The Theosophy of Ancient America

[Part 1]

There was an ancient American theosophy which taught conceptions of the universe and of man just as lofty, profound, and spiritual as any formulated by either Greeks or Hindus. And this god-wisdom was frequently expressed in terms and metaphors more graphic than are found in either of the latter. We are only at the beginning of a living understanding of the true esoteric perspective of the many Indian cultures that once overspread all of and still exist in parts of South, Central, and North America. The more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that they all shared in a common religious tradition that was known and taught from one end of the New World to the other by the initiates of each center, in language and imagery adapted to local circumstances. (1) Then all of these local versions, stripp ed of their elements of superstition and formalism, are seen to reflect major portions of that primary secret doctrine or esoteric tradition which is global in extent, and which has formed the heart of the human spiritual drama in prehistoric as well as all historic eras. (2)

The ravages of time and the destructiveness of conquest have left us partial records only of this primeval New World theosophy. Because European conquerors came when many Indian tribes were in the slough of a degenerate, materialistic and bloody cycle and others had returned to a simple pastoral and farming life, they were all treated as of inferior breed, perhaps not fully human, and slaughtered or ignored accordingly. The white man’s blindness coupled with the Indian’s great religious reserve resulted in an almost complete obscuration of the latter’s true inner scale of values. Only now, when the results of our wanton misuse of the human and natural resources of our lands have opened our eyes to the fact that the Indians are living, and have always lived, in close ecological harmony with their environment, have we become more aware that those values have considerable merit and should be carefully investigated.

For the best among aboriginal American peoples, every aspect of daily life was religious: they recognized that not only the physical but also the divine and spiritual forces of the solar universe played through man’s life on earth at every moment, and had to be taken into account by him in his conduct and thought. The twenty-four hours of day and night reflected, to the smallest detail, the larger corresponding cycles of the universal solar system. The divine-spiritual heart of this solar universe in which they lived was clothed with the physical sun that we see: it was therefore the highest representative in our solar system of an even loftier cosmic divinity. They taught that this solar system or universe is a compound or hierarchy of spheres, planes or worlds (“heavens and hells”) both superior and inferior to and including our earth-world; and that this hierarchical star-system emanated from a celestial source, very difficult to describe. That source was the place where the duality characterizing all manifestation h ad had its birth or beginning, and every manifested being was a spark or ray of it. The total human being has in him elements or phases corresponding to each and every sphere or world within the universal solar system.

The subject is vast, but it can be usefully illustrated by taking up one concept at a time from any one of the surviving lines of the aboriginal tradition and drawing some parallels. Let us look, for example, at some of these ideas from the ancient Mexican or Nahuatl perspective. Fortunately we have authentic and fairly good information from surviving codices, extensive rock sculptures on temple ruins, and narrative accounts of early Spanish chroniclers obtained from native Nahuatl wisemen or tlamatinime. Much the same philosophy is apparent in the records of the great Mayan peoples of prehistoric Yucatan and Central America, but it is harder to investigate because the narrative portions of Mayan codices and stone carvings cannot be read.

The Nahuatl wisemen taught of nine, eleven, twelve, or thirteen spheres or ‘heavens’ above our earth-sphere, and of eight or nine ‘hells’ or underworlds beneath the earth-plane, thirteen and nine being the most commonly found numbers. The highest divinity was named Ometeotl, ‘the god of duality,’ and it inhabited a place named Omeyocan, ‘the place of duality.’ Omeyocan was the place of cosmic origin of all manifested things, and it was variously shown as above the nine ‘heavens’ or, if more were given, as being the thirteenth or highest ‘heaven’ or sphere. Ometeotl embraced both halves of all the dualities which characterize manifestation, such as male-female, positive-negative, spirit-matter. It was beautifully described as both the feminine, “she of the starry skirt,” and the masculine, “celestial body which illumines things.” This concept is vividly portrayed in a frieze at Teotihuacan, the magnificent temple-center of the prehistoric Toltec culture located northeast of Mexico City, (3) that represents the divinity Ometeotl creating the worlds of form (the planes or spheres) which build our solar universe, out of itself.

The Nahuatl hierarchy of being composing the solar system was often pictured in drawings of the spheres placed one above the other, in staircase fashion, from the lowest to the highest. In such case, Ometeotl was depicted as manifesting on each of these levels or planes, in drawings of a clothed male and a female figure seated facing each other in conversation. The result was a wonderfully human way of showing the emanated permutations of the one force in dual manifestation through all the ethereal and material spheres of the solar system.

We find a corresponding expression of this conception in the hierarchies of lokas and talas, or bipolar spheres, of Hindu religious philosophy. The idea is also conveyed in representations of the various Hindu divinities — each one an aspect of the one divine force — as having their respective saktis or ‘feminine’ aspects or ‘companions.’ The aboriginal Nahuatl conception of Ometeotl itself corresponds rather obviously in one sense with the Hindu philosophical teaching of Parabrahman and Mulaprakriti, the primeval divine force and its vehicular aspect of root-matter as the origin of the duality of creation or manifestation. In fact, the portrayal of Ometeotl as ‘creator’ or source of the worlds of form is analogous to the well-known depiction of the Hindu god Krishna, who in the Bhagavad-Gita is made to say, “I establish this universe with a single portion of myself, and remain separate.” In this delineation, Krishna clearly embraces both aspects of duality: male-female, light-darkness, spirit-matter; and from his hand, as from those of Ometeotl, are symbolically shown emerging all the creatures in the worlds of form. Krishna states moreover that although he remains separate, nevertheless a portion of himself is present in every part of the universe.

