THREE

H. P. Blavatsky and the Early Theosophists

NEOPLATONIC FORERUNNERS AND ISIS UNVEILED

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) was the most influential contributor to occult Atlantology, as her contemporary Ignatius Donnelly (see chapter 1) was to the rational stream. In her early work Isis Unveiled, written during the years around the foundation of the Theosophical Society in New York (1875), Blavatsky was tentative on the subject and still indebted to flawed authorities such as Brasseur de Bourbourg and Augustus Le Plongeon (see chapter 8). After she had left America for India, an entirely new prospect of prehistory opened up. Its source was in letters signed by the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya which, together with a cryptic Book of Dzyan, furnished the basis for the much more extensive Atlantean and Lemurian lore contained in Blavatsky’s second major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888). This chapter tells the story of how her information was obtained and released to the world.

First, however, we must trace a thin line of succession in the English-speaking world that leads from the era of Fabre d’Olivet up to that of the early Theosophists. Its originator was Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), the first translator of Plato and the Neoplatonists into English. Like the French philosophes, Taylor had to defend Platonic chronology against the narrow, biblical view of history. When he came to translate the Critias, he wrote this stirring defense of his master (emphases and spelling as in the original).

That the authenticity of the following history should have been questioned by many of the moderns, is by no means surprising, if we consider that it is the history of an island and people that are asserted to have existed nine thousand years prior to Solon; as this contradicts the generally-received opinion respecting the antiquity of the world. However, as Plato expressly affirms, that it is a relation in every respect true, and, as Crantor, the first interpreter of Plato, asserts, “that the following history was said, by the Egyptian priests of his time, to be still preserved inscribed on pillars,” it appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narration in any antient historian. Indeed, he who proclaims that “truth is the source of every good both to Gods and men,” and the whole of whose works consists in detecting error and exploring certainty, can never be supposed to have wilfully deceived mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact, and with all the precision of historical detail.1

Taylor was a true pagan, committed to the philosophy, theology, and mystical practices of Neoplatonism. He had no doubt that Plato had transmitted, as accurately as possible, what the Egyptian priest told Solon; and, as a mathematician, the last thing Taylor was going to quarrel with was Plato’s plainly stated number of 9,000 years.

Spurned by English classicists because he lacked academic credentials, Taylor found more open-minded readers in America. Among the most dedicated admirers of his work and example was Alexander Wilder (1823–1908), a physician and classical scholar. Wilder brought a strong Platonic influence into the early Theosophical Society and was mainly responsible for the essay “Before the Veil” that prefaces Isis Unveiled. It begins with an argument in favor of Plato as the best way of access to the “abstruse systems of old India” that were already Blavatsky’s main interest. Plato’s wisdom, after all, came from Egypt, and Egypt herself, as she wrote, “received her laws, her social institutions, her arts and her sciences, from pre-Vedic India.”2 With her natural inclination to synthesis, she set out to correlate Plato’s Atlantis with the oriental sources known to her: both the published ones and a Great Book or Secret Book accessible only to initiates.

These sources told of a sacred place approximately in today’s Gobi Desert that would play an important part in occult historiography. Blavatsky dates it before the Adamic race, that is, the race whose history the Bible encodes under the story of Adam and Eve. At that time,

there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western prolongation. An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours. This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the “Sons of God;” not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real Elohim. . . . The hierophants of all the Sacerdotal Colleges were aware of the existence of this island. . . .3

There was no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages known only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions. Tradition points to many of the majestic ruins of India, Ellora, Elephanta, and the caverns of Ajunta (Chandor range), which belonged once to those colleges, and with which were connected such subterranean ways. Who can tell but the lost Atlantis—which is also mentioned in the Secret Book, but, again, under another name, pronounced in the sacred language—did not exist yet in those days? The great lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from India to Tasmania? If the hypothesis now so much doubted, and positively denied by some learned authors who regard it as a joke of Plato’s, is ever verified, then, perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of the god-inhabited continent was not altogether fable. And they may then perceive that Plato’s guarded hints and the fact of his attributing the narrative to Solon and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the world and by cleverly combining truth and fiction, to disconnect himself from a story which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to divulge.4

Isis Unveiled is a formidable and sprawling tome, written in an impossibly erudite stream of consciousness. Blavatsky’s colleague Henry Steele Olcott observed her writing it in a state of trance, as though taking dictation or copying from invisible books,5 as she herself confirmed in a letter to her sister: “Whenever I am told to write, I sit down and obey, and then I can write easily upon almost anything—metaphysics, psychology, philosophy, ancient religions, zoology, natural sciences, or what not.”6 Although the early Theosophists helped her with it, especially since she had yet to master the English language, much of Isis might qualify as channeled material.

