Root Race - Theosophical Belief in The Brotherhood of Humanity

Theosophical Belief in The Brotherhood of Humanity

Modern writers within theosophy or influenced by theosophy defend Blavatsky's use of the terms Aryan race and root race as "not connected to demagogic ideas". They say that the classification of humanity into races is still practised today and that Blavatsky and subsequent esoteric philosophers who expressed similar lines of thought intended a Universal Brotherhood of humanity. Blavatsky wrote that "all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence." In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky stated: "Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence, but by this she referred to levels of being. " Attempts to connect Blavatsky's ideas of physical race with spiritual attributes are futile. Spiritual attributes do develop, but for instance, the Atlantean and Lemurian races were more spiritually developed than the Aryan race. Similarly it was the fourth sub-race of the Fourth root race which was the seed of the Aryan race. "Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (The Chinese, Africans, &c.) gradually brought the worship back.".Sub-races do have importance, but all are vital in race development. Blavatsky called the physical Aryan race "the 'cream' of the fourth race", which "gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution", asserting that the Aryan fifth root race corresponds to "the final adjustment of the human organism – which became perfect and symmetrical only in the Fifth Race". But this is not the modern concept of evolution, as the fifth, sixth and seventh sub-races of the Atlantean race are not the cream of the Atlantean race: the fourth sub-race was. And the Aryan race could never be the culmination of the races when Blavatsky affirms that there are another two root races to follow.