In future articles it is our hope to develop more details of the marvelous range of cosmic philosophy embodied in the theosophy of ancient America.

Part Two

Characteristic of aboriginal American theosophy was its multileveled cosmic vision. There was the outer, exoteric or popular religion which was polytheistic. There was also a more esoteric perspective, imparted to those accepted for training in the kivas, lodges, and temple-schools of traditional instruction and initiation. Here, the multiple ‘gods’ of the populace were revealed as so many aspects or transformations of a single divine emanation or force, as hierarchies of consciousness which compose the solar universe. The individual’s understanding of these perceptions depended upon the degree of his initiation. Moreover, obligations of silence this imposed upon him restricted what be could relate publicly. This important fact explains the seeming variations reported in the chronicles of ancient Indian belief coming down to us, and why it is still difficult to comprehend portions of them. We do not have the complete story, and are ourselves limited by our degree of comprehension.

There is evidence of an even deeper level of esotericism imparted to some exceptional men, beyond the majority who were trained in the centers. For example, in the calmecac, the ancient Nahuatl school of initiation and teaching, those taught to read and interpret the sacred codices learned of Ometeotl as the highest divinity, the single dual principle from which all manifested worlds had been begotten. But certain ones who had passed through the calmecac, such as Nezahualcoyotl, the famous “poet-king” of Tezcoco, a city-state northeast of pre-Conquest Mexico City, went further and revered an “invisible god who could not be represented physically,” known as Tloque Nahuaque or Ipalnemohuani, “the Lord of the Everywhere,” “the Giver of Life.” It is related that this poet-king erected a temple to the Unknown God — “who was unknown, unseen, shapeless and formless.” This lofty conception was no different from the Tat, or That, of ancient India, whose rishis were unwilling to give a more limited name to the unnameable Causeless Cause of all, than simply to call it That, in contrast to This, the manifested universe. The unusually dedicated temple of the early Mexican poet-king reminds one of the similarly inscribed altar seen by Paul on the Hill of Ares in Athens. (Cf. Acts 17:23.)

In the previous article we saw how the primeval Toltec initiates of Mexico taught that the solar universe was composed of a series of worlds, spheres, or planes above, below, and including the earth-plane. The usual number given was thirteen ‘heavens’ above and nine ‘hells’ beneath the earth; these were depicted as a series of vertical levels. But they also represented them in a manner strikingly similar to that employed in 1888 by H. P. Blavatsky and in 1932 by Dr. G. de Purucker who amplified the earlier information. The vertical-step presentation was the more exoteric; the second method, illustrated here, was the more esoteric, complex, and illuminating explanation.

In the 1890s Eduard Seler, the well-known German student of Nahuatl religious philosophy, published a diagram of the thirteen ‘gods of the hours of day’ and the nine ‘gods of the hours of night.’ We recall that for the aboriginal American peoples the passage of the hours of day and night reflected, to the smallest detail, the larger structure and operation of the solar cosmos (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

NOON
(7) Xochipilli-Cinteotl
(6) Teoyaomiqui [or preferably Mictlantecutli] —————— Tlaloc (8)
(5) Tiacolteutl ————————————————— Quetzalcoatl (9)
(4)Tonatiuh —————————————————- Tezcatlipoca (10)
(3) Chalchihuitlicue ———————————- Mictlantecutli [or Chalmecatecutli] (11)
(2) Tlaltecutli —————————————————- Tlauizcalpantecutli (12)
(1) Xiuhtecutli ——————-Ilamatecutli [Citlalinicue according to Mexican investigators] (13)
_______________________________________________________________________________

(IX) Tlaloc ——————————- Xiuhtecutli (I)
(VIII) Tepeyollotl —————————-Itztli (II)
(VII) Tlacolteuti —————-Piltzintecutli-Tonatiuh (III)
(VI) Chalchihuitlicue ————– Cinteotl (IV)
(V) Mictlantecutli
MIDNIGHT

In 1932 Dr. de Purucker published the following arrangement of the planes of the universal solar system (Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, p. 499; it must be made clear here that these diagrams are symbolic arrangements only, and not direct representations of the facts they are intended to stand for). In it, the triangle at the top stands for three highest spheres of this hierarchy or family of beings, de Purucker explaining that two additional planes or spheres, one each at the top and bottom, form connecting links with other hierarchies to complete a total twelve (Figure 2).

Now if we take the thirteen ‘above-worlds’ and the nine ‘underworlds’ of the Nahuatl wisemen and arrange them on twelve levels or planes, the resulting depiction looks like this (Figure 3).

The earth-plane is represented by the red line. For illustration of another way in which the solar universe was imaged, identical in principle with the foregoing, we have this twelvefold scheme as viewed by the North American Plains Indian teachers (Figure 4). [For more detailed treatment of this “Medicine Wheel,” which for the Plains Indians symbolized the solar universe among other things, see The Sacred Pipe, Joseph Epes Brown (1953) and Seven Arrows, Hyemeyohsts Storm (1972).]

Comparison of these diagrams will immediately suggest much to students of the theosophical philosophy. First, we see that the same fundamentals of the ancient wisdom or esoteric philosophy, outlined by Blavatsky and de Purucker and illustrated by them largely from the spiritual thought of the classical Oriental and Western world, were known to and imparted by the initiates of the ancient New World as well. The Toltecs, like other aboriginal initiate castes to the north and south of them, had knowledge of the twelvefold universal solar system and of the place of the earth-sphere within it. Of course, they taught of this in a manner and after a fashion to meet the needs of the particular peoples for whom they had responsibility. As the tide of spiritual instruction flowing around the globe brought the various great cultural eras each to individual fruition in time and space, the primordial American civilizations also received their due. The American hemisphere is only a New World in the sense that it was rediscovered by Europeans.

