rise above the race-idea, and will therefore fail to advance; that it may, so to speak, crystallize into that Race and consequently be confined to the Race-bodies when they start to degenerate, as happened to the Jews.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 306

In Periods, revolutions, and Epochs where there are no Races, there is much more time, and fossilizing is less likely. The sixteen Races are born and die in so relatively short a time that the danger is grave. Christ is the great unifying leader of the Sixth Epoch, and enunciated this law in the words, which Heindel calls little understood, that if any man come to Him and hate not his father, mother, wife, children, brethren, sisters, and his own life also, he cannot be His disciple, and that whoever does not bear his cross, and whoever does not forsake all that he has, cannot be His disciple. Heindel’s reading is not that we are to leave or underestimate family ties, but that we are to rise above them. Father and mother are bodies. Relations are part of the Race, which belongs to form. The souls must recognize that they are Egos striving for perfection. If a man identifies himself with his Race and clings to it with fanatic patriotism, he is likely to sink with it when his compeers have passed to greater heights (pp. 306 to 307).

Chapter XIII. Back to the Bible

Printed pages 308 to 316. Western churches send missionaries to convert every nation, and the East has commenced an invasion of Western fields. Many Christians dissatisfied with clergy and dogma have accepted Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like. From an occult point of view this missionary effort, in either direction, is not desirable, because it is contrary to the trend of evolution. Religion is one of the aids the leaders give, and there are reasons why the Bible, containing both the Jewish and the Christian religions, should have been given to the West. No other religion of the present day is suitable to our peculiar needs.

He returns to the Epochs. In the Polarian, Hyperborean, and Lemurian Epochs, leading humanity was comparatively easy, because man was without mind. When that disturbing element came in during the first part of the Atlantean Epoch, he developed cunning, the product of the mind unchecked by the spirit. Cunning acts as an aid to desire, whether the desire is good or bad. In the middle of the Atlantean Epoch the spirit had drawn completely into its vehicles and commenced to work in the mind to produce thought and reason, the ability to trace a cause to its effect and an effect to its cause. That faculty was to be more fully developed in the Aryan Epoch, and therefore the Original Semites, the fifth race of the Atlantean Epoch, were a chosen people, to bring the germinal faculty to such a ripeness that it would be impregnated into the very fiber of their descendants, who would thus become the new Race (p. 309).

To transmute cunning into reason was not easy. Earlier changes had been easy, because he had no conscious desires and no mind. By the time of the Original Semites he was cunning enough to resent limitations and to circumvent the measures taken to hold him in line. The task was harder because he had to have some liberty of choice, so that he might learn self-government. A law decreed immediate rewards for obedience and instant punishment for disregard, so that he would reason, in a limited way, that the way of the transgressor is hard, and that he must fear God, or the leader who guided him (pp. 309 to 310).

Out of all who were chosen as seed for the new Race, few remained faithful. Most were rebellious and frustrated the purpose of the leader by intermarrying with the other Atlantean Races, thus bringing inferior blood into their descendants. That is what is meant where the Bible records that the sons of God married the daughters of men. For that disobedience they were abandoned and lost. Even the faithful died, according to the body, in the Desert of Gobi, the wilderness, in Central Asia, the cradle of our present Race. They reincarnated as their own descendants, and thus inherited the promised land, the Earth as it is now. They are the Aryan Races, in whom reason is being evolved to perfection (p. 310).

The rebellious ones who were abandoned are the Jews, of whom the great majority are still governed more by the Atlantean faculty of cunning than by reason. In them the race-feeling is so strong that they distinguish only two classes, Jews and Gentiles. They despise the other nations and are despised for their cunning, selfishness, and avarice. He does not deny that they give to charity, but it is principally, if not exclusively, among their own people, and rarely internationally, as was done in the earthquake disaster in Italy, and in the San Francisco disaster, where barriers of creed, race, and nationality were forgotten. Such incidents show the direction of evolution. The control of man by reason must be succeeded by love, which at present acts independent of, and sometimes contrary to, reason, because love is rarely quite unselfish and reason is not always true. In the New Galilee, the coming Sixth Epoch, love will become unselfish and reason will approve it. Universal brotherhood will be realized (pp. 310 to 311).

