Premature Growths Are Harbingers of the Sixth Root-Race

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist across December 1883 and January 1884, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VI. A Russian Theosophist's letter supplies the case: in a small village on the outskirts of Siberia a daughter was born to the peasant family of Savelieff in October 1881, very large at birth, who began an extraordinary development at three months when she started teething. At five months she had all her teeth, at seven she began to walk, and at eight she walked as well as an adult, spoke as a two-year-old might, and stood nearly a yard high.

At eighteen months, the report continues, she spoke fluently, stood over four feet in her stockings, was proportionately large, and with her very dark face and long hair talked as a child of twelve could — while showing the physical development of a girl of seventeen. The local board of physicians from the neighbouring town took charge of her for scientific purposes, and Blavatsky notes that the Moscow Gazette corroborated the account and supplied a second instance. Her reading of both is the one the title gives: that such premature growths are not freaks but harbingers, early and isolated appearances of characteristics belonging to the sixth root-race — an interpretation that makes the medical reports evidence for a doctrine the physicians recording them had no interest in.

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