Earthquakes as the Outcome of Accumulated Human Sin

H.P. Blavatsky, William Quan Judge · Down to Earth Series · 17 pages

The claim is that seismic disturbance is the physical sign of disturbance in the moral, psychic and mental fields, and that earthquakes, floods and social upheavals together presage a new order of things for the human race — which the file describes, in a phrase written in the 1880s, as the rule of the strong hand in the shape of bureaucratic despotism and military intimidation with global reach. The practical counsel drawn from it is stoical rather than alarmist: that earthquakes are dreadful but can be avoided when their probable place is known, whereas social earthquakes and moral pestilence go with a man wherever he goes and cannot be averted by moving.

From that follows the advice the file gives its reader — to do your duty where you find yourself, and if from your goodness you are a favourite of the gods you will escape; if not, it is better to die and take another chance at building up your character in a future life. The geological half develops the correspondence at length: that as the solid earth began as a ball of liquid fire, so did man; that at the beginning of every new Round the earth casts off her old skins as a serpent does, her seven skins standing for the seven geological changes which accompany and correspond to the evolution of the seven root-races; and that the human races which succeed one another are separated by large-scale change in the earth itself.

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