This verse cannot be understood without the help of the Commentaries. It means that the First Root‐Race, the “Shadows” of the Progenitors, could not be injured, or destroyed by death. Being so ethereal and so little human in constitution, they could not be affected by any element—flood or fire. But their “Sons,” the Second Root‐Race, could be and were so destroyed. As the Progenitors merged wholly in their own Astral Bodies, which were their progeny, so that progeny was absorbed in its descendants, the “Sweat‐born.” These were the Second Humanity—composed of the most heterogeneous gigantic semi‐human monsters—the first attempts of material nature at building human bodies. The ever‐blooming lands (Greenland, among others) of the Second Continent were transformed, successively, from Edens with their eternal spring, into hyperborean Hades. This transformation was due to the displacement of the great waters of the Globe, to oceans changing their beds; and the bulk of the Second Race perished in this first great throe of the evolution and consolidation of the Globe during the human period. Of such great cataclysms there have already been four.(319) And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time. A Few Words About “Deluges” And “Noahs.” The accounts in the various _Purânas_ about our Progenitors are as contradictory, _in their details_, as everything else. Thus while, in the _Rig Veda_, Idâ, or Ilâ, is called the Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu, Sâyana makes of her a Goddess presiding over the Earth, and the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_ shows her to be the Manu’s daughter, an offspring of _his sacrifice_, and later on, his (Vaivasvata’s) _wife, by whom he begat the race of Manus_. In the _Purânas_ she is, again, Vaivasvata’s daughter, yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma) and the planet Jupiter’s (Brihaspati’s) wife, Târâ. All this, which seems a jumble to the profane, is full of philosophical meaning to the Occultist. On the very face of the narrative a secret and sacred meaning is perceivable; all the details, however, being so purposely mixed up that the experienced eye of an Initiate alone can follow them and place the events in their proper order.