Root Race

Root Race is a term first used by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in her book The Secret Doctrine. The word designates the large time periods in her cosmology and symbolizes stages in human evolution. The large time periods of the root races can be compared to the geological time periods or to the Yugas in Hindu Mythology.

According to Blavatskys writings, there are seven root races, each root race is divided into seven subraces. The first root race was according to her "ethereal", the second root race lived in Hyperborea. The third root race lived according to her in Lemuria and the fourth root race in Atlantis.

According to Blavatsky, our present fifth root race, the so-called Aryans, is approximately one million years old. It overlapped the fourth root race and the very first beginnings of the fifth root race were approximately in the middle of the fourth root race. Generally speaking, all humans who live in the time of the period of the fifth root race are part of the fifth root race.

Among the subraces of the Aryan Fifth Root Race are the Hindu, the Persian, the Egyptian (the Eastern Ethiopians), the Greek and the European. Blavatsky described the fifth root race with the following words: "The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis." (The Secret Doctrine vol.II, p.249)

According to Blavatsky the sixth sub-race will begin to evolve in the United States.

Rudolf Steiner in his writings often uses the term Cultural Epoch instead of Root Race, with the same meaning.

However, Blavatsky's use of terms like "Aryan Race" and "Root Race" was not connected to fascist or racialist ideas, she believed in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that "all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence." (The Key to Theosophy, Section 3)

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Categories: Human evolution