To attain that end, another chosen people must be selected from the present stock, to serve as a nucleus for the new Race. This choosing is not contrary to the will of the chosen. Each man must willingly enter the ranks. Races are an evanescent feature of evolution. Before the end of the Lemurian Epoch there was a chosen people, different from the ordinary humanity of that time, who became the ancestors of the Atlantean Races. From the fifth race of those, another chosen people was drawn, from which the Aryan Races descended, of which there have been five and will be two more. Before a new Epoch is ushered in there must be a new heaven and a new earth. The physical features of the Earth will be changed and its density decreased. There will be one Race at the beginning of the next Epoch, but after that every thought and feeling of Race will disappear. Humanity will again constitute one vast fellowship. The leaders call these sixteen Races the sixteen paths to destruction, because the Races are comparatively evanescent, and extra care must be taken that as few spirits as possible become enmeshed (pp. 311 to 312). This is the same phrase as on page 306, said here of the leaders of mankind. Page 231 had “sixteen possibilities for destruction.”

The spirits in the Jewish race-bodies attached themselves so firmly that they are drawn back into it in successive incarnations. “Once a Jew, always a Jew” is their slogan. They have forgotten their spiritual nature and glory in the material fact of being Abraham’s seed. They are neither fish nor flesh. They have no part in the advancing Aryan Race, and yet they are beyond those remnants of the Lemurian and Atlantean peoples which are still with us. They have become a people without a country. Because of their bondage to the Race-idea, their one-time leader was forced to abandon them, and they became lost. Other nations were stirred up against them, and they were led captive from the country where they had settled, but in vain. They returned in a body to their arid land. Prophets of their own Race rebuked them and predicted disaster, without avail (pp. 312 to 313).

As a final effort, the leader of the coming Race, Christ, appeared among the Jews. Among all the Races, none other was lost in the same sense, and none other so sorely needed help. A stranger would have been rejected. As the great spirit known as Booker T. Washington incarnated among the Negroes, to be received as one of themselves, so the leaders hoped that Christ among the Jews, as one of their own, might draw them out of the Race-bodies. He came unto His own, and they chose Barabbas. He did not glory in Abraham. He spoke of another world, a new earth, love, and forgiveness, and repudiated an eye for an eye. He did not call them to arms against Caesar. Had He done so, they would have hailed Him as a deliverer. Even His disciples mourned the vanished hope of an earthly kingdom (p. 313).

The rejection of Christ was the supreme proof of their thralldom to Race. Efforts to save them as a whole, by special prophets and by exile in a body, were abandoned, and they were scattered among all the nations. The majority are yet orthodox. In America there is a slight falling away. The younger generation is commencing to marry outside the Race. In time, bodies with fewer of the Race characteristics will be provided for the incarnating spirits of the Jews of the past. They will be saved in spite of themselves. They became lost by marrying into inferior Races. They will be saved by amalgamating with those more advanced (p. 314).

The present Aryan Races are reasoning beings and can profit by being told of past stages and of the fate of the disobedient Jews. Those rebels had a written record of how their leaders had dealt with them: chosen, rebellious, punished, and yet hopeful of redemption. It is immaterial that the record has become mutilated, and that the Jews of today are still under the delusion of being a chosen people. Their experience should warn any future chosen people. He quotes Hebrews 2:3-4, and says Paul was speaking to Christians, Hebrews who had accepted Christ, people he expected would in some future incarnation be among the new chosen people, who would willingly follow a leader and evolve love and spiritual perception, the intuition which shall succeed self-seeking and reason (pp. 314 to 315).

The Christian teaching of the New Testament belongs particularly to the pioneer Races of the Western world. It is being specially implanted among the people of the United States, because the object of the new Race of the Sixth Epoch will be the unification of all the Races, and the United States is becoming the melting pot in which all the nations are being amalgamated, and from which the next chosen people, the nucleus, will chiefly be derived. Spirits from all countries who have striven to follow the teachings of the Christ, consciously or otherwise, will be incarnated here. Hence the American-born Jew is different from the Jew of other countries. The fact that he has incarnated in the Western world shows that he is becoming emancipated from the Race-spirit, and is in advance of the crystallized Old World orthodox Jew, as were his parents, or they would not have conceived the idea of moving to America. The American-born Jew is the pioneer who will prepare the path his compatriots will follow later (p. 315).