The next quotation contains a rich vein of material for our subject.

To continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of hierophants was divided into two distinct categories: those who were instructed by the “Sons of God,” of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure revelation, and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis—if such must be its name—and who, being of another race, were born with a sight which embraced all hidden things, and was independent of both distance and material obstacle. In short, they were the fourth race of men mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, whose sight was unlimited and who knew all things at once. They were, perhaps, what we would now term “natural-born mediums,” who neither struggled nor suffered to obtain their knowledge, nor did they acquire it at the price of any sacrifice. Therefore, while the former walked in the path of their divine instructors, and acquiring their knowledge by degrees, learned at the same time to discern the evil from the good, the born adepts of the Atlantis blindly followed the insinuations of the great and invisible “Dragon,” the King Thevetat (the Serpent of Genesis?). Thevetat had neither learned nor acquired knowledge, but, to borrow an expression of Dr. Wilder in relation to the tempting Serpent, he was “a sort of Socrates who knew without being initiated.” Thus, under the evil insinuations of their demon, Thevetat, the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians. In consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to narrate; its substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of Cain, the giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came to an end by the submersion of the Atlantis.7

Without any idea of what he was starting, Alexander Wilder contributed some remarks to the discussion: “The Pacific also shows signs of having been a populous island-empire of Malays or Javanese—if not a continent amid the North and South. We know that Lemuria in the Indian Ocean is a dream of scientists; and that the Sahara and the middle belt of Asia were perhaps once sea-beds.”8 Lemuria was the name proposed in 1864 by the English zoologist Philip Sclater for a hypothetical sunken land linking India with Madagascar. His reason was that lemurs, living or extinct, are found in both places; but the term, soon dropped by scientists, would enjoy a far different career.

These early passages anticipate themes of Blavatsky’s later Atlantis lore, but in the 1870s her system was still at a formative stage. Just before Isis Unveiled went to press, she received a shipment of the complete works of Louis Jacolliot, in twenty-one volumes, and added a two-page footnote on the basis of her initial skimming of these. Jacolliot (1837–1890) was a French magistrate who worked many years in India and wrote on the borderline between anthropology and myth. Blavatsky was particularly taken with his statement that all the islands from Malacca to Polynesia “once formed two immense countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at war; and that the gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to pacify them, the latter swallowed up the two continents.” This tradition of a prehistoric civilization, she writes, “corroborates with the one we have given from the ‘Records of the Secret Doctrine.’ The war mentioned between the yellow and the black men, relates to a struggle between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘sons of giants,’ or the inhabitants and magicians of the Atlantis.”9

There are resonances here with Fabre d’Olivet’s interracial conflicts and vanished southern (Austral) continent, but with Blavatsky a more occult type of prehistory was taking shape. Among points to note are the not-quite-materialized nature of the inhabitants of the sacred island, and the existence among ancient races of an intuitive, clairvoyant state of consciousness. Wilder thinks immediately of Socrates and his daimon; Blavatsky, a natural-born medium if ever there was one, is aware of the dangers of that condition. Whereas in Plato, the fall of Atlantis was due to a preponderance of the human over the divine element in the genetic makeup of the inhabitants, here it is a more dramatic battle of good versus evil magicians. Whereas Plato was obliged to suppress the truth, the whole theme of Isis Unveiled, starting with the title, was that something kept secret for ages would now be divulged.