The great Mayan civilization of prehistoric Central America had the same esoteric philosophy. The eminent contemporary authority on the Mayans, J. Eric S. Thompson, writes:

The Maya . . . believed that the sky was divided into 13 compartments, in each of which certain gods resided. These may have been arranged as 13 horizontal layers or as six steps ascending on the east to the seventh and then six more descending on the west, so that compartments I and 13, 2 and 12, etc., were on the same level. In the latter case there were 13 heavens but seven layers. . . .

There seems no reason to doubt that the Maya, like the Aztec, believed that there were nine underworlds, one below the other or again stepped with the fifth the bottom-most. . . . the nine lords of the nights, who have an evil aspect, are as prominent in the Maya calendar as in the Aztec. In Aztec belief these ruled the nine underworlds . . Maya Hieroglyphic Writings, p. 10

All aboriginal American spiritual teachings assign to Man, the total human being, a divine and an earthly origin. For the Nahuatls, Man’s original divine progenitor was Ometeotl, the “mother of the gods, the father of the gods,” who was the ultimate omnipresent force sustaining the cosmos. Each human being was a ‘spark’ of Ometeotl in essence. But man as a composite manifested entity owes his being more immediately to a hierarchy of four ‘gods’ who were the sons of Ometeotl. These gods formed the four primary forces whose activities and permutations brought about the four ‘manifested’ worlds or planes of the solar universe . (These can be identified with the four lower planes, labeled with letters A through G, in the diagram published by Dr. G. de Purucker.) Each of these creative divinities is identified with a color, a cardinal direction, certain cycles of time, and one of the phenomena we know as fire, air, water, and earth. Each is dual in its nature, having its ‘feminine’ or polar counterpart. What we call time and space are also characteristics of these creative entities: with their advent, space and time were manifested as factors that combine to regulate the occurrence of cosmic events.

The appearance of the earth was also due to the action of these divinities. The Mexican concept of the earth was, as can be seen, not static in any sense; in fact it was the reverse. The earth, as the rest of the manifested creation, is ever in motion and flux in time and space, subject to the influences of all the dualities and their field of action. The earthly vehicles or bodies of Man, which house the divine spark, were all made from the materials of this globe, and human beings as entities manifesting on earth were frequently likened to plants. The Mayan word for “one generation of men,” uinay, for example, literally meant “one growth.” In fact, for both the Mexican Nahuatl and the Central American Mayan peoples the twelvefold emanation of the solar universe was often depicted as a cosmic tree whose roots dwelt in the highest place of origin, and whose trunk and branches extended ‘downward,’ composing the intermediate worlds and spheres of being. (Cf. The Bhagavad-Gita, chapter xv, which describes the Aswattha, “the eternal sacred tree,” growing with its “roots above and its branches below.” The figure of the celestial tree is a prominent symbol in many ancient spiritual traditions.) Life itself and human generations descend to the world through the branches of this celestial tree. In the Maya-Quiche’ language, the verbs to descend and to be born are synonyms. Thus, the serial birth or emanation of lower worlds from higher or primeval worlds was wonderfully portrayed in this figure. Likewise, the origin of the highest spark in Man, its peregrination ‘downwards’ into the manifested planes, and its ultimate birth in a body here on earth, was fully indicated.

The central religious importance given to the New World corn — maize — has its explanation here. Maize was for aboriginal Americans at once a divinity, life itself, and the support of human life — that is, of the physical vehicle on earth of Man’s divine spark. Because it meant life, maize was closely associated with fertility and generation, and doubtless represented for the Indian the necessary carrier of the human spark from inner spheres to a successful birth on this globe. (An amusing insight into early European incomprehension of maize’s importance is gained from this comment of a seventeenth century Franciscan observer: “If one looks closely at these Indians he will find that everything they do and say has something to do with maize. A little more, and they would make a god of it. There is so much conjuring and fussing about their corn fields, that for them they will forget wives and children and any other pleasure, as if the only end and aim of life was to secure a crop of corn.”) It has been estimated that, next to rice, maize feeds more millions throughout the world than any other grain. Maize does not reproduce itself; it must be sown by human hands. The origin of maize as a food grain is still enveloped in mystery, so much so that one author has stated that maize seemed to have sprung as “a cultivated grain directly from the hand of God.” (See p. 186, The First American, C. W. Ceram,1971.) This contemporary estimate echoes the exceedingly ancient belief of America’s aboriginal peoples that maize was indeed a gift of the gods who, when at first they taught the early humans the arts and sciences, included that of agriculture or food cultivation as a primary religious instruction. Because maize can be successfully grown only if it receives rain, rain itself shared in the divine character of the maize and thus in the esoteric as well as exoteric religion of aboriginal American cultures. These supports of human life on earth were always associated with the idea of sacrifice, another convergence with the highest expressions of classical Hindu spiritual philosophy as stated in the Bhagavad-Gita. There, the divinity Krishna, as divine instructor, enjoins Arjuna, who represents Man, to “nourish the Gods, that the Gods may nourish you; thus mutually nourishing ye shall obtain the highest felicity. . . . Beings are nourished by food, food is produced by rain, rain comes from sacrifice, and sacrifice is performed by action. Know that action comes from the Supreme Spirit.”

