Pygmalion-Galatea, an Allegory of Man's Soul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. *It is the most elegant single argument in this section*, because it takes a familiar Greek story and shows that it says exactly what the Third Proposition says — and says it better than the one in Genesis.

The chronology is set out first, and it is the one used throughout this section: physical humanity has existed on earth for eighteen million years, preceded by three hundred million years of mineral and vegetable development. The principle that follows is the file's premise — that evolution is double, physical and spiritual; the physical is visible, but the spiritual which animates it is invisible and therefore, in the mind of the material man, non-existent. Then comes the reading the title promises, and it is worth following closely. The allegory of Pygmalion, who fashions a statue and cannot bring it to life, is called a far more philosophical and scientific conception than Adam — because it separates the making of the form from the giving of the life, which the Genesis story runs together. Human forms, on this account, existed in eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes, and the lower angels evolved the protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from their own essence, bringing them into objective life on earth. But they would not, or could not, breathe a spark of divine fire into the Adam-Galatea of volcanic dust — so the statue stood finished and lifeless, exactly as in the myth, and something else had to happen. That something else is the Great Sacrifice which the rest of this section describes, and the file's achievement is to make the reader feel the gap it fills.

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