Appendix on the Divine Instructors of Our Race

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 88 pages

*Eighty-eight pages — the largest file in this batch — forming the appendix to "Proposition 3 — The last three Root-Races", with its own contents page and train of thoughts. Its full title names both halves of its subject: the Divine Instructors of our Fifth Race, and their degradation by the Churches*.

It opens by setting a limit to what is ordinarily called history, which does not go back, it says, further than the origin of our fifth subrace — nor nearly so far as the Lemurian Deluge, that Great Dragon whose tail sweeps whole nations out of existence in the twinkling of an eye. Where the earlier adepts lived is then answered concretely: the adepts of the first three root-races lived in subterranean habitats and in pyramids. The file is unusually willing to laugh at its own sources, which is worth knowing before opening eighty-eight pages of it: much confusion, it says, is caused by the foolishness of the Arcadians who claimed to be older than the moon, and by the self-glorification of the Atticans who boasted they had existed before the sun appeared in heaven. Having made fun of both, it then defends the principle underneath them — that man and the stars are bound together indissolubly. The most useful piece of source-criticism in the file concerns the flood stories, and it is the sort of distinction that makes these appendices worth having: several deluges, it argues, are mixed up in the memories of the peoples of our Fifth Race — the first astronomical and cosmical, the subsequent ones terrestrial — so that stories which appear to contradict each other are in fact accounts of different events collapsed into one.

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