The other half of the idea of a descent of human consciousness from higher spheres into earth-life is that of its ascent after bodily death to those higher planes once more and — after a time — its rebirth or reincarnation again onto the earth. This belief in the cyclic peregrination of the human monad through all the worlds or spheres of the solar universe formed an important part of ancient American theosophy, more particularly of the esotericism which was imparted to qualified individuals in the lodges and inner schools of initiation among the aborigines.

When, several years ago, a reliable Indian spokesman of the sacred Hopi tradition was asked by a white friend why reincarnation as a specific tenet was not set out with other Hopi teachings, he replied that the cyclic rebirth of human beings is taken for granted, and the Hopi saw no need to emphasize that they believed specifically in such a process. The Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin, in their most sacred ritual, “The Road of Life and Death,” interpreted life as a mystical road from earth to heaven and back again ad infinitum, as the white investigator, Paul Radin, learned when this secret medicine-lodge ritual was revealed to him by Indian spokesmen in 1908-09.

Reincarnation as a specific teaching does not stand out in Nahuatl esotericism either, although there are some allusions in the early Spanish chronicles of Mexican beliefs to a rebirth on earth of those who have gone after death to Tlalocan, the “earthly paradise,” one of the ‘heavens’ or higher worlds within the Nahuatl twelvefold cosmogony. Close study of the various expressions of ancient American esoteric philosophy leads to the conclusion that their concern was not so much with the fact of human rebirth itself, which is implicit throughout that spiritual philosophy, as it was with how human beings can so live as to achieve a successful peregrination to the higher worlds before returning to earth-life. For, in their view, apparently many, many individuals were unable to do this because they did not live correctly, nor in the right spirit of sacrifice, and so had to spend a sojourn in one or more of the various ‘hells’ before rebirth.

For those born and trained in the Christian tradition, where the idea of human rebirth was deliberately excised from Church teaching almost fifteen hundred years ago, the concept does assume the aspect of a distinct if not novel belief. One, moreover, that somehow we expect will be expounded with much fanfare in other spiritual traditions. This preconception is, however, peculiar to ourselves and will disappear when we begin to understand reincarnation as forming simply part of the background of aboriginal American religious thought, for example, as it does in the traditions of many peoples of the ancient world. Suffice it to say that while this idea was given full and clear expression only within the sacred precincts of Indian kivas and secret schools of instruction about life and death, the fact of reincarnation was known implicitly among even non-initiated Indians. We need only mention the well-known practice among some Southwest Indians of saving the clothes when a young child died, because of their conviction that the next child born to them would be the same soul trying again for a successful rebirth into the world.

[Part Three:] “One Foot in the Fifth World”

Deeper than our desire for material trophies is the need to know who and what we are, how we relate to those around us and to the world we all occupy. So true is this that a person who cannot usefully satisfy himself about these questions is said to be alienated, dissociated from the mainstream of his own consciousness. The measure in which a culture is able to endow its members with an identity and a sense of social solidarity is one criterion by which we rank it in terms of worth and standing. Alienation or the reverse — psychological unity — results from whether the spiritual tradition prevailing within the culture has become bankrupt or is yet a living power. If the former, the necessity is an urgent one, because “not by bread alone” does man live and thrive. If he could, he would be something less than man. We require the bread of intellectual conviction to satisfy the mind’s questions and the intuitive bread of the heart to assuage the thirst for spiritual comprehension of ourselves and the universe.

Because their sacred traditions gave them reliable and satisfying descriptions of themselves, their antecedents, and the universe, American Indian peoples for long millennia have bad a very precise notion of who they are, where they came from, and where they are in the evolutionary trek of the ages. This absorbing vision of the panorama of human history can enrich our own Judeo-Christian story, for it embraces a manifold conception of the Great in the Small, the cosmic in man. It tells of four previous great racial and geological eras, sometimes speaks of the present as a fifth era, and it can be found in a variety of parallel forms from South to North America.

One of its more memorable versions is that of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an unusual Andean Indian of high-caste antecedents whose mother was a daughter of the great Inca, Tupac Yupanqui. For thirty years, from 1583 to 1613, this man traveled all over Peru interceding for and trying to protect his unfortunate people from Spanish depredation. Finally Guaman Poma composed an illustrated book which proudly recounted his people’s prehistoric origins, and openly and fearlessly attacked the cruel tyranny of Spanish rule. Addressing his book to King Philip II, the author had the temerity to carry it himself, on foot, down to Lima, the viceroyal capital on the coast, for transmission to Spain. His personal fate is not known, but the book itself, titled Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno, disappeared and did not turn up again until 1908 when it was found by accident, not in Spain, but in the Royal Library at Copenhagen — some 300 years after its composition The celebrated English historian of Peru, Sir Clements Markham, said of Guaman Poma and his work:

How the book, with all those damning illustrations, escaped destruction and how it was ever allowed to be sent home, is a mystery. One would give much to know the fate of the author, so full of compassion for his ill-fated countrymen, diligent as a collector of information of all kinds, proud of his ancestry, a gifted artist, full of sympathy, fearless in the exposure of injustice and cruelty. Guaman Poma was a hero of whom any country might be proud. At length this most important work is in good and sympathetic hands, and will be given to the world. It is, without exception, the most remarkable as well as the most interesting production of native genius that has come down to our time. –– The Incas of Peru, pp.18-19

In Pakarimoc-Runa, the first age or Dawn of Humanity, says the Nueva Coronica, there were “direct relations between men and gods.” Wari-Runa, the second, was that of giant human autochthones who increased in numbers and lived primitively. In the Purun-Runa which followed, mankind diversified in different lineages or castes, gained the arts and sciences, built cities of stone, and began to form nations. The first wars and diseases afflicted it. The fourth, or Auka-Runa, an age of wars and warriors, saw increasing strife among people all over the earth. It was from the last stages of this period that the ruling caste of Incas appeared. These Ayar-Incas traced their origin to an emergence from “the cave of Pacaritambo” following a flood.