The Bible, on this reading, contains the teaching the Western peoples need: the awful example of the Jewish Race in the Old Testament, and the teachings of the Christ in the New, so that they may offer their bodies as a living sacrifice upon the altar of fellowship and love (p. 316). This chapter adds no new geography of Lemuria or Atlantis, and no new date. It does add the marriage of the sons of God and the daughters of men as intermarriage with the other Atlantean Races, the death of the faithful in the body in the Gobi, the Jews as the abandoned rebels, and the United States as the melting pot of the next chosen people.

Chapter XIV. The Occult Analysis of Genesis

The contents place “Limitations of the Bible” at page 317. He has so far made comparatively little reference to the Bible. He does not intend to vindicate the Bible, in the form commonly known today, as the only true and inspired word of God. It does contain much valuable occult knowledge, hidden beneath interpolations and obscured by the withholding of parts as apocryphal. The occult scientist who knows the intended meaning can see which portions are original. Even the first chapter of Genesis, as it stands in the best translations, unfolds the same scheme of Periods, revolutions, and Races, an entire Period sometimes covered in a score of words.

Hebrew words, particularly in the old style, run into one another, and vowels are left out, so much depends on where they are inserted. A slight change can alter the signification of almost any sentence. Of the forty-seven translators of the King James version, only three were Hebrew scholars, and of those three, two died before the Psalms had been translated. The Act which authorized the translation prohibited any rendition that would greatly deviate from, or disturb, the already existing belief. Luther, he says, did not translate from the Hebrew but from a Latin text, and most Continental Protestant versions are translations of Luther. He does not claim that we possess a single line of the original writings. The Septuagint, a translation into Greek, was brought forth as early as 280 B.C. The Talmud, giving the first text resembling the present one, appeared about 500 A.D. The Masorete school, from 590 to about 800 A.D., principally in Tiberias, produced the Hebrew Old Testament nearest to the original that we have. He says he will use that Masoretic text, supplemented by a German translation made by H. Arnheim, M. Sachs, and Jul. Furst, with Dr. Zunz as editor. I do not treat his renderings as a second Hebrew edition. He says the opening sentence can be read in two ways, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and “Out of the ever-existing essence [of space] the twofold energy formed the double heaven,” and that both are needed.

He maps the days and the verses onto his Periods and Epochs. The Saturn Period is the dark heat that precedes glowing heat. Above that dark Earth floated the creative hierarchies, working from the outside. The Bible refers to them as the Spirits of the Elohim. The Sun Period is the third verse, “Let there be Light.” The scornful question, how there could be light before the Sun was made on the fourth day, mistakes the narrator. He is speaking of the central fire-mist, from which the planets, including the Earth, were formed. When the nebula glowed, in the Sun Period, the light was within. The fourth verse, the Elohim differentiated between the light and the darkness, is the dark outside space set against the glowing nebula (p. 328).

The Moon Period is the sixth verse, an expansion in the waters, to divide the water from the water. Heat and the cold of outside space formed a body of water around the fiery core. Fire and water generated steam. There was a circulation, and two kinds of water: dense water nearest the core, and expanded water or steam outside, an atmosphere of fire-fog. This, he says, also harmonizes with the scientific order: dark heat, then the glowing nebula, later outside moisture and inside heat, and finally incrustation (pp. 328 to 329).

The Earth Period comes next, but the verses already quoted also correspond to the recapitulations. What is said of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon Periods corresponds to the first three revolutions of our present Earth Period, and what follows corresponds to conditions in the present revolution. The ninth verse, let the waters be divided from the dry land, and the Elohim called the dry land Earth, refers to the first firm incrustation (pp. 329 to 330).

The Polarian Epoch is that same ninth verse, describing the Earth Period in this fourth revolution, and also the formation of the mineral kingdom and man’s recapitulation of the mineral stage. Each Epoch is also a recapitulation of the previous stage. There is always a spiral within a spiral, in the atom, in the globe, and in every phase. The Hyperborean Epoch is described in verses 11 to 19, as the work of the fourth day, when the Elohim created the plant kingdom, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. The Bible agrees with modern science that plants succeeded the mineral. The difference is the time when the Earth was thrown off from the central mass. Science says it was before any incrustation that could be called mineral and plant. If we mean minerals and plants such as we have today, that is correct. There was no dense material substance, but the first incrustation in the central Sun was mineral. The narrator gives only the principal incidents. It is not recorded that the incrustation melted when it was thrown off as a ring which broke and then coalesced, nor that the melting happened again when the Moon was thrown off. In a body as small as the Earth, recrystallization was comparatively short, and he supposes the historian omitted details an occult student would already possess. The plants of the central fire-mist were ethereal, so the melting did not destroy them. They were the molds which drew the dense material of present plant-bodies and of the plant-forms embedded in the geological strata. They were aided when heat came from outside, after the separation of the Earth from Sun and Moon (pp. 330 to 331).

