Nevertheless, whatever the allegory may signify, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a _divine_ Builder of man—a “Progenitor.” Do we then believe in such “supernatural” Beings? We say: No. Occultism has never believed in anything, whether animate or inanimate, _outside_ Nature. Nor are we Cosmolaters or Polytheists for believing in “Heavenly Man” and Divine Men, for we have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and _universal_ tradition. We reject, however, such groundless and baseless traditions as have outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, although they may have found acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in _unanimous_ tradition, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of Beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of ethereal, following _incorporeal_ (Arûpa) Men, with form but no solid substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in Dynasties of Divine Beings, those Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with which our little Modern Science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic with geometry. No, certainly not. We do not believe in _supernatural_ but only in _superhuman_, or rather _interhuman_, intelligences. One can easily appreciate the feeling of reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan when he says that: The supernatural has become like the original sin, a blemish that everyone seems ashamed of—even those most religious persons who refuse in our day to accept be it a minimum of Bible miracles in all their crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it in the furthermost corners of the past.(445) But the “supernatural” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If Theology asks us to believe that it was only four or five thousand years ago that men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature only five _thousand_ years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides Geology, Anthropology and Ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if this same Theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years—the age of Methuselah—five _million_ years ago, we should have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a Megalosaurus to a common lizard.