The dramatically varied creation stories that we have from this same Andean region lend additional dimensions to Guaman Poma’s prehistory; they also refer to four serial creations. (For a good resume of Peruvian creation myths see Empire of The Inca, by Burr Cartwright Brundage; University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. See also South American Mythology, by Harold Osborne; The Hamlyn Publishing Group, New York, 1968. A facsimile edition of Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno was published in Paris, 1936, by the Institut d’Ethnologie. Several modern Spanish editions of this codex also exist. Runa is variously translated as ‘man,’ ‘race,’ ‘humanity.’) In them Viracocha, the supreme creative deity born from Chaos, whose father was the sun, first constructs the form and archetype of an early mankind but doesn’t create a humanity proper. In a new effort as the god Cons, “he who appeared from the north and had no bones,” Viracocha created a second, ‘boneless’ race. Cons was followed by Pachacamac who destroyed Cons’ world in fire and flood and “transformed men into monkeys.” After that, Viracocha as Pachacamac remade the creation and provided corn for a new humanity which, by seeking mountain peaks, providentially survived the great flood (uno pachacuti) that had destroyed Cons’ former race of “evil and contentious men.”

Five ages, or “suns,” each having its own humankind, are enumerated by the ancient Nahuatl peoples of Mexico. A great cataclysm terminated each of the first four “suns,” the last being destroyed by water. The Nahuatls believed themselves to be living in the fifth “sun” or present age, which they said would also end, but could give way to a new “sun” if men made proper sacrifice to the divine creator. Their sacred manuscripts describe third-age men who became monkeys.

To the north, the Hopi Indians of Arizona preserve a secret teaching that their ancestors ‘migrated’ through three previous worlds which were successively extinguished by ice, floods and great earth movements after their inhabitants turned away from the divine creator. Only a part of each former mankind survived: those who had not forgotten their divine nature, who remained humble and obeyed the law of brotherhood toward all creatures. The ones saved when the third world succumbed traveled eastward across the Pacific Ocean to a fourth world, the Americas. The Hopis say they are fourth-world people but that nevertheless they “have one foot in the fifth world.” The Zunis, another southwestern pueblo Indian tribe, have the same general traditions as the Hopis, but regard themselves as now in that fifth world.

Turning to Middle America, an impressive and beautiful genesis story is found in the Popol Vuh or “community history” of the Quiche-Mayans of Guatemala. In this account the creative gods first construct primitive beings; but because these were “Unable to say our names,” i.e., lacked awareness of themselves and their divine progenitors, they were unserviceable. A subsequent creation produced a ‘man’ of earth or mud, who could speak but had no mind, was unable to stand and kept falling apart. Unsatisfactory, this effort had also to be broken up. More intensive exertions by the gods resulted in a third mankind made of ‘wood’ and ‘reeds.’ These could live and multiply but had neither souls nor minds, “walked on all fours and did not remember their Maker.” Although judged an improvement over the former, they were yet imperfect and so were largely done away with in a great flood. Some of the descendants of this humankind “are the monkeys which now live in the forest,” who are “an example of a generation of men which were created and made but were only wooden figures” (i.e., they resembled true men but were empty of genuine thinking consciousness). A fourth age begins when the creative deities reassemble and call upon higher powers to help them fashion a true and viable human being. Their deep meditation and prayer result in a new type that is produced from “the dough of cornmeal.” It can walk, talk, see and grasp things, and had an intelligence godlike in its scope: a fit being at last! Four first mortals of this kind were made. The Popol Vuh also tells of certain fourth-age individuals — brothers to another fourth-age race — who became monkeys.

From all this we can get an idea of the well-formed notion the Indians of the Americas had of their place in an immense serial creation of progressively improved human types, interrupted by divinely-ordained cataclysms that each time allowed a better mankind to survive and continue. We see an initial, archetypal, quasi-man followed by a second, ‘boneless’ or relatively ethereal race, which nonetheless had some mineral or bonelike material in its frame, symbolized by references to autochthonous men of ‘earth’ or ‘mud.’ A third evolution, much more like our own species but still lacking real self-consciousness, is then described. This is followed by a more fully conscious, thinking race that because of its misdeeds mainly perished in a flood. A new race of men, sometimes enumerated as the fifth, then emerges as our pre-historic ancestors.