THE MAHATMA LETTERS

Soon after Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in India in 1879, the Theosophical Society became a magnet both for educated Indians and for British colonial society. Among the latter were Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921), editor of India’s leading daily, The Pioneer, and Allan Octavian Hume, C.B. (1829–1912), a highly placed civil servant. They were enthralled by Blavatsky and the occult phenomena she produced, especially in the summer of 1880 when she stayed in Simla as guest of the Sinnetts. More alluring still was the information that she was acting on orders from certain masters or “Mahatmas” (great souls) who lived in Tibet. Sinnett, eager to demonstrate the reality of paranormal phenomena to his readers, suggested asking the Masters for an incontrovertible proof: a copy of the London Times should appear in Simla on the day of its publication, instead of arriving by sea a month later.

Sinnett’s challenge produced, not the Times, but on October 15, 1880, the first of a series of letters from the Masters. The most communicative of these signed himself “Koot Hoomi Lal Singh,” or plain “KH.” The second was known as “Morya.” Other masters made brief appearances, including a junior one called Djwal Khul (variously spelled). The resulting collection of “Mahatma Letters” remains, especially for those who have examined the originals in the British Library, one of the great enigmas of its time. Blavatsky and the writers asserted that the letters were not written by hand but “precipitated” or materialized through an occult process. Now that the letters are encapsulated for preservation, it is virtually impossible to tell what instrument was used to write them, but it does not resemble pen, pencil, or crayon. Many witnesses testified to the strange circumstances of their delivery. The letters would seemingly drop from the ceiling; one had to be dug out of a cushion; others appeared during train or sea journeys. Sometimes they would take the form of postscripts to an unrelated letter that arrived, sealed, in the mail. Some people saw them in the process of precipitation, the words forming on blank paper. Another question was who was responsible for their contents. Theosophical orthodoxy takes the letters and the Masters at face value. Blavatsky herself is the skeptics’ choice, which implies an elaborate plan involving many co-conspirators, a system of delivery that would challenge any stage magician, and an epidemic of self-deception by otherwise intelligent people. In between is a range of more subtle possibilities, which, as often with paranormal phenomena, may not have been uniform in kind or unmixed with deception.

The mystery of the Mahatma Letters is important to our study, because it was they that first outlined the Theosophical system of prehistory, correlated it with the epochs of paleontology, and established the place of Atlantis in the scheme, thus superseding the disjointed information given in Isis Unveiled.

Sinnett and Hume were at first interested in the big questions: the existence of God (which the Masters, disconcertingly, denied), the problem of evil, the nature of the soul, spirit, and other elements of the human being, what happens to them after death, where the universe comes from, how humans arose, and so on. They soon got more than they had bargained for, in the shape of a tremendous system of Globes, Rounds, Root Races, and Sub-races that still has the average Theosophist flummoxed. Part of the problem is that the system is viewed variously from the perspectives of a cosmic observer, of the earth, of the human race, or of the individual. For our purposes, the second and third of these are the most relevant.

In a letter received by Sinnett in June 1882, Morya explained that while science believes there to have been four races successively inhabiting Europe, “there were not four but five races; and we are that fifth with remnants of the fourth.”10 The next month, Koot Hoomi wrote, “There are seven root-races, and seven sub-races or offshoots.”11 This and other tidbits prompted Sinnett to pose twenty-nine distinct questions, which Koot Hoomi answered at length in October.

To Sinnett’s question about the fifth race, Koot Hoomi writes, “Yes; the fifth race—ours—began in Asia a million years ago.”12 In conformity with nineteenth-century notions of migrations and racial origins, he calls this race Aryan.13 The race prior to that was the Atlantean, and for the one before that Koot Hoomi uses Sclater’s term, Lemurian. He also uses the terms Eocene and Miocene. These had been coined in 1833 by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology as part of his division of the Tertiary (postdinosaur) period. Although Lyell had no means of dating the periods, his “uniformitarian” view of geology required a time scale of millions of years for gradual Earth changes to occur. In conventional science, which now dates the Tertiary period to circa 65 million to 1.8 million years BP, there was and is no question of humans having existed then. Here are the essential passages from Koot Hoomi’s letter:

In the Eocene Age—even in its “very first part”—the great cycle of the fourth Race men, the Atlanteans, had already reached its highest point, and the great continent, the father of nearly all the present continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking—a process that occupied it down to 11,446 years ago, when its last island, that, translating its vernacular name, we may call with propriety Poseidonis, went down with a crash. Bye the bye, whoever wrote the Review of Donnelly’s Atlantis is right: Lemuria can no more be confounded with the Atlantic Continent than Europe with America. Both sunk and were drowned with their high civilizations and “gods,” yet between the two catastrophes a short period of about 700,000 years elapsed; “Lemuria” flourishing and ending her career just at about that trifling lapse of time before the early part of the Eocene Age, since its race was the third.14

The sinking of Atlantis (the group of continents and isles) began during the Miocene period—as certain of your continents are now observed to be gradually sinking—and it culminated—first, in the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps; and second with that of the last of the fair Islands mentioned by Plato.15

The great event—the triumph of our “sons of the Fire Mist,” the inhabitants of “Shamballah” (when yet an island in the Central Asian Sea) over the selfish but not entirely wicked magicians of Poseidonis occurred just 11,446 years ago. Read in this connection the incomplete and partially veiled tradition in Isis, Volume I, p. 588–94, and some things may become still plainer to you.16

From 1881 to 1883 Hume gave out extracts from the Masters’ letters in the monthly journal The Theosophist under the title “Fragments of Occult Truth.” These led to further questions and explanations, some of them by Blavatsky. At the beginning of 1883, A. P. Sinnett published a book-length collection of extracts from the letters with his own commentary, called Esoteric Buddhism. He explained that “esoteric science” is not merely about religious matters, but a comprehensive system that can also “search out and ascertain the manner in which the human race has evolved through aeons of time and series of planets.” Not only can it discover the history of Atlantis and Lemuria:

It goes back still further indeed, but the second and first races did not develop anything that could be called civilization, and of them therefore there is less to be said than of their successors. The third and fourth did—strange as it may seem to some modern readers to contemplate the notion of civilization on the earth several millions of years ago.

Where are its traces? they will ask. . . . The answer lies in the regular routine of planetary life, which goes on pari passu with the life of its inhabitants. The periods of the great root races are divided from each other by great convulsions of Nature, and by great geological changes. Europe was not in existence as a continent at the time the fourth race flourished. The continent on which the fourth race lived was not in existence at the time the third race flourished, and neither of the continents, which were the great vortices of the civilizations of those two races, are in existence now. Seven great continental cataclysms occur during the occupation of the earth by the human life-wave for one round-period. Each race is cut off in this way at its appointed time, some survivors remaining in parts of the world, not the proper home of their race; but these, invariably in such cases, exhibiting a tendency to decay, and relapsing into barbarism with more or less rapidity.

The proper home of the fourth race, which directly preceded our own, was that continent of which some memory has been preserved even in exoteric literature—the lost Atlantis.17

FRAGMENTS OF FORGOTTEN HISTORY

The explanation in Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism of rounds, root races, and sub-races was anything but lucid, and others now joined him in the effort to clarify the matter. These were Mohini Mohun Chatterji (1858–1926), an Indian Theosophist and attorney who traveled to England with Blavatsky in 1884 and testified on her behalf before the committee of the Psychical Research Society; and Mrs. Laura C. Holloway-Langford (or Langford Holloway, 1848–1930), an American Theosophist then staying in London. In a whirlwind of activity during the summer of 1884, they collaborated on a pseudonymous book, coyly calling themselves “The Eastern Chela” and “The Western Chela.” Entitled Man: Fragments of Forgotten History, it was supposed to be an example of East-West collaboration and to supplement the Masters’ and Blavatsky’s information on the prehistory and nature of the human race.

A. P. Sinnett wrote that Laura Holloway “used to get vivid clairvoyant visions of the Masters, could pass on messages to me from K.H. and on one occasion he actually made use of her to speak to me in the first person.”18 Evidently this gave her a claim to independent authority in the matter of humanity’s past.