The Lemurian Epoch is the work of the fifth day. This Epoch, being the third, is in a sense a recapitulation of the Moon Period, and the narrative describes Moon-Period conditions: water, fire-fog, and the first attempts at moving, breathing life. Verses 20 and 21 say the Elohim said, let the waters bring forth life-breathing things and fowl, and the Elohim formed the great amphibians and all life-breathing things according to their species, and all fowl with wings. That harmonizes, he says, with material science, that the amphibians preceded the birds. What was formed was not Life. The things inhale life. The Hebrew word for that which they inhale is nephesh (pp. 331 to 332).

The Atlantean Epoch is the work of the sixth day. In verse 24 the creation of mammals is mentioned, and nephesh occurs again: the mammals breathed life. In verse 27 the Elohim formed man in their likeness, male and female. The historian omits the asexual and hermaphrodite stages and comes to the two separate sexes. He could not do otherwise, because he is describing the Atlantean Epoch, and by that stage there were neither sexless men nor hermaphrodites, the differentiation having taken place earlier, in the Lemurian Epoch. That which afterward became man could hardly be spoken of as man in the earlier stages, when it differed but little from the animals. The narrator does no violence to facts when he states that man was formed in the Atlantean Epoch. In verse 28, all versions, he finds a small prefix of great significance: be fruitful and replenish the earth. He prints the force on “re.” This plainly shows, he says, that the scribe was cognizant of the occult teaching that the life wave had evolved here, on globe D of the Earth Period, in previous revolutions (pp. 332 to 333).

The Aryan Epoch corresponds to the seventh day of creation, when the Elohim rested from their labors as creators and guides, and humanity had been launched upon an independent career. That ends the story of how the forms were produced. The following chapter of Genesis tells the story more from the side of life (p. 333).

Jehovah and his mission

Learned discussion has treated the creation story of the first chapter and the story that starts at the fourth verse of the second chapter as the work of different men, because the being whom the English translators render as God in both chapters is Elohim in the Hebrew of the first chapter and Jehovah in the second. Heindel’s answer is that the narrator was not a monotheist and did not mean the same God. Jehovah was and is one of the Elohim. He is the leader of the Angels, who were the humanity of the Moon, and He is regent of our present Moon (p. 333).

As regent of the Moon, He has charge of the degenerate, evil beings there, and He also rules the Angels. With Him are some of the Archangels, the humanity of the Sun, called the Race-spirits. Jehovah’s work is to build concrete bodies or forms by the hardening, crystallizing Moon forces. He is the giver of children, and the Angels are His messengers. Physiologists have observed that the Moon measures gestation and other physiological periods. The Archangels, as spirits and leaders of a Race, fight for or against a people as the evolution of that Race demands. He cites Daniel 10:20, an Archangel who will return to fight with the prince of Persia, and when he is gone the prince of Grecia shall come. The Archangel Michael is the Race-spirit of the Jews (Daniel 12:1). Jehovah is not the God of the Jews alone. He is the author of all Race-religions which led up to Christianity. Nevertheless He did take a special interest in the progenitors of the present degenerate Jews, the Original Semites, the seed-race for the seven races of the Aryan Epoch. Jehovah takes special care of a seed-race, in which the embryonic faculties of a new Epoch are to be inculcated. They were His chosen people, chosen to be the seed for a new Race which was to inherit the promised land, not merely insignificant Palestine, but the entire Earth as it is at present (pp. 334 to 335).

He did not lead them out of Egypt.

That story originated with their descendants and is a confused account of their journey eastward through flood and disaster out of the doomed Atlantis into the "wilderness" (the Desert of Gobi in Central Asia), there to wander during the cabalistic forty years, until they could enter the Promised Land.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 335

The land was called promised because, as land or earth suitable for human occupation, it did not exist at the time the chosen people were led into the wilderness.