The Indians’ recitals converge remarkably with the modern theosophical perspective of man’s development, In this philosophy the human species is stated to evolve through seven successive great stock-races, and is now in the fifth of these. Each such stock-race is associated with a geological era. The previous, or fourth, is symbolized in Plato’s account of Poseidonis or Atlantis, but in fact refers to the Cenozoic era as a whole. The third, the Lemurian, corresponds to the earlier Mesozoic era of geology; while our present fifth race answers to the Pleistocene epoch of the last one or two million years. Because each of these stock-races is born from its predecessor, some of the peoples from the different geological humanities have lived side by side and mingled during long periods of time. [It is important the reader be aware that this article does not assign the Mesozoic, Cenozoic, and Pleistocene periods the enormous durations of years usually given them by modern geologists, who rely almost exclusively on radiogenic tests for that purpose. We use the time-periods employed by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky adopted the nomenclature for the geological periods devised by Sir Charles Lyell, the “Father” of geology. To this she applied a proportional calculation based on thickness of strata that was proposed by Professor Lefevre, which harmonized with occult data regarding the true age of the strata. Thus, the Pleistocene (Lyell’s Quaternary) began about 1,600,000 years ago. The Cenozoic Era (Lyell’s Tertiary), or that of Atlantis, began about 10-12,000,000 years ago; and the Mesozoic (the old Secondary) about 37,000,000 years ago (Cf. S.D., 2:693-711). These are the time-periods intended to be understood in talking of Atlantis and Lemuria, and the present fifth race. The latter was formerly identified by Western scholars as the Aryan peoples, but now is termed the Indo-European speaking peoples of the world.] This theosophical interpretation can explain why certain aboriginal Indian traditions emphasize a “fourth” and others a “fifth” world. Those, like the Hopis, who say they have “one foot in the fifth world” and, by proper living, can bring in “the other foot” as well, really are telling us that although their roots derive from the previous stock-race they have survived beyond its natural term into the present or Aryan world and so can in some important sense fully enter it. Others apparently by reason of more recent racial origin believe they are an Aryan or fifth-race stock.

Singularly enough, these traditions invariably assert that the relationship between man and simian or pithecoid is sequentially the opposite to the one proposed in the nineteenth century by Haeckel and Darwin. These savants theorized that man sprang from an ape ancestor — an idea that has never been proved true. In the Indian statement the simians are always the progeny of already-existing human beings, and thus are often called their “brothers” because of the portion of human blood in them. (The ancient American accounts, especially the Popol Vuh, corroborate with much precision the theosophical explanation that the monkey stock was produced in the Mesozoic era (about 20,000,000 years ago) from fruitful crossings between a then mindless or unself-conscious human stock with a high animal stock. The great apes were produced much later, in the Miocene of the Tertiary Period (about 3-4,000,000 years ago) — now termed the Cenozoic era — from similar unions between later simian stocks and self-conscious early hominids of the fourth race. For a good statement of this position, see Man in Evolution, by Dr. G. de Purucker, 1941. Since the great apes are not known in the Americas but monkeys are, in the Popol Vuh the references to both these simian evolutions are to monkey-like creatures.) This is reminiscent of the old Hindu tradition of veneration for the monkey kingdom and its hero Hanuman as being something higher than mere beasts as are the other animals. Some contemporary scientists now say the fossil record shows a hominid evolution older than the simian. The Finnish palaeontologist, Bjorn Kurten, recently wrote that “the most logical answer suggested by the fossil evidence is this: hominids are not descended from apes, but apes may be descended from hominids .” (Not from the Apes, p. 42, Pantheon Books, 1972) Dare we admit that aboriginal Americans may have known the true facts, which only now because of the failure of Darwinism and the testimony of the spade are receiving serious consideration by science?

The ancient American perspective of our past is manifestly grander and more logically appealing than any we ourselves have so far conceived. It is also thoroughly evolutionary, hence scientific. The Indian at the same time likewise had a strong conviction of the absolute necessity for right living and right action as the key to successful human progress in harmony with surrounding nature. His profoundly spiritual conceptions of life, the universe, and his relations to them are demonstrated again and again in his philosophy and culture. Only in certain few expressions such as the Aztec culture, which had degenerated into a bloody perversion of the earlier, pure emphasis on a life of self-sacrifice for the good of the race and the world, is this spiritual outlook lacking.

We have good reason to believe that the primeval American wise men knew that these serial humanities represented no more than facets in time and space — phases — of an immensely rich and complex evolution of the consciousnesses composing the solar universe. We, trying to comprehend their vision solely with our minds or intellects, all too often see but its shell and remain baffled by the terse, elliptical symbolism they used to record their cosmic insights. The Indian accounts can in fact be studied successfully only by means of our intuitions and awakened spiritual vision. It is not too much to say that until these faculties are brought by us into more active use generally, the theosophy formulated and lived by these remarkable peoples through long epochs can be neither fully utilized nor thoroughly appreciated.

[Part Four]: To Make Men Divine

Is it possible to understand the spiritual outlook and way of life of a people who, though intensely religious, “have no word for religion in their own language,” as Frank Waters has exclaimed in surprise of the Navaho? (Masked Gods, The Swallow Press, Inc., Chicago, 1950; p. 125.) In truth his expression can apply to all the great native American cultures, for each centered thought and daily action in the vast mystery of spirit-matter. Equally with the Taoist of China who saw life as a Way, American Indians spoke of the Road or Way of Life and Death — a progression of consciousness. For them, the Road of Life embraced not merely the individual’s three score and ten years, but the complete process of mankind’s evolution. Because our manner of approaching truth is primarily through the mind, and not the ‘heart” or intuition as with the Indian, his vision of reality is often incomprehensible to us.

The Indian had no word for religion because he did not see it as something separate from life: his life-stance itself was religious, was a “way” trod through this time-space world to the worlds of the Beyond. The Indian’s “ways” were really Mystery-religions whose closest parallels are found in the Mysteries of the ancient Mediterranean world, such as the Eleusinian, the Orphic and Mithraic. (For a fuller and authoritative comparison of native American Mystery-religions with classical Mediterranean and Asian counterparts, see The World’s Rim, by Hartley Burr Alexander, University of Oklahoma Press, 1953; or more recent editions.) Esoteric “schools,” they embraced deeper experiences of consciousness, whose comprehension demanded prior training, discipline, and qualification. As such, they were “operative,” because intended to actively evoke man’s divinity during life on earth, and not passively in a heaven after death. If not this time, then in a succeeding incarnation it might be accomplished, as the individual treading the Way learned to blend his consciousness ever more fully with the “Great Spirit” or cosmic divinity.

