The Future of the American Continent and Its Peoples

William Quan Judge · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages by William Quan Judge, first published in Lucifer volume X, March 1892, pages 20 to 23, and republished in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient as "On the Future: A Few Reflections". *It is the one file in this section that makes a prediction about a place a reader could visit*, and it is the more disarming for the way Judge opens it.

He begins by heading off the obvious objection with a joke at his own expense: although he is an American citizen, the place of his birth was Ireland, so in what he is about to say he cannot be accused of Columbiamania. Having established that he has no patriotic motive, he makes his claim — that present-day America is the nursery for the Sixth Root-Race, which will in future occupy the Sixth Continent as it emerges from the waters of the Pacific Ocean. That connects the file directly to "Proposition 3 — The last three Root-Races" in this same batch, where the Sixth Race is described but not located, and it is the reason this piece sits in the Third Proposition series rather than among Judge's other writings. What makes the file readable rather than merely curious is Judge's tone. He is writing about a continent he lives on and a people he has joined, in a movement whose headquarters were then in India, and the essay is as much about what a mixed and unsettled population might become as about occult geography. The prediction is offered as a reflection — his own word — rather than a revelation, and a reader who has no time for root-races can still take it as a nineteenth-century Irishman's estimate of America.

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