The “forgotten history” begins in an ethereal, prehuman state. Its location recalls Bailly’s Arctic origins and the French tradition of a shifting axis of the earth (see chapter 2): “The cradle of the first objective race of man in the present Ring was the North Pole, which at the time we are speaking of was almost on the ecliptic. Since that period the poles and the equator have changed places.”19 Man is full of curious details about human evolution, such as how and when humans began to eat food, rather than living on air; how humans relate to nature spirits and elementals, how the sexes separated, how pain and death entered into the picture, and how survivors of past root races are living on today. Apparently one feature of the seven root races was their successive development of the physical senses, in addition to “astral senses” that they already possessed. The first race developed sight; the second, touch; the third (Lemurian), hearing; the fourth (Atlantean), smell; and the fifth (Aryan), taste. That leaves two further senses to be developed by the sixth and seventh races of the present “ring” or round.20

Regarding the Atlanteans, “They knew how to navigate aërial vehicles with the help of the subtle agency which Bulwer-Lytton refers to under the name of Vril. Their houses, like those of the ancient Peruvians, were floored with gold. The weapons of destruction they constantly used were so far superior to those known to us as to be hardly conceivable.”21 Although the evil magicians of Atlantis were overthrown, we are not rid of them yet: “Ages after this event, which but robbed black magicians of predominance and not of existence, we find Atlantean black magicians at times interfering with the progress and development of students of the real occult science.”22

Neither Blavatsky nor the Masters were pleased with the Two Chelas’ effort. Here is Koot Hoomi, writing to Sinnett confidentially about Holloway, after she had returned to America but before the book was sent to press:

Aroused some 18 months ago to spasmodic, hysterical curiosity by the perusal of your Occult World23 and later on by that of Esoteric Buddhism to enthusiastic envy, she determined to “find out the truth” as she expressed it. She would either become a chela herself—first and foremost, to write books, thus eclipsing her “lay” rival, or upset the whole imposture in which she had no concern. She decided to go to Europe and seek you out. Her surexcited fancy, putting a mask on every stray spook, created the “Student” [the Master whom she believed to have appeared to her] and made him serve her purpose and desire. . . . Her thoughts were for a certain period guided, her clairvoyance made to serve a purpose. . . . Try to save “Man” by looking it over with Mohini, and by erasing from it the alleged inspirations and dictations by “Student.”24

Man came out in 1885 without the desired corrections. Blavatsky wrote an apologetic statement for Theosophists who marked its contradictions vis-à-vis Esoteric Buddhism. She tried to release Mohini from blame and promised to set right the confusion over rounds, root races, and sub-races in her forthcoming book The Secret Doctrine.25 She also sent Sinnett a long list of corrections intended for future editions (but never used). Here is one of them, its tone of tender exasperation quite different from Koot Hoomi’s:

You surely dream dreams, my gentle child. If you had Humanity of the second Round in your mind’s eye when writing this—passe encore—but on this Earth and in this Round!? Why see what Master says in his letter to Mr. Sinnett. 1st Round man, an ethereal being, non-intelligent but super-spiritual. 2nd Round gigantic ethereal, growing more condensed in body a more physical man. In the third Round—less gigantic, a more rational being, “more ape than Deva-man”—(still a human man). The Lord love you innocent sweety. . . go to confession dear, and learn from the Padris something of Chapter VI 2nd verse in Genesis. You have “Forgotten History.”26

THE SECRET DOCTRINE: THE FIRST TWO ROOT RACES

It remained for Blavatsky to pick up the pieces and to retell the story in her own style. Her second major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), treated the subject of “Anthropogenesis” or human origins with no less prolixity and erudition than Isis, but with better structure. The work takes the form of an immense commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan, an archaic and otherwise unknown text that proceeds chronologically from the very beginnings of the universe. If the reader has difficulty with the concepts contained in the work, he or she is not alone. Blavatsky herself writes:

Born and bred in European, matter-of-fact and presumably civilized, countries, she assimilated the foregoing with the utmost difficulty. But there are proofs of a certain character which become irrefutable and are undeniable in the long run, to every earnest and unprejudiced mind. For a series of years such were offered to her, and now she has the full certitude that our present globe and its human races must have been born, grown and developed in this, and in no other way.27

In The Secret Doctrine, as in Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky uses the twin opponents of Science and Religion as a sounding board for her esoteric doctrines. Science she respects, though she reminds us that it is in a perpetual state of revision and change, and that its methods are only a couple of centuries old. Its sticking point, which remains the same today as in the 1880s, is its refusal to consider anything beyond material reality. This disbars it, in her opinion, from ever penetrating the mysteries of human or cosmic origins. Religion she loathes, at least the exoteric Judeo-Christian kind that takes the Bible as literal truth and rejects every other faith. But the Bible, as she demonstrates, is a document written by initiates that conceals esoteric truths under its incredible fables. As such, it agrees with the esoteric doctrines of the East, of Egypt, and of pre-Christian Europe.