Everywhere in native American traditions coming down to us we note a type of Lesser and Greater Mysteries. The Lesser are typically the annual cycle of dramatic religious dances and ceremonies which can still be witnessed by the populace and are open to the general public. The Greater Mysteries consist of secret rites and instruction, restricted to the precincts of the kivas, lodges, and temple schools. Judging by present-day practices, it was always possible for those having the right qualifications to pass from the Lesser to the Greater. Among the Hopis of northern Arizona, for example, all children aged six to eight are initiated into either the Kachina or Powamu religious societies. Only every four years, however, are initiations held into four higher, more restricted societies: the Alwimi or “Two-Horn,” Kwakwan or “One-Horn,” Tatawkyam or “Flute,” and the Wuchim. These are ceremonially accomplished in a secret, sacred event called Astotokya. (See Book of the Hopi, by Frank Waters, 1963, for further details of Hopi religious conceptions. For similar information on the Zuni counterpart, see The Zuni Indians; Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities and Ceremonies, by Matilda Coxe Stevenson; first published in 1904 as Bureau of American Ethnology Report No. 23.)

Among the ancient Mexican peoples, all male children of comparable age were enrolled in one of two temple-schools, the Calmecac or the Telpochcalli. There is much we still do not know about these schools. However, they were centers wherein young men were trained to become respectively scholars or religious officials, or soldiers and administrators. The two highest initiate orders in pre-Columbian Mexico were termed the “Eagles” and the “Jaguars.” (Pre-Columbian religious schools and initiate orders or societies in Mexico are lucidly discussed in The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations by Zelia Nuttall, Peabody Museum, 1901. Correlative material on this theme can be found in Aztec Thought and Religion, by Miguel Leon-Portilla, University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.) Equivalent centers of esoteric instruction were open to girls and women. Each order had its own sacred precinct within religious areas of the community.

How can we present the rationale of the Indian’s Mystery-religions? The possibility of a transcendent evolution, set forth in his profound philosophy of Being, has been examined in previous articles. It explained to the Indian the structure and operation of the solar universe and his place in it. Because he has in him everything that the universe has in it, man’s essence or core is a ‘spark’ or ‘particle’ of the universal divinity. Logically, then, the human being enjoys a potential for conscious union with that Whole. All of the interwebbed, bipolar hierarchies or grades of spirit-matter have corresponding reflections in the total man. Thus, the very structure of the solar cosmos offers the means and the way or path by which such union with the transcendent can be accomplished. Each human being can, then, “become divine.”

To show men how this could be done was, in the view of native Americans, the only real justification any religion or system of devotional practice had for its perpetuation. Each qualified individual was taught that he could rediscover his origin in Light, by the transfer of consciousness from one state to another and higher condition until the highest — which includes all the others — is attained. These higher states of consciousness were identified with the spiritual planes or worlds of the solar cosmos and with the “gods,” or more evolved entities, which dwelt there.

“What is so astonishing is the cosmic role assigned to moral virtue,” marvels Laurette Sejourne, an archaeologist writing of the ancient Nahuatl religion and its symbols. (Burning Water, London, 1956; p. 76. Sejourne, who has excavated at Teotihuacan and lives in Mexico, has in the writer’s opinion done as much as any contemporary scholar to clarify and bring forward some of the hidden mystical symbolism in ancient Mexican thought and religion.) Such could not, however, be otherwise in genuinely “operative” systems whose aim was to make men godlike. Only the loftiest and most selfless ethics and morals could hope to bring this about. If “becoming the universe” entails the steadily more perfect alignment of man’s consciousness with the hierarchies of greater consciousnesses above and ahead of him, which compose the spiritual and divine spheres of that universe, it follows that the quality and type of his every momentary thought and action are critical to the enterprise. These have gradually to be molded to the flow and pattern of the greater: the lesser perforce must be ‘sacrificed’ to that greater. Recognition of the need for such spiritual sacrifice runs as a salient thread all through the best native American thought. It entailed the daily and hourly living in harmony with the great inner nature surrounding and bathing man, in which he “lives and moves and has his being.”

Among pre-Columbian peoples such as the Nahuatls of Mexico this sacrifice was symbolized by the idea of “penance,” and was so important it had its own glyph prominently displayed on statues and temple walls. In fact, the Nahuatls employed a series of pictorial metaphors to depict the “blossoming’ from within the “man-plant” of the heart or ‘particle’ of solar essence there, and its conscious return journey to its parent, the inner sun of the solar cosmos. When mystically understood, this conception is of the highest beauty. The same is true of Hopi symbols depicting this process. The smallest spot of color, every simplest tying of eagle feather to stick of wood by cotton cord, has profound ethical and mystical meaning for the Hopi initiate. For example, the sacred artifact or mongko of their “Flute” society — a small piece of wood shaped like a hoe, painted white, having a downy eagle feather attached — is “a reminder that on the spiritual level man must cut down the evil grown from the assertion of his own selfish will” when this confronts the will or flow of divine consciousness of the universal life. (Book of the Hopi, p. 142.)

