The Solar System

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The Solar System offers a comprehensive picture of the streams of life, passing from stage to stage of development, to the level of humanity and beyond. This valuable work is the last of a series of books that present a coherent and sequential account of the finer bodies of Man and his role in the Scheme of Evolution. It was preceded by The Etheric Double, The Astral Body, The Mental Body, and The Causal Body, all of them by the same author.

Human evolution takes place as the soul experiences birth in different races and civilizations. The vast panaroma presented here and the details of the human constitution contained in the other books of the author, awaken insight into the glorious nature of the cosmic process, and the great future awaiting the human being on his pilgrimage towards the Eternal.

Both before and since the publication in 1893 of The secret Doctrine, by H. P. Blavatsky, there has become available for students of occultism a good deal of information regarding the Solar System and the streams of life amongst which is our own humanity—which evolve in that system. In 1883 appeared Esoteric Buddhism by A. P. Sinnett, followed in 1896 by The Groth of the soul by the same author. In 1897 was published. The Ancient Wisdom by Annie Besant, and in 1903 this great student of the occult delivered an important series of lectures, afterwards published in book form, under the title The Pedigree of Man, dealing in greater detail than anything previously published with the Solar System, with its Chains, Rounds, Globes, Sib-races, etc. Further elaboration and details have been added by C. W. Leadbeater in various books, notably The Inner Life, Volumes I and II. and A textbook of Theosophy.

In 1913 appeared that monumental work, Man: whence, flow and Whither? In addition to these, two fascinating volumes, entitled The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria,with maps of those continents, from the pen of W. Scott-Elliot, appeared in 1896 and 1904 respectively, describing in very full detail the races that inhabited those lands, and their civilisations.

Up to the present, however, no one book has appeared covering the whole of this vast ground, describing both the “field” of evolution and the streams of life which evolve in it as the ages roll by.

The present volume is therefore an attempt to fill this need. The whole of the information it contains is to be found in the volumes already mentioned, or in certain others, the complete list being given on p. xv.For the convenience of the student, the marginal references enable him to refer to the original sources of information, should he so desire.

In view of the complexity of the subject, and its many details, a large number of diagrams, most of which are original, have been included in the text, and it is hoped that these will facilitate the work of the student in mastering the many intricacies of the system to which we belong and the method under which our evolution proceeds. Some tabular statements and summaries have been added, with the same purpose in view.

In order to keep the book within reasonable dimensions, many details, such, for example, as those concerned with the civilisations of the various races in Atlantean and Lemurian times, have been omitted. These details, however, are readily accessible to the student, the places where they are to be found having invariably been given in the text, which contains only a summary of their leading features.

Such omissions do not in any way interfere with or break the continuity of the story as told in this book. Their inclusion would, in fact, probably have made the picture too complicated and elaborate to be grasped in one treatise, so that the student would have been in danger of losing sight of the “ forest “ because of the number of the “trees.”

The aim of the present volume is to give a coordinated and coherent view of the “forest,” rather than to describe in detail each particular “tree.” The student may then, as his leisure permits, and his tastes impel, study for himself the histories of the separate trees, bushes, thickets, and so on, which, collectively, make up the gigantic forest of lives which populate the amazing world, or rather series of worlds, in which we have our being and evolve.

The work is planned in three main sections. First, the field, in which evolution takes place, is described. This involves a study of the various globes, their successive periods of activity and obscuration, the chains and schemes of evolution. It is the form-side of our subject, a description of the places where life evolves. The second section deals with the various streams of life which are poured into the prepared field, and the method by which those streams steadily evolve and pass through the various stages or levels of attainment or growth. These processes are here dealt with in broad outline only, giving the student a bird’s-eye view of the whole stately march of events.

The third section describes in much more detail the progress of the component parts of certain of the kingdoms of life, more especially the human races and sub- races. In this section, however, as already stated, full elaboration of detail is avoided, the object being, not so much to give the student an encyclopedic mass of information, as to enable him to perceive and understand he principles determining the mighty plan in obedience :o which everything is ordered in this superbly ordered universe, in which” not a sparrow falls on the ground” save by the will of the Father of the System to which we have the honour to belong.