Part of the Earth had been submerged by floods and other parts changed by volcanic eruptions, hence it was necessary that a period of time elapse before the new Earth was in a fit condition to become the possession of the Aryan Race.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 335

The Original Semites were set apart and forbidden to marry into other tribes or peoples. They were stiff-necked, led almost exclusively by desire and cunning, and they disobeyed. Their Bible records that the sons of God married the daughters of man, the lower grades of their Atlantean compatriots. They thus frustrated the designs of Jehovah and were cast off, the fruit of such cross-breeding being useless as seed for the coming Race. These cross-breeds were the progenitors of the present Jews, who now speak of lost tribes. They know that some of the original number left them and went another way, but they do not know that those were the few who remained true. The story of the ten tribes being lost is a fable. Most of them perished, but the faithful ones survived, and from that faithful remnant have descended the present Aryan Races (pp. 335 to 336).

He cheerfully agrees with opponents of the Bible that it is a mere mutilation of the original writings. Parts are even conceded to be entire fabrications, and no attempt is made to prove its authenticity as a whole in the form we now have. The effort is to exhume a few kernels from misleading interpretations (p. 336).

Involution, evolution, and epigenesis

From the confusion about Jehovah, he turns to the two accounts of the creation of man. The first chapter deals chiefly with form, the second with life, and the fifth with consciousness. From the life side, man was created first. From the form side, as in the first chapter, he was created last. All through evolution, those who do not improve by the formation of new characteristics are held back and immediately begin to degenerate. Only that which remains plastic evolves with the pioneers. Progress is not simply involution and evolution. There is a third factor, epigenesis. From the very beginning of the Saturn Period up to the time in the Atlantean Epoch when man’s eyes were opened by the Lucifer Spirits, and as a consequence the activities of man, or the life-force which has become man, were chiefly directed inward, that same force which he now sends out to build railways and steamboats was used internally to build a vehicle. The form was built by evolution. The spirit built and is still building the life (pp. 336 to 337).

The later sections of the chapter, a living soul, Adam’s rib, the guardian angels, the mixing of blood in marriage, and the Fall of man, carry the same Epochs into Genesis without a new continent. Jehovah and His Angels and Archangels were the principals in the separation that produced the sexes, and the time was between the early and the middle parts of the Lemurian Epoch, and must have been after the Moon was thrown out from the Earth, because Jehovah had nothing to do with the generation of bodies before the Moon was separated (p. 346). In the Lemurian Epoch, bodies had been definitely formed, but they had to have warm red blood before they could be ensouled and become the abode of an indwelling spirit (p. 348). Before mind, there was no marriage outside the tribe, and no inclination to it. The Original Semites were the first to evolve will, and they at once married the daughters of the men of other tribes, the act he has already called whoring after strange gods, which rendered them unfit to give the seed for the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch (p. 354). The Lucifer who spoke to the woman is again the picture-consciousness of the Lemurian training: her consciousness was principally internal, and she saw them as serpents (p. 361). In the latter part of the Lemurian Epoch, when man arrogated to himself the generative act at his own pleasure, it was his then-powerful will that enabled him to do so (p. 362). The creative power used in ancient Lemuria to make plants and animals is the power he says man will one day use as a real creator, not in the slow manner of the present day (p. 364). I do not repeat the whole of chapter XII under these headings. The new claims are the verse-by-verse map, the reading of the exodus as a confused memory of the journey from Atlantis to the Gobi, the cabalistic forty years, the lost tribes as a fable, and the timing of the separation of the sexes.

Chapter XV. Christ and His Mission

The contents place “The Evolution of Religion” at page 367, and the chapter heading stands at the head of that discussion. Man and his religions have evolved side by side. The earliest religion of any Race is found to be as savage as the people governed by it, and as that people advances, so does the religion. He has already studied the Jewish Race-religion. Christianity is the last and greatest of the divine measures for the uplifting of humanity, and will be the universal religion of the future. The sections run through Jesus and Christ-Jesus, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, “not peace but a sword,” the star of Bethlehem, the heart as an anomaly, the mystery of Golgotha, and the cleansing blood.