Blavatsky was well aware that her exposition of prehistory would have little chance of an impartial hearing. Materialistic science could not grant any role to nonphysical elements of man, whether these are called astral, ethereal, spirit, or soul. Nor could it allow a purpose to nature beyond the blind evolutionary impulses of Darwinism. Then there were her three radical claims: “(a) the appearance of man before that of other mammalia, and even before the ages of the huge reptiles; (b) periodical deluges and glacial periods owing to the karmic disturbance of the axis; and chiefly; (c) the birth of man from a Superior Being, or what Materialism would call a supernatural Being, though it is only super-human.”28

The Theosophical system is evolutionary, but its concern is above all with the destiny of the “monads” (a term borrowed from Leibniz) that have traveled through eons of cosmic evolution before becoming the sort of humans we are. Part of this evolution was taken care of by nature, but its later phases needed something more.

Thus physical nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal and man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two [mineral, vegetable] and the lower animal kingdoms, but when it comes to the turn of man spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his creation, besides the “coats of skin” and the “Breath of animal Life.” The human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher than purely physical materials to build their personalities with, under the penalty of remaining even below any “Frankenstein” animal.29

Nature (in man) must become a compound of Spirit and Matter before he becomes what he is; and the Spirit latent in Matter must be awakened to life and consciousness gradually. The Monad has to pass through its mineral, vegetable and animal forms, before the Light of the Logos is awakened in the animal man. Therefore, till then, the latter cannot be referred to as “man,” but has to be regarded as a Monad imprisoned in ever changing forms.30

For humans to become more than animals, higher beings had to intervene. In The Secret Doctrine these are variously called Gods, Angels, Creators, Progenitors, Fathers, Pitris, Dhyanis, and so on, but their histories and fine distinctions cannot concern us here. It suffices to know that a certain group of them was responsible for the appearance of the first root race of the present life-wave or “round” on Earth. In some way they “projected” it out of their own essences,31 producing images or “astral doubles” of themselves.32 But being in such an immaterial condition, these protohumans had no consciousness, no will, and consequently no spiritual development. “The first Humanity therefore, was a pale copy of its Progenitors; too material, even in its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of Gods; too spiritual and pure to be Men.”33 This is the first of the seven root races, which inhabited an “Imperishable Sacred Land” that has never disappeared, despite all the changes that have taken place on the earth’s surface since then. Its connection with physical geography is necessarily tenuous, but there is some occult link with the North Pole.34

Having no bodies to speak of, the first root race “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.”35 Instead of dying, “its ‘men’ melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own ‘sweat-born’ progeny, more solid than their own.”36

These “sweat-born” beings, exhaled or exuded by their parents, were the second root race. Blavatsky calls this race the Hyperborean, because it inhabited “the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia.”37 Being more materialized than the first root race (though still “ethereal” in comparison to ourselves), the second root race was affected by physical conditions on the globe.

The ever-blooming lands of the Second Continent (Greenland, among others) were transformed, in order, 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. And we may expect a fifth for ourselves in due course of time.38

Although there is plenty of evidence, such as fossil flora and coal, that the Arctic region was once warm, to look there for remnants of the first two root races is futile. While the earth and its lower kingdoms were already well advanced in materialization, these races were simply “too ethereal and phantom-like in their constitution, organism, and shape, even to be called physical men,” and consequently left no fossils.39

THE THIRD (LEMURIAN) ROOT RACE

One can see why so little is written about the first two races. They lacked all that makes for human interest from our point of view, such as personality, a foothold in the material world, and of course sex. All this changed with the third root race (Lemurian), whose occult history is the most dramatic of all.