Everywhere among the best of early American cultures the importance of correct living and thinking was held up as an indispensable requisite to all true expansion of consciousness or initiation. Sejourne refers to “the seven difficult trials” confronting the candidate for godhood in the ancient Mexican tradition, in which the symbol of death, which stood between him and the solar light, “represents the annihilation of the individual who comes with insufficient inner preparation.” (Burning Water, pp. 65-6.) In majesty of conception, native American symbol and metaphor of initiatory achievement lose nothing when compared with the highest visions of god-men from Mediterranean and Asian Mystery-religions.

There are even deeper reaches of meaning within the American Indian’s esotericism. The self-sacrifice demanded of the candidates for liberation had nothing to do with personal salvation or achievement, strange as this may seem to us. The search for union with the divine was a duty owed to the community, to one’s people, and ultimately to all mankind, as brothers. Because of the vital link between men and their divine progenitors — the “gods” — each is needed by the other. If it is true that men depend for life upon divinity, by the same token divinity depends for its sustenance upon mankind, and the forward progress of the solar universe depends upon both acting in harmony.

Mexican teachers anciently phrased this reciprocal relationship by saying that the Sun, which gives life to the universe, is born of man’s sacrifices and can only exist if sustained by the power flowing to it from them. So that by “freeing their hearts,” the candidates for initiation became the craftsmen “perfecting” the universe. Put by them in another way, the mystic “death” of the initiant meant the return of the human ‘sun’ or ‘earth-sun’ to the Great or Cosmic Sun. A return to that Sun’s bosom of the now-luminous human solar particle, so that the Great Sun might also attain to the fullness of its evolutionary zenith. Thus, it was through individuals that universal salvation was brought about or ensured.

In Middle America, the successful man-god was personified in the figure of Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan, the well-known “feathered serpent.” This spiritual hero had, through the mystical passion, death, and resurrection cycle, reached that interior realm where divinity dwells: the state of consciousness of the solar universe. Various accounts telling of Quetzalcoatl’s trials and tests demonstrate unmistakably his messianic character; he endured all solely to show mankind the way to that highest state. One story tells of a vast “river” blocking the road to liberation. Instead of crossing alone to the “other shore,” Quetzalcoatl built a “bridge” over it so that his followers and disciples could cross over also. In the writer’s view this reference suggests that this primeval Mexican man-god was a being of the grade or rank of a Bodhisattva or Buddha of Compassion who lived “not for himself, but for the world.”

The concept of such advanced men, those who have become what in Oriental thought are termed buddha or fully “awakened,” fully “freed” units of consciousness coextensive with the consciousness of the solar cosmos, is firmly embedded in ancient American esotericism, if we have some idea of what to look for. One has only to study a Hopi painting of the figure of one of their Qaletaqas, or “Guardians of the people,” for example, to see emerging from the top of its head the protuberance or stalk of the lotus flower. This is a characteristic mark in Oriental iconography of the fully awakened spiritual “eye” of one who is buddha, called in Sanskrit the ushnisha. Or, again, to examine the various carved stone figures of the Mayan “maize god” of Central America. Above the serene countenance of this personage can be seen in floral wreath a form of the protuberance of the ushnisha such as is found in numerous Oriental Buddha and Bodhisattva figures. Moreover, the hands of the Mayan “maize god” are extended palms outward, one raised and one lowered, in a classical mudra or gesture of the Bodhisattva and Buddha as also seen in Oriental iconography. (See Mudra, A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture, by E. Dale Saunders, London, 1960. The mudra cited is called in Japanese the Segan-Semui-in and, in Sanskrit, the Vara or Varada and Abhata mudra. Its symbolism is too extensive to be dealt with here. Briefly, it can mean that the Buddha of Compassion or Bodhisattva is extending to all sentient beings the ‘gift’ of fearlessness and assurance through teaching or preaching to them the facts of spiritual reality, or the Law. The ushnisha is, in formal Buddhist theology, one of the thirty-two superior and eighty inferior marks of beauty belonging to a “perfected” Buddha.)

Young Maize God. Copan, Honduras.

In spite of our stereotyped picture of early American peoples as untutored barbarians, it should not be so strange to find such convergences between their spiritual traditions and those of other parts of the ancient world which we tend to think were more advanced. What would be truly strange, would be to discover that the Hierarchy of Compassion in its universal work among men bad not been as fully active among the American civilizations as it has been in any other place or time in the world, nor had left any mark of its presence here.

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1. This is seen more effectively when we study and compare the secret teachings of the north-central Winnebago tribes in The Road of Life and Death, Paul Radin (1945); of the Plains Indians — Sioux, Comanche and Cheyenne — in Seven Arrows, Hyemeyohsts Storm (1973); in the Nahuatl cultures of Mexico in Burning Water, Laurette Sejourne (1956), and Aztec Thought and Culture, Miguel Leon-Portilla (1963); and of the southwest Pueblo Indians in Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters (1963), to enumerate some recent studies of the aboriginal American tradition. 

2. For treatment of this timeless and global tradition, see The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky (1888), and The Esoteric Tradition, G. de Purucker (1935). 

3. The word Teotihuacan, in Nalmatl, means ‘the place where men become gods.’ It was apparently a great initiatory center. The word Toltec, also Nahuatl, means ‘master-builder’ or ‘master craftsman.’ Most authorities think the Toltecs were a distinct racial people among prehistoric Nahuatl tribes, but some dispute this theory. The writer believes them to have been an initiate caste, very likely a primary one among a number of such teaching at schools and centers which flourished in various places in the prehistoric Americas.