The Epoch claims in this chapter are short, and they depend on chapter XII. Had Christ appeared in a manifestly miraculous manner, it would have been contrary to the scheme of evolution, because at the end of the Atlantean Epoch humanity had been given freedom to do right or wrong. No coercion could be used if they were to learn to become self-governing. They must know good and evil through experience. Before that time they had been led willy-nilly. At that time they were given freedom under the different Race-religions, each religion adapted to the needs of its particular tribe or nation (p. 385).

When the division of the Sun, Moon, and Earth took place, in the early part of the Lemurian Epoch, the more advanced portion of humanity-in-the-making experienced a division of the desire body into a higher and a lower part. The rest of humanity did likewise in the early part of the Atlantean Epoch. This higher part became a sort of animal-soul. It built the cerebro-spinal nervous system and the voluntary muscles, and by that means controlled the lower part of the threefold body until the link of mind was given (p. 396). The chapter does not add a new site, a new Race name, or a new flood. The Golgotha and the cleansing blood are the mission of Christ in the present Epoch, not an account of Atlantis.

Chapter XVI. Future Development and Initiation

The contents place “The Seven Days of Creation” at page 411. The Rosicrucian speaks of the Earth Period as Mars-Mercury. The great creative day of manifestation is embodied in the names of the days of the week. Saturday corresponds to the Saturn Period, Sunday to the Sun Period, Monday to the Moon Period, Tuesday to the first half of the Earth Period and is ruled by Mars, Wednesday to the second half of the Earth Period and is ruled by Mercury, Thursday to the Jupiter Period, and Friday to the Venus Period. The Vulcan Period is the last Period of the scheme. This is a table of Periods, not a table of the sixteen Races.

The Atlantis and Lemuria claims here are about consciousness and initiation, and they repeat the chronology of sight already given. The mysteries were given to the earlier Lemurians and Atlanteans, but not the Four Great Initiations (p. 414). On diagram 15 the black serpent is the winding path of involution, the Saturn, Sun, and Moon Periods, and the Mars half of the Earth Period, during which the evolving life built its vehicles and did not become fully awake and clearly conscious of the outside world until the latter part of the Atlantean Epoch. The white serpent is the path through the Mercury half of the Earth Period and the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan Periods, toward an omniscient creative intelligence. The staff of Mercury, around which the serpents twine, is the straight path of initiation, shorter than the serpentine path of the great majority (p. 414).

Consciousness, until late, consisted of inward representations of external objects, colors, or sounds. At last, in the latter part of the Atlantean Epoch, this picture-consciousness gave way to the present full waking consciousness, in which objects could be observed outside, clearly and distinctly outlined in space. Man then realized the difference between self and others, and the “I” became a fact of his consciousness (p. 415). From the existence on globe C in the third revolution of the Moon Period until the latter part of the Atlantean Epoch, the evolving life passed through four great stages of animal-like development before reaching the human stage. Those four steps of the past correspond to four stages yet to be passed, and to the four initiations. Within the four stages already passed there are altogether thirteen steps (p. 416).

The mind, or the human stage of waking thought as he is using it here, was not started until the fourth revolution, when the life wave had reached the fourth globe, globe D, and was in the fourth or Atlantean Epoch on that globe. The Jupiter consciousness will not start until the fifth revolution, the fifth globe, and the fifth Epoch on that globe. The Venus consciousness waits for the sixth, and the special Vulcan work is confined to the very last globe and Epoch (p. 422). The rest of the chapter is alchemy and soul-growth, and the creative word. It adds no new continent and no flood. He does not, in this chapter, rename the seven Atlantean Races.

Chapter XVII. The Method of Acquiring First-Hand Knowledge

The contents place “The First Steps” at page 430. This is the practical chapter: Western methods for Western people, the science of nutrition, a table of food values, the law of assimilation, live and let live, the Lord’s Prayer, the vow of celibacy, the pituitary body and the pineal gland, how the inner vehicle is built, and the exercises of concentration, meditation, observation, discrimination, contemplation, and adoration. It is not a history of a continent.