The First Race having created the Second by “budding,” as just explained, the Second Race gives birth to the Third—which itself is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform ball—or shall we say egg?—that served as an extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a foetus and child, the mode of procreation by the latter races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of the earlier races were entirely sexless—shapeless even for all one knows; but those of the later sub-races were born androgynous. It is in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally the man-bearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women.40

In parallel with these surprising developments, other higher beings became involved in human evolution. A particular class of them, called Dhyanis or Sons of Wisdom, were destined to incarnate in human form, both for reasons of their own and to help bring infant humanity to consciousness. This took place during the Lemurian and Atlantean ages, in three main waves. (1) The first group of Dhyanis incarnated “immediately the men of the Third Race became physiologically and physically ready, i.e., when they had separated into sexes,” providing these “senseless monads” with an ego, conscious knowledge, and will. They became the “seed on earth for future adepts.” (2) A second group, preferring its immaterial state and “intellectual freedom,” hesitated to undergo incarnation until far later in the Lemurian age. When at last they did so, “they got bodies (physiologically) inferior to their astral models, because their chhayas had belonged to progenitors of an inferior degree in the seven classes.” These became the ancestors of average humanity. (3) Some of the Sons of Wisdom deferred incarnation until the fourth, Atlantean root race. By that time, some of the protohumans, being mindless and consequently not responsible for their actions, had mated with females of an extinct apelike species and bred a hybrid race. (Apparently inter-species breeding was more feasible in those times; shortly afterward, the possibility was blocked.) The Dhyanis who had come late to the game had to incarnate in these human-animal bodies. In so doing, “they produced a terrible cause, the Karmic result of which weighs on them to this day. It was produced in themselves, and they became the carriers of that seed of iniquity for aeons to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their own procrastination.”41

Among the descendants of this hybrid race were the apes. So Blavatsky turned the tables on Darwin: instead of humans evolving from monkeys, it is the apes that are the unnatural result of human iniquity.

In the course of the Lemurian age, humans, besides evolving from “sweat-born” to “egg-born” to sexually differentiated, became sufficiently adept in the material world to start manipulating it: “The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the Lemurians of the last sub-races. . . . The first large cities, however, appeared on that region of the continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were civilized people and savages in those days, as there are now.”42

In Theosophical doctrine, every root race has its own continent. The following extracts give the location of Lemuria and of the fourth continent, Atlantis.

It must be noted that Lemuria, which served as the cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. . . . No more striking confirmation of our position could be given than the fact that the elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south-easterly line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d’Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced farther, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.43

Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. Only Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. . . . The area between Atlas and Madagascar [was] occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk.44

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. Their continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and became ultimately the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans.45

THE FOURTH (ATLANTEAN) ROOT RACE

Blavatsky tells us little about this great fourth root race except to extol their knowledge and science. This included “the knowledge of flying in air vehicles,” the arts of meteorography and meteorology, the “most valuable science of the hidden virtues of precious and other stones, of chemistry, or rather alchemy, of mineralogy, geology, physics and astronomy.”46 What were the destructions of the Library of Alexandria, she asks, in comparison with that of the Atlantean Libraries, “wherein records are said to have been traced on the tanned skins of gigantic antediluvian monsters?”47 The said monsters presented no threat to the Atlanteans, who, like many past races, were of giant stature (a topic to which Blavatsky dedicates many pages). The threat to their civilization came from within. Magic, she writes, “was practised in such ungodly ways by the Atlantean Sorcerers that it has since become necessary for the subsequent race to draw a thick veil over the practices which were used to obtain so-called magical effects on the psychic and on the physical planes.”48

These Atlantean sorcerers fought a war with the “Initiates of the Sacred Island” that has already been mentioned as the refuge from Atlantis’s destruction and the cradle of the fifth root race. T. Subba Row (1856–1890) gives some disconcerting information about its later consequences. Of all Blavatsky’s associates, after the Masters it was Subba Row whom she most respected for his esoteric knowledge; in secular life, he was a pleader (advocate) at the Madras High Court. He writes, à propos elemental beings:

