The Secret Doctrine

Continuously in print for over 100 years, the SD remains today the most comprehensive sourcebook of the esoteric tradition, outlining the fundamental tenets of the “Secret Doctrine of the Archaic Ages.” Challenging, prophetic, and strikingly modern, it directly addresses the perennial questions: continuity of life after death, purpose of existence, good and evil, consciousness and substance, sexuality, karma, evolution, and human and planetary transformation.

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.” — Preface

Based on the ancient Stanzas of Dzyan (see link below) with corroborating testimony from over 1,200 sources, these volumes unfold the drama of cosmic and human evolution — from the reawakening of the gods after a “Night of the Universe” to the ultimate reunion of cosmos with its divine source. Supplementary sections discuss relevant scientific issues as well as the mystery language of myths, symbols, and allegories, helping the reader decipher the often abstruse imagery of the world’s sacred literature.

Volume one

The first part of the book explained the origin and evolution of the universe itself, in terms derived from the Hindu concept of cyclical development. The world and everything in it is supposed to alternate between periods of activity (manvantaras) and periods of passivity (pralayas). Each manvantara lasts many millions of years and consists of a number of Yugas, in accordance with Hindu cosmology.

Blavatsky attempted to demonstrate that the discoveries of “materialist” science had been anticipated in the writings of ancient sages, and that materialism would be proven wrong.

Volume two

The second half of the book describes the origins of humanity through an account of “Root Races” dating back millions of years. The first root race was, according to her, “ethereal”; the second root had more physical bodies and lived in Hyperborea. The third root race, the first to be truly human, existed on the lost continent of Lemuria and the fourth root race developed in Atlantis.

According to Blavatsky, the present fifth root race is approximately one million years old. It overlapped the fourth root race and the very first beginnings of the fifth root race were approximately in the middle of the fourth root race.

Volumes three and four

Blavatsky wanted to publish a third and fourth volume of The Secret Doctrine. After Blavatsky’s death, a controversial third volume of The Secret Doctrine was published by Annie Besant.

Theories on human evolution and race

In the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, dedicated to anthropogenesis, Blavatsky presents a theory of the gradual evolution of physical humanity over a timespan of millions of years.

The steps in this evolution are called rootraces, seven in all. Current humanity mainly consists of the fifth such rootrace. Earlier rootraces exhibited completely different characteristics: physical bodies first appearing in the second rootrace and sexual characteristics in the third.

The designation aryans appears as a subgroup of the fifth rootrace, which comprises the vast majority of present humanity.^{[citation needed]}

Some detractors have emphasized passages and footnotes that claim some peoples to be less fully human or spiritual than the “Aryans”. For example,

“Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The ‘sacred spark’ is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily — owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction — fast dying out. Verily mankind is ‘of one blood,’ but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 421).

When discussing “sterility between two human races” as observed by Darwin, Blavatsky notes:

“Of such semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks — e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, pp 195-6).

Blavatsky also asserts that “the occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite, accepting even the Turanian with ample reservations. Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans — degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 200). She also connects physical race with spiritual attributes constantly throughout her works:

“Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 723).

According to Blavatsky, “The MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the “narrow-brained” savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 168).

She also prophesies of the destruction of the racial “failures of nature” as the “higher race” ascends:

“Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups — the failures of nature — will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind” (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p 446).

While these assertions have been criticized, other extracts from her writings show her strong belief in an Universal Brotherhood of humanity. In The Key to Theosophy she wrote that “All men have spiritually and physically the same origin, which is the fundamental teaching of Theosophy” and that “mankind is essentially of one and the same essence.”

One of the objects of her Theosophical Society is “To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, color, or creed.” She also spoke out against European slave trade in Africa (Key to Theosophy 3), the Caste System (SD I:270) and often laid stress on “kindness, absence of every ill feeling or selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings, and perfect justice to others as to one’s self” (The First Message of HPB). In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: “Verily mankind is ‘of one blood,’ but not of the same essence.” Yet, she also said: “True, again, that if the characteristics are accepted literally”. (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 255).

In Isis Unveiled, published eleven years before The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky gave an account of why “white men” were “almost incapable of magic”:

“Magic being what it is, the most difficult of all sciences to learn experimentally — its acquisition is practically beyond the reach of the majority of white-skinned people; and that, whether their effort is made at home or in the East. Probably not more than one man in a million of European blood is fitted — either physically, morally, or psychologically — to become a practical magician, and not one in ten millions would be found endowed with all these three qualifications as required for the work. Civilized nations lack the phenomenal powers of endurance, both mental and physical, of the Easterns; the favoring temperamental idiosyncrasies of the Orientals are utterly wanting in them. In the Hindu, the Arabian, the Thibetan, an intuitive perception of the possibilities of occult natural forces in subjection to human will, comes by inheritance; and in them, the physical senses as well as the spiritual are far more finely developed than in the Western races. Notwithstanding the notable difference of thickness between the skulls of a European and a Southern Hindu, this difference, being a purely climatic result, due to the intensity of the sun’s rays, involves no psychological principles. Furthermore, there would be tremendous difficulties in the way of training, if we can so express it. Contaminated by centuries of dogmatic superstition, by an ineradicable — though quite unwarranted — sense of superiority over those whom the English term so contemptuously ‘niggers,’ the white European would hardly submit himself to the practical tuition of either Kopt, Brahman, or Lama” (Isis Unveiled, Vol. 2, pp 635-6).

Source

Wikipedia

Theosophical University Press