Two passages use the Epochs as the history of the nervous system. When the currents moved through the involuntary or sympathetic system, man saw the inner worlds, as in the Moon Period and the latter part of the Lemurian and early Atlantean Epochs. Pictures presented themselves independent of his will. The sense-centers of his desire body were spinning counter-clockwise, following negatively the motion of the Earth (p. 473). In the ages since the Lemurian Epoch, humanity has gradually built the cerebro-spinal nervous system, which is under the control of the will. In the latter part of the Atlantean Epoch this was so far evolved that the Ego could take full possession of the dense body. That was the time, previously described, when the point in the vital body came into correspondence with the point at the root of the nose, and the indwelling spirit became awake in the physical world but, for the greater part of humanity, lost consciousness of the inner worlds (p. 478). A later use of the word “flood,” that a successful meditation may flood the soul with light, is a metaphor for an exercise, not a catastrophe. The chapter adds no Mu, no new Race, and no inundation of a continent.

Chapter XVIII. The Constitution of the Earth and Volcanic Eruptions

Printed pages 498 and following, with diagram 18 at the page the contents number 509. Even among occult scientists, the construction of the Earth is among the most difficult problems. To investigate it fully, one must have passed through the nine lesser Mysteries and the first of the Great Initiations. It is easier to investigate the desire world and the region of concrete thought, and bring the results back, than to investigate the physical planet completely. Modern scientists know very little of it. He then describes the strata. I do not reproduce the whole series. The eighth, which he names from the text, is the atomistic stratum, the expression of the world of virgin spirits, with a property of multiplying things that have been definitely formed.

The flood sentence in this chapter is not the inundation of Atlantis.

Nature-forces are the general agents of such retributive justice, causing floods, or earthquakes, or the beneficent formation of oil or coal for various groups, according to their deserts.

Max Heindel. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1911), p. 507

That is collective karma, acting through nature, for the acts of groups. He does not, in this chapter, place those floods in Atlantis or in Lemuria, and he does not name a Race. The number of the beast is a section of the same chapter, on the constitution of the Earth, not a lost-continent claim. Volcanic eruptions are discussed as part of that interior. The Lemurian cataclysms of chapter XII are not retold here.

Chapter XIX. Christian Rosenkreuz and the Order of Rosicrucians

The contents place this chapter at page 515. He writes it because of a widespread desire to learn something of the Order, and because even students do not understand the place of the Brothers of the Rose Cross in Western civilization. Everything is subject to law, and spiritual and physical progression go hand in hand. The sun, the physical light-bringer, apparently travels from east to west. A wave of spiritual awakening follows the same alternation as day and night, summer and winter, ebb and flood. “Ebb and flood” here is the law of alternating cycles, not the Atlantean inundation. He says there was a time when the Orient was awake and the West slept, and that the wave is now in the West. The sections run through initiation, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, rays from the Rose Cross, and the symbolism of the Rose Cross.

The degrees of initiation are a review of the Periods and of the Epochs. In one degree the candidate follows the last half-revolution and its latest consummation in the Polarian Epoch. In the second degree he follows the Sun revolution and its replica, the Hyperborean Epoch. During the third degree he watches the work of the Moon revolution and sees how that was the basis of life in the Lemurian Epoch. During the fourth degree he sees the evolution of the last half-revolution and its corresponding time in our present stay on Earth, namely the first half of the Atlantean Epoch, which ended when the dense foggy atmosphere subsided and the sun first shone upon land and sea. Then the night of unconsciousness was over, the eyes of the indwelling Ego were fully opened, and he was able to turn the light of reason upon conquering the world. That was the time when a man as we now know him was first born (p. 537).

I do not fold this into the “last third” of chapter XII. There, the points in the vital body and the dense body unite in the last third, and during the Original Semites, the fifth Atlantean Race, the atmosphere commenced to clear definitely. Here, the first half of the Atlantean Epoch ends when the fog subsides and the sun first shines on land and sea. Both sentences are his. He also says that when old systems of initiation speak of the candidate entranced for three and one-half days, the reference is to this part of initiation. The three and one-half days are the stages gone through, not days of twenty-four hours. The time varies with each candidate. In all cases he is taken through the unconscious development of mankind during the past revolutions. When it is said that he is awakened at sunrise on the fourth day, that is the mystical way of expressing that his initiation into the involutionary career ceases at the time when the sun rose above the clear atmosphere of Atlantis. The candidate is then hailed as a first-born. The fifth degree takes him onward from the road already traveled (p. 537).

