Table of Contents
The Secret Doctrine, published by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1888, is the book behind most of the Theosophical material in my research on root races, Lemuria and Atlantis. These are the pages where I wrote about it and about the writers who built on it.
Blavatsky’s book
On Helena Blavatsky I describe The Secret Doctrine as her most significant work, presenting a cosmological system of seven root races, cycles of evolution and the hidden history of humanity, including Atlantis and Lemuria. What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races? follows that scheme, which sits at the centre of the book, especially Volume II on anthropogenesis. There she ties the fourth race to a Lemurian nucleus:
In the case of Race-evolution . . . no hard and fast line can be drawn where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean
Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine
On Atlantean Wars I follow her account, drawn from the Stanzas of Dzyan, of the last days of a doomed land and the war between two factions of adepts. In it, a chief sends air-vehicles to his brother-chiefs with a warning:
The Lords of the storm are approaching. Their chariots are nearing the land. One night and two days only shall the Lords of the Dark Face (the Sorcerers) live on this patient land.
Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine
On Who Was Vaivasvata Manu? I show how Volume II pushes the Manu figure into her root race scheme.
The writers who followed
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, in Man: Whence, How and Whither, read the statement in The Secret Doctrine that the fifth root race began one million years ago as the beginning of the Manu Vaivasvata’s choosing of materials; I quote this on Beginning of the 5th Root Race. On Annie Besant I note that her picture of Atlantis as home of the fourth root race follows Blavatsky’s framework. Arthur E. Powell, on The Lords of Venus, recalls that The Secret Doctrine spoke of the Lords of the Flame projecting the spark of mind into mindless men, and on Lemurians: androgynous with group focused consciousness he cites it for the one language of the Lemurian period. On Spiritual Traditions of the Descent | Part 02 | Lesson 11 | The Exiles of Capella the book’s Sons of Fire, instructors who came during the third root race, are set beside the Capellan exiles.
Related pages
- Helena Blavatsky
- What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races?
- Atlantean Wars
- Who Was Vaivasvata Manu?
- Beginning of the 5th Root Race
- Annie Besant
- The Lords of Venus
- Lemurians: androgynous with group focused consciousness
- Spiritual Traditions of the Descent | Part 02 | Lesson 11 | The Exiles of Capella
For every page I tagged with The Secret Doctrine, see the The Secret Doctrine tag archive.
