The Origin of Good and Evil

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 16 pages

This one places the origin of moral choice at a datable point in the descent of humanity: the moment when the Sons of Mahat quickened the mind of animal man, and reason, newly given, succumbed to the temptation of personal desires. Before that the early Lemurians of the sweat-born Third Race were mindless and therefore sinless. The essay's method is to let legend and language confirm what the doctrine states, and its material is a tale of two Lemuro-Atlantean divisions, the Northern and the Equatorial.

The classical readings are the interesting part. Old Greece is said to have had two Apollos, the Hyperborean personification of the Sun, whose birthday falls on 25 December, and the Southern. Ulysses is read as an Atlantean hero and a profligate in the eyes of the pastoral Cyclopes, his adventure with the three one-eyed giants standing for humanity's passage from the Lemurian civilisation of stone in the North to the sensual culture of the Atlanteans in the South — the change by which the last subraces lost the spiritual eye. The Hyperborean continent is described as a land beyond Boreas that knew no winter and no night, of which Greenland was part, until the fatal hour struck and its ever-blooming lands became an underwater Hades.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.2 MB, 16 pages)