The symbolism of the Rose Cross is his picture of the same stages. A single rose in the center is the spirit radiating the four vehicles, dense, vital, desire, and mind, when the spirit has drawn into its instruments and become the indwelling human spirit. There was a time when the threefold spirit hovered above its vehicles and could not enter. Then the cross stood alone without the rose, symbolizing the condition which prevailed in the early third of Atlantis. There was a time when the upper limb of the cross was lacking, and man’s constitution was represented by the Tau, the T, in the Lemurian epoch, when he had only the dense, vital, and desire bodies, and lacked the mind. The animal nature was paramount, and man followed desire without reserve. Still earlier, in the Hyperborean Epoch, he was also without a desire body, and possessed only the dense and vital bodies. Man-in-the-making was like the plants, chaste and devoid of desire. His constitution could not be represented by a cross. It was symbolized by a straight shaft, a pillar. That symbol has been considered phallic, an emblem of the licentiousness of the people who worshipped it. He says it is truly a symbol of generation, but generation is not degradation. The pillar is the lower limb of the cross, and it was given to earlier races as a model of the plant’s chaste perpetuation of its species. The phallus and yona used in the Greek mystery temples were given by the hierophants in that spirit, and over the temple were placed the words “Man, know thyself.” The plant is innocent but not virtuous. It has neither desire nor choice. Man has both (pp. 534 to 535).

The chapter’s account of Christian Rosenkreuz, the Fellowship, and the rays of the Rose Cross adds no further continent, flood, or Race name. The closing pages of the book, after this chapter, are the index, which the contents place at page 539, and then the epilogue.

Epilogue

The contents call it “The Healing Power” and place it at page 599. The running head is “Epilogue.” It opens from the truth that man is of few days and full of trouble, and that bodily affliction turns us toward God more powerfully than poverty or the loss of friends. The priestly office has always been connected with healing. Among savages the priest was also the medicine man. In ancient Greece the temple of Aesculapius was renowned for cures. Christ healed the sick. The early Church followed the practice, and certain Catholic orders have continued it. Modern times have divorced the spiritual comforter from the ailing body, and both priest and parishioner are poorer. He does not deny that the double office gave a dangerous power, sometimes abused, or that medicine has reached an efficiency possible only by devotion to that one aim. Sanitary law and the extinction of insect carriers of disease are testimonies to scientific method. The question remains how we may attain and maintain health, until humanity as a whole enjoys it.

He sets the regular school of surgery and medicine, which depends on physical means, beside systems which depend entirely on mental healing. Testimonials prove that many have benefited. They do not prove a method absolute, because thousands may hold the opposite opinion, and occasionally one man is right, as when Galileo maintained that the earth moved. Man is a composite being, and cures succeed only in proportion as they remedy defects on the physical, moral, and mental planes. Results may be easier when stellar rays are propitious, or when a remedy was prepared under an auspicious constellation. The blood changes with the mind. Suggestion used as an adjunct makes the physician more successful. Planetary rays are a further factor, now that radioactivity and wireless telegraphy have made particles and etheric waves thinkable, and the sun’s rays already affect us differently in the morning and at noon. Disease is a manifestation of ignorance, the only sin, and healing is a demonstration of applied knowledge, the only salvation. Faith without works is dead. Unsanitary life will not be saved from typhoid by faith. The Rosicrucians, like other mystery orders, have aimed at bodily health. The story that members took a vow to heal others free of charge is, like other previous so-called revelations, somewhat garbled. The lay brothers take a vow to minister to all according to the best of their ability, free of charge. The vow included healing for such men as Paracelsus, who combined physical remedies under favorable stellar rays with spiritual counsel. All were alike in never charging, and in laboring in secret.

He says that during the past three years the teachings have been written, published, and spread, and have reached from South Africa to the Arctic Circle, without a charge for the teaching. The Elder Brother who inspired the work has entrusted the formula of a spiritual healing panacea, to be used free of charge. Headquarters and a school will be needed, to educate helpers in the panacea, medical astrology, and hygiene. A number of physicians are already affiliated. At this writing they are about to secure a tract of land in Southern California. The epilogue adds no Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, flood, or race claim. The leaves after page 602 are advertisements for his other books and lectures, including titles on Parsifal, Lucifer, Golgotha, and the coming race. I do not treat the advertisement list as chapters of this book.