Opening Remarks
The soul is there in every creature but in early humanity, like its immediate animal ancestors it is just a little spark buried deep within dense rings of Matter. What is often called as a soul by this layer of humanity is generally the vital body. Such a humanity was more like the titans whose memory is preserved through myths and legends.
Animal grooves
Ignorant of soul save as a wraith within,
Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives
And to a dull usual sense and feeling’s beat,
They turned in grooves of animal desire.
Early humanity lived largely like the animal, centred around food and survival. Its life was largely mechanical like its animal predecessors with only a limited scope of thought and feelings. They mistook the ghost for the soul rather than knowing that there is a divine element within man.
Work and war
In walls of stone fenced round they worked and warred,
Did by a banded selfishness a small good
Or wrought a dreadful wrong and cruel pain
On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.
Even as the animal, fear and rage were the two common psychological forces experienced by them. The moral and ethical sense was yet to develop. It was an unthinking life that hurt and harmed others and yet knew not that this was wrong as the sense of good and evil was not yet developed. Yet Nature uses everything for her secret purposes and this too was used by the Wisdom that governs the world for its deeper goals.
A selfish, violent race
Ardent from the sack of happy peaceful homes
And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,
They made of human selves their helpless prey,
A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,
Or torture a spectacle made and holiday,
Mocking or thrilled by their torn victims’ pangs;
Admiring themselves as titans and as gods
Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds
And praised their victory and their splendid force.
This early humanity, and its remnants still persist within us, used cruel and murderous sport for pleasure. To possess and to dominate, to give pain to others, to plunder and to loot was their favourite pastime. It was more like a race of titanic beings than of humanity proper since the spiritual element that gives us the sense and impulsion towards beauty and truth and good and nobility and right was yet like an embryo, dormant and in a seed state.
Closing Remarks
The first attempts at human evolution out of the animal was an abortive one. It was more of a race of titans armed with a mind at the service of a brute strength and animal appetites. Yet this was a needed step in the evolution, even though it is wiped out. These intermediary species paved the way for the coming of modern man that is a little farther than an animal even though its body is still of an animal make.
