Book excerpt: Evolution is double, physical and spiritual: the physical is visible but the spiritual that animates the physical is invisible, hence non-existent in the mind of the material man. Physical humanity has existed on earth for 18 million years, preceded by 300 million years of mineral and vegetable development. The allegory of Pygmalion, who fails to animate his statue, is far more philosophical and scientific concept than Adam: the human forms have existed in eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes; according to which, the lower angels evolved the protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from their own essence, thus bringing them into objective life on earth. But they would not breathe a spark of Divine Fire into the Adam-Galatea of volcanic dust simply because they could not give that sacred spark, which glows inside and expands into the flower of human reason and self-consciousness — for they had it not to give. There are four Adams, one for each of the preceding Root-Races. All this must be a galvanic shock to the spiritually blind, who pooh-pooh the “Self-born heavenly man,” the first Divine Androgyne viewed as Nature in the abstract, and represented as the ethereal man. Occultism without practice will ever be like the statue of Pygmalion that no one can animate without infusing into it a spark of the Sacred Divine Fire. The Jewish Kabbalah, the only authority of the European Occultist, is based on the secret meanings of the Hebrew scriptures, which afford no hope for the adepts to solve them practically. More! The likelihood of anyone becoming a practical Kabbalist-Rosicrucian through studying the Jewish Kabbalah single-handed, without being initiated and so being “made” by someone who “knows,” is as foolish as to hope to thread the Cretan labyrinth without a clue, or to open the secret locks of the ingenious inventors of the mediaeval ages, without having possession of the keys. The Seventh Rule of the Rosicrucian “who became but was not made” has its secret meaning, like every other phrase left by the Kabbalists to posterity. He has to struggle alone and toil long years in the hope of finding out some of the lesser secrets of the great Kabbalah. His mental, moral, and physical fitness will be tested to the extreme. His spirit will have to pass through the ordeal of incarnation and life, and be baptised with matter before it can reach experience and knowledge. Pivotal attributes of the first four Root-Races.