There are all the powerful elemental gods and goddesses worshiped by the Atlanteans, and these still exist. They are most ferocious things, but they cannot be evoked easily. It is fortunate for us that they do not interfere more than they do.49

The following passage from The Secret Doctrine describes how the primordial wisdom was transmitted through the root races, and, by implication, to the authors of the Book of Dzyan and the spiritual ancestors of the Theosophical Masters:

Let us remember that the Atlanteans became the terrible sorcerers, now celebrated in so many of the oldest MSS. of India, only toward their fall, the submersion of their continent having been brought on by it. What is claimed is simply the fact that the wisdom imparted by the “Divine Ones”—born through the Kriyasakti powers of the Third Race before its Fall and Separation in to sexes—to the adepts of the early Fourth Race, has remained in all its pristine purity in a certain Brotherhood. The said School or Fraternity being closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea, believed in by both Hindus and Buddhists, but called “mythical” by geographers and Orientalists, the less one talks of it, the wiser he will be.50

Whether or not as the consequence of its misdeeds, every root race except the ethereal first suffered one or more cataclysms. Continents disappeared, new lands appeared, mountain chains rose: “The face of the Globe was completely changed each time; the survival of the fittest nations and races was secured through timely help; and the unfit ones—the failures—were disposed of by being swept off the Earth. Such sorting and shifting does not happen between sunset and sunrise, as one may think, but requires several thousands of years before the new house is set in order.”51 The immediate cause of these cataclysms was not outside agency, such as a comet, but changes in the inclination of the earth’s axis—another topic to which Blavatsky repeatedly alludes, without properly explaining it.

As to the dating of these events, Blavatsky was aware that the most advanced scientists of her day allowed an age of the earth of up to 500 million years, calculated partly from measuring sediments and partly from how long the earth would have taken to cool after having been thrown off by the sun. She herself gives a figure of 300 million years for the mineral and vegetable development preceding physical man,52 or 320 million years from the “first sedimentary deposits” until the present. She extends the example of Koot Hoomi in correlating the occult history of mankind with geological periods. Here is her summary of the scientists’ estimates, which “harmonize with the statements of Esoteric Ethology in almost every particular,” except that she considers the durations of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods to be somewhat too long:53

			Rough Approximations
	Laurentian
Primordial	Cambrian Silurian	lasted	175,0000,000 years
	Devonian
Primary	Coal Permian	"	103,040,000 years
	Triassic
Secondary	Jurassic Cretaceous	"	36,800,000 years
	Eocene
Tertiary	Miocene Pliocene	"	7,360,000 years (probably in excess)
Quaternary		"	1,600,000 years (probably in excess)

This serves as the matrix into which to fit the occult chronology of the rise and fall of Lemuria and Atlantis:

Lemuria is said to have perished about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary Age (the Eocene), and it is during this Deluge—an actual geological deluge this time—that Vaivasvata Manu is also shown as saving mankind (allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is saved); so also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last Atlanteans, the remnants that perished 850,000 years ago,*2 after which there was no great submersion until the day of Plato’s Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because it happened in such relatively recent times. . . . The cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. That which put an end to its successor—the fourth continent—was brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa.54

Blavatsky’s work was not designed to simplify the picture of prehistory, but rather to convey its complexity. The races overlap in time; their continents bear little relation to any that we know, neither do the poles of the earth; they do not vanish “in a night and a day” but break up piecemeal. Their inhabitants are not uniform in culture, lifestyle, or consciousness. Nor is the simplistic division by color, favored by the French occultists, of much relevance: “There were brown, red, yellow, white and black Atlanteans; giants and dwarfs (as some African tribes comparatively are, even now).”55

As for Plato’s Atlantis, it is little more than a postscript: “The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater than even that of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato’s Atlantis, who built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainly before the advent of the ‘Eastern Aethiopians,’ as Herodotus calls the Egyptians.”56

But Plato himself gets more respect, for in Blavatsky’s view he was an initiate who knew this whole history, but was only allowed to disclose it in hints: “Aiming more to instruct as a moralist than as a geographer and ethnologist or historian, the Greek philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one event which he located on one comparatively small island . . . about the size of Ireland.”57