Appendices to the First Four Root-Races

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 47 pages

Forty-seven pages of appendices belonging to "Proposition 3 — The first four Root-Races", with their own contents page and train of thoughts. *They are where the dates and the geography live*, so a reader who wants the chronology rather than the doctrine should come here rather than to the parent file.

Appendix A is esoteric history, and it opens with the claim the whole section rests on: that the physical frame of man became ready to receive the divine Pilgrim eighteen million years ago, after what it calls the first great failure of nature to create human beings without the help of the divine Fashioners — the same nature unaided fails argument made elsewhere in this section, here given a date. The continents then follow one at a time. The First Continent is the Imperishable Sacred Land, the land of gods under their chiefs the Spirits of Planet Earth, cradle of the First Root-Race and dwelling of the last divine mortal. The Second is the Hyperborean, with the observation that Asia is the root-continent, as old as the Second Race yet contemporary with man. The most careful passage concerns where history is reckoned to begin, and it is worth quoting because it explains the whole scheme's chronology: the history of root-races begins at the separation of the sexes, when the preceding egg-bearing androgynous men perished rapidly and the succeeding subraces of the Third Root-Race appeared as an entirely new race physiologically — the actual duration of the first two and a half races being, it says, withheld from all but the higher initiates. That admission is characteristic and useful: it marks where the account stops claiming to be precise.

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