Lessons in Theosophy





Lesson 15, History of the Races and
the History of the World



      It has been said that, behind all life and form, as their heart and soul, is a great Consciousness. This Consciousness is constantly evolving, constantly growing. This consciousness, this evolving, manifests itself in many ways.

      The history of mankind is the history of a parade of races, one appearing after another, in succession yet over-lapping in their time-frames. Many years ago, the first race of humans appeared on Earth.


-- Seven Races (“Root-Races”) --


      Theosophy groups humanity into seven groups called root-races. take a look at this chart.




(This chart is from First Principles of Theosophy by C. Jinarajadasa.)

      The chart lists three root-races, and titles them Lemurian (third root-race), Atlantean (fourth root-race), and Aryan (fifth root-race). Theosophy teaches that humanity passes through seven root-races. The first two root-races have disappeard from the Earth, people are presently incarnating in bodies of the third, fourth, and fifth root-races, the sixth root-race will appear later, and the seventh root-race will be the last root-race, marking the end of the human race upon the Earth.


-- Sub-Races --


      Within each root-race are seven sub-races. The names of some of the sub-races are listed in the graph.

      This, then, is the scheduled span of time for the human race on the Earth. A specific amount of time has been alloted for the seven root-races. At the end of the seventh root-race, much of humanity will have entered Nirvana.

      At that time, the various life-waves on Earth will be shifted to another planet, our present-day animals will become the next planet's humans, our present-day plants will become the next planet's animals, etc.


-- Details of the History of the Six Races (so far) --


First Race

      “The first [root-race is] given no specific name, but it inhabited the ‘Imperishable Sacred Land,’ about which there is little information. It was a continent that lay in a quarter of the globe where the climate was suited to the forms of life then prevalent. At the end of its long history it was sunk by great cataclysms beneath the ocean. Men in this race were boneless, their bodies plastic; in fact ‘organisms without organs.’
Second Race

      “In due time the second great continent appeared, to be the home of the Second Race, the Hyperboreans. This, we are told, lay around the present region of the North Pole. But the climate then was equable and even tropical, owing to the position of the earth’s axis, which was then at a quite decided angle of divergence from the present inclination. The author claims that the axis had twice shifted radically; that Greenland once had a torrid climate and luxuriant vegetation. Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla are mentioned as remnants of the Hyperborean Land.
Third Race

      “The Third Race was the Lemurian [Negroid], and it occupied a vast continent extending south from the Gobi Desert and filling the area of the Indian Ocean, west to Madagascar and east to New Zealand. Madame Blavatsky gives its boundaries with considerable explicitness. Australia is one of its remnants and the much-discussed Easter Island another. Some of the Australian aborigines, some races in China, and some islanders, are lingering descendants of the Lemurians. It was destroyed mainly by fire, and eventually submerged.
Fourth Race

      “As it sank its successor arose in the Atlantic Ocean and became the seat of Fourth Race [Oriental] civilization. This is the fabled Atlantis, to which Plato and the ancient writers have alluded, the existence of which Madame Blavatsky says was a general tradition among the early nations.22 The Azores, Cape Verde, Canary Islands and Teneriffe are the highest peaks of the alleged Atlantean Land. The Fourth Race flourished there some 850,000 years ago, though the last portion, the island of Poseidonis, north of the Sahara region, carried the surviving remnant of the race to a watery doom only eleven thousand years ago. This final cataclysm became the basis of the world-wide deluge myth. The later Lemurians and the Atlanteans were men like the present humanity, fully compounded of mind, body, and spirit or soul. They had reached in some lines (the mechanical and the psycho-spiritual) a development far higher than our own, wielding psychic forces with which we are not generally familiar and having, beside airships, a more ready method of tapping electric and super-electric forces. In the early centuries of the race's history its members were gigantic in stature, and Madame Blavatsky uses this assertion to explain the historical riddle of the erection of the Druidical temples, the pyramids, and other colossal forms of their architecture.

      “It must be understood that the races overlapped in temporal history, the former ones being progenitors of their successors. Nature never makes sudden leaps over unbridged gaps. Her progressions are gradual. Many circum-Mediterranean nations were descendants of the Atlanteans, and a few degenerate Lemurian stocks yet linger on. Nor were their several continents annihilated at one stroke. Portions of the old lands remained long after the new ones had risen from the waters. This permitted migrations and the continuity of propagation. The races were in no sense special creations, but attained distinct differentiations through the modifying influences of time and environment. The Atlanteans permitted their ego-centric development to outstrip their spiritual progress, fell into dangerous practices of sorcery and magic, and through the operation of karmic law their civilization had to be blotted out, so that a more normal evolution of the Egos involved could be initiated under new conditions in succeeding races.
Fifth Race

      “The Fifth Race, our present Aryan [Caucasian] stock, took its rise in northern Asia, spread south and west, and ran the course that is known to history. The Anglo-Saxon is the fifth sub-race of the seven that will complete the life of this Root-Race....
Sixth and Seventh Races

“... The beginnings of the sixth sub-race are taking form in America, we are told. Mentality is the special characteristic of human development which our fifth sub-race is emphasizing. Each race, so to say, sounds in its life one note in a scale of seven.

      “This in outline is the story of the five races and their continental homes. Two other great races are yet to appear, before the cosmic life impulses complete their expenditure of energy in this Fourth Round. At the termination of that period the present humanity will have reached the end of its allotted cycle of evolution and the life impulse will withdraw from our globe. The latter will lose its living denizens and its own life and will be left in a condition of deadness or pralaya, to await the return of the wave on its fifth swing round the chain of spheres.” (Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom, pages 223-225 online or hardcopy)






For further reading on the History of the World:







Next: Lesson 16, History of the Solar System



   

 
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