Foundingof the Brotherhoodby Thesosophical Society Pasadena (US)TheosophicalUniversity PressMillions upon millions of years ago in the darkness of prehistory,humanity was an infant, a child of Mother Nature, unawakened, dreamlike,wrapped in the cloak of mental somnolence. Recognition of egoity slept;instinctual consciousness alone was active. Like a stream of brilliance acrossthe horizon of time, divine beings, manasaputras, sons of mind, descended amongthe sleeping humans, and with the flame of intellectual solar fire lighted thewick of latent mind, and lo! the thinker stirred. Self-consciousness wakened,and man became a dynamo of intellectual and emotional power: capable of love,of hate, of glory, of defeat. Having knowledge, he acquired power; acquiringpower, he chose; choosing, he fashioned the fabric of his future; and theperception of this ran like wine through his veins.Knowledge, more knowledge, and still greater knowledge was required bythe maturing humans who looked with gratitude to the godlike beings who hadcome to awaken them. For many millennia they followed their guidance, aschildren lovingly follow the footsteps of their mother.As the ages rolled by, a circulation of divine instructors succeededthese primeval manasaputras and personally supervised the progress ofchild-humanity: they initiated them in the arts and sciences, taught them tosow their fields with corn and wheat, instructed them in the ways of clean andmoral living in short, established primeval schools of training andinstruction open and free to all to learn of things material, intellectual, andspiritual. At this early period there were no Mystery colleges: the ancientwisdom was the common heirloom of all mankind, for as yet there had been noabuse of knowledge, and hence no need for schools kept hid and sacred from theworld. Truth was freely given and as freely accepted in that golden age. (Cf.H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings 14:248-9.)The race was young; not all were adept in learning. Some through pastexperience in former world periods learned quickly and with ease, choosingintuitively the path of spiritual intellection; others, less awake, were goodthough wayward in progress; while a third class of humans, drugged withinertia, found learning and aspiring a burden and became laggards in theevolutionary procession. To them, spiritual apathy was preferable to spiritualexertion.Mankind as a whole progressed rapidly in the acquisition of knowledgeand its subsequent use. Some obviously wrought evil others good. What hadbeen latent spirituality now became active good and active evil. Suffering andpain became nature's most merciful method of restoring the heart to itsprimeval instinct, that of spiritual choice. As mind developed keenerpotentialities and the struggle for mental supremacy overcame the spiritual,the gift of intellect became a double-edged weapon: on the one hand, thebringer of spiritual awareness and undreamed of intellectual ecstasy; and onthe other, the wielder of a weapon of destruction, of horror and, in the worstcases, of deliberate spiritual wickedness diabolism. As H. P. Blavatskywrote:Themysteries of Heaven and Earth, revealed to the Third Race by their celestialteachers in the days of their purity, became a great focus of light, the raysfrom which became necessarily weakened as they were diffused and shed upon anuncongenial, because too material soil. With the masses they degenerated intoSorcery, taking later on the shape of exoteric religions, of idolatry full