The Root Races

The cosmology of The Secret Doctrine volume II and its successors: humanity evolving through seven "root races" on successive continents — Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis — with the present said to be the fifth, named Aryan. Elaborated in enormous clairvoyant detail by Scott-Elliot, Besant, Leadbeater and Steiner.

⚠⚠⚠ THIS IS THE THING ON THE BENCH THAT IS NOT AN ERROR OF SCHOLARSHIP, AND IT IS NOT A MISREADING BY HOSTILE CRITICS. The Secret Doctrine ranks existing peoples by "spiritual essence", calls named living populations "semi-animal", and describes some of them as "the failures of nature" who will "vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind". Two things are true at once and this room holds both. The Society's first Object forbids exactly this, in writing, and Olcott and Besant did more for colonised people than most of their critics. And the sentences are in the books. Neither fact is allowed to delete the other here.