THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE


 The Commentaries explain that the first Race – the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called "Self-born" – was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a "Sound-language," to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the "Sweat-born" (the early Third Race). In its second half, when the "Sweat-born" gave birth to the "Egg-born," (the middle Third Race); and when these, instead of "hatching out" (may the reader pardon the rather ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age) as androgynous beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually, an act which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of "one language and of one lip." This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race 1 from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors 2 and their own already awakened minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven races is divided into four ages – the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age – so is every smallest division of such races. 3 Speech then developed, according to occult teaching, in the following order:

 I. Monosyllabic speech: that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the close of the Third Root-Race, the "golden-coloured," yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full awakening of their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called "thought-transference," though, with the exception of the Race called the "Sons of Will and Yoga" – the first in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had incarnated – thought was but very little developed in nascent physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether. Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist. 4

 II. These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race preserved the mother language. And as languages have their cyclic evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with other languages, maturity, decay, and finally death, 5 so the primitive speech of the most civilized Atlantean races – that language, which is referred to as "Râkshasi Bhasa," in old Sanskrit works – decayed and almost died out. While the "cream" of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America.

 III. The inflectional speech – the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called "the elder sister" of the Greek, instead of its mother – was the first language (now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race). At any rate, the "Semitic" languages are the bastard descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit. The occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations. The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans – degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Tchandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A-bram (No Brahmin) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of those Aryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations, some of whom remained on the borderlands thereof, in Afghanistan and Kabul, 6 and along the Oxus, while others penetrated into and invaded Arabia.

 But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent. We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub-races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross-breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization, which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids.

 In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the "Lords of Wisdom" did not incarnate, as we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural "sexual selection") originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity, while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later. 7

 As to the separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature proceeds slowly in whatever she does.


1 To avoid confusion, let the reader remember that the term Root-Race applies to one of the seven great Races, sub-Race to one of its great Branches, and Family-Race to one of the sub-divisions, which include nations and large tribes.
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2 In the Selection on the Divine Dynasties, the nature of these "Instructors" is explained.
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3 Vide Selection attached to the "Divisions into Yugas."
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4 The present yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early branches of the Fourth Race. Of the third, the only pure and direct descendants are, as said above, a portion of the fallen and degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors belonged to a division of the seventh Sub-race of the Third. The rest are of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in stature and intellectual capacities.
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5 Language is certainly coeval with reason and could never have been developed before men became one with the informing principles in them–those who fructified and awoke to life the manasic element dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor Max Müller tells us in his "Science of Thought," "Thought and language are identical." Yet to add to this the reflection that thoughts which are too deep for words do not really exist at all, is rather risky, as thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in eternity whether expressed or not. Logos is both reason and speech. But language, proceeding in cycles, is not always adequate to express spiritual thoughts. Moreover, in one sense, the Greek Logos is the equivalent of the Sanskrit Vâch, "the immortal (intellectual) ray of spirit." And the fact that Vâch (as Devasena, an aspect of Saraswati, the goddess of hidden Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate Kumâra, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference to the Kumâras, those "who refused to create," but who were compelled later on to complete divine Man by incarnating in him. All this will be fully explained in the Selections that follow.
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6 Ptolemy, speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitæ (Kabul tribes), calls them Αριστόφυλοι, Aristophyli, the aristocratic or noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves Ben-Issrael (children of Is(sa)rael), from Issa, "woman and also earth," Sons of Mother Earth. But if you call an Afghan Yahoudi (Jew), he will kill you. The subject is fully treated elsewhere. The names of the supposed twelve tribes and the names of the real tribes, the same in number, of the Afghans, are the same. The Afghans being far older (at any rate, their Arabic stock) than the Israelites, no one need be surprised to find such tribal names among them as Youssoufzic, "Sons of Joseph" in Punjcaure and Boonere; the Zablistanee (Zebulon); Ben-manasseh (sons of Manasseh) among the Khojar Tartars; Isaguri, or Issachar (now Ashnagor in Afghanistan), etc., etc. The whole twelve names of the so-called twelve tribes are names of the signs of the Zodiac, as is now well proven. At any rate, the names of the oldest Arabic tribes, re-transliterated, yield the names of the zodiacal signs and of the mythical sons of Jacob likewise. Where are the traces of the Jewish twelve tribes? Nowhere. But there is a trace, and a good one, that the Jews have tried to deceive people with the help of those names. For, see what happens ages after the ten tribes had wholly disappeared from Babylon. Ptolemy Philadelphus, desiring to have the Hebrew Law translated for him into Greek (the famous Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of the Jews, Eleazar, to send him six men from each of the twelve tribes; and the seventy-two representatives (of whom sixty were ghosts apparently) came to the king in Egypt and translated the Law amid miracles and wonders. See Butler’s "Horæ Biblicæ," Josephus, and Philo Judæus.
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7 The Commentary explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has gradually and with every generation and variety tended more and more to return to the original type of its male forefather–the dark gigantic Lemurian and Atlantean.
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H. P. Blavatsky
The Secret Doctrine, ii 198-201