Proposition 3: The First Four Root-Races

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 64 pages

Sixty-four pages with a full contents page and train of thoughts, opened by notes from the series editor, quick definitions and a note to students. Its cover subtitle is Prehistoric waves of humanity. *It is the middle-length treatment of the root-races* — fuller than "Crowning achievement of the Great Sacrifice" and far shorter than the 241-page "Evolution of the human life-wave on earth", both in this section — and it has its own volume of appendices, listed separately.

It begins with the First Root-Race, the Shadows, and with man's dual origin and birth, including a section on the parentless birth of the Great Orphan. Occultism affirms two births, it argues: a spiritual one, manifested through the potency inherent in unborn, unconditioned noetic essence; and a material evolution of discrete physical elements — the two running together rather than one after the other. The passage that follows is the interpretative heart of the Third Proposition and appears in several files in this section. The Higher Angels, the Solar Pitris, were commanded to create — to imbue primordial matter with evolutionary impulse and guide its formative powers — and it is said that they rebelled. The file denies it flatly: there were no rebels as such. The Higher Angels would not create irresponsible men, nor endow human beings with only temporary reflections of their own attributes as the Obedient Angels did at first; for those, belonging though they did to a much higher plane of consciousness, would have left men irresponsible. The refusal was therefore a refusal to do the work badly, and the whole myth of angelic rebellion is turned into an account of conscientiousness. The remaining root-races follow in order through the rest of the file.

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