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Liber XXXIII · Theosophy

Liber XXXIII · Theosophy · Chapter X: Theosophical Society

The Secret Doctrine: Blavatsky's Cosmic Cycles and Root Races

The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky's magnum opus: the Stanzas of Dzyan, three propositions, cosmic cycles, rounds and root races, its critics and legacy.

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The Secret Doctrine is the principal work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, published in London in 1888 in two volumes titled "Cosmogenesis" and "Anthropogenesis". Presented as a commentary on the "Stanzas of Dzyan", verses Blavatsky said came from an ancient and otherwise unknown sacred book, it describes the cyclic birth and dissolution of universes, the evolution of spirit through matter, and the history of humanity through a series of "root races". It became the foundational text of modern Theosophy and one of the most influential esoteric books ever written.

Writing The Secret Doctrine, 1884–1888§

Blavatsky first announced the book in 1884 as a revised and expanded version of her earlier Isis Unveiled. It soon became something quite different. After she left India in 1885 she worked on the manuscript at Würzburg, where she was looked after by the Swedish Countess Constance Wachtmeister, and then at Ostend. When she moved to London in 1887 the pile of pages was given to two young disciples, Bertram Keightley and his relative Archibald Keightley, who found it unwieldy and proposed the arrangement that was finally adopted.

Each volume opens with a set of stanzas and Blavatsky's commentary on them, followed by long sections on the symbolism of world religions and on the relation between the "Secret Doctrine" and modern science. The first volume appeared in the autumn of 1888 and the second soon after. A third volume, compiled from her papers, was issued by Annie Besant in 1897, but its authenticity has been questioned and it is not usually treated as part of the work. The years of composition, set against Blavatsky's illness and the scandal of the Hodgson Report, are told in our biography of Helena Blavatsky.

The Stanzas of Dzyan and the Book of Dzyan§

The framework of the book is a sequence of verses that Blavatsky called the Stanzas of Dzyan: seven stanzas on cosmic origins in the first volume and twelve on human origins in the second. She said they were translated from the Book of Dzyan, written in a secret priestly language called Senzar and preserved, with other ancient writings, by the Masters in hidden libraries in Central Asia. The stanzas are written in a solemn, archaic style, full of images of darkness, breath, the "Mother" and the awakening of the cosmos.

No manuscript of the Book of Dzyan has ever been found, and Senzar is unknown to linguists. Most historians regard the stanzas as Blavatsky's own composition, drawing on Indian cosmological texts in translation such as the Vishnu Purana, on Kabbalistic and Gnostic imagery and on her wide reading. Some sympathetic researchers have argued that her references to the "Books of Kiu-te" point to the Tibetan Buddhist tantras, including the Kalachakra literature, but this remains a minority view and does not explain the stanzas themselves.

The Three Fundamental Propositions§

In the introductory section, often called the Proem, Blavatsky sets out three propositions on which the rest of the work depends.

  1. An absolute Principle. There is one omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable Principle, beyond all thought and description, from which everything proceeds. It is not a personal God; Blavatsky's language here owes much to the Vedanta and to Neoplatonic ideas of the One.
  2. The periodicity of the universe. Universes appear and disappear in endless cycles, "the playground of numberless universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing", in her phrase. She adopts the Hindu terms manvantara for a period of manifestation and pralaya for the dissolution that follows.
  3. The pilgrimage of the soul. Every soul is fundamentally one with the universal Over-Soul and must pass through the whole cycle of incarnation, under the law of karma, before it returns to its source enriched by experience.

These propositions explain why The Secret Doctrine, unlike Isis Unveiled, places reincarnation and karma at the centre of its teaching. They also give Theosophy its basic shape: an impersonal absolute, a cosmos that evolves and returns, and a human spirit that progresses through many lives.

Cosmogenesis: Rounds, Globes and Cosmic Cycles§

The first volume describes how a universe emerges from latency. Blavatsky's cosmos is organised in sevens. A planetary system is a "chain" of seven globes, only one of which, in our case the Earth, is physical in the ordinary sense. The life-wave of evolving monads passes around the chain seven times; each circuit is a "round". According to the book, humanity is now in the fourth round on the fourth globe, the deepest point of descent into matter, and has begun the long ascent back toward spirit.

The process is guided by hierarchies of intelligences, the Dhyan Chohans, and driven by Fohat, a term Blavatsky used for the cosmic energy that links ideas to matter. Earlier chains, including one associated with the Moon, are said to have preceded our own. The scheme combines Indian cosmology, especially the Puranic doctrine of the days and nights of Brahma, with a Western idea of progressive evolution. It was not, Blavatsky insisted, a rejection of science, but a spiritual account of the evolution that science described only from outside.

The seven principles of the human being§

Alongside the cosmic sevens stands the doctrine of the seven principles of the human constitution, popularised a few years earlier by A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1883). The physical body, vital energy and astral double form the lower principles; desire, mind, spiritual soul and spirit form the higher. Later Theosophists, Rudolf Steiner among them, developed their own versions of this anatomy of the subtle self.

Anthropogenesis: Root Races, Lemuria and Atlantis§

The second volume tells the history of humanity in the present round as a sequence of seven "root races", each divided into sub-races. The first was ethereal and "self-born"; the second, called Hyperborean, was scarcely more physical. The third, the Lemurian, lived on a lost southern continent; during its course the sexes separated and the "sons of mind" descended to give human beings self-consciousness. The fourth, the Atlantean, flourished and fell on another vanished continent, and the fifth, which Blavatsky called the Aryan, is the present humanity. Two further root races are still to come.

The names drew on contemporary speculation. "Lemuria" had been proposed by the zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864 as a sunken land bridge to explain the distribution of lemurs, and the Atlantis of Plato had been revived in Ignatius Donnelly's best-selling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Blavatsky also reversed the usual reading of Darwin: in her account the anthropoid apes descended from early humanity rather than the other way round.

Sources, Critics and the Question of Race§

The scholarly critique of The Secret Doctrine follows two lines. The first concerns sources. William Emmette Coleman claimed in the 1890s that the book borrowed heavily and without acknowledgement from H. H. Wilson's translation of the Vishnu Purana, from Alexander Winchell's popular geology World-Life and from other reference works. Historians accept that much of its learning came from such secondary literature, even if Coleman's tone was hostile.

The second concerns race. Blavatsky's root races are first of all spiritual stages, and the Theosophical Society's first object was a universal brotherhood without distinction of race. Yet the book also ranks living peoples, describing some as degenerate survivals of earlier races, in terms typical of nineteenth-century racial science. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke showed in The Occult Roots of Nazism how Austrian and German Ariosophists such as Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels adapted these ideas to a völkisch and antisemitic ideology, a story told in our article on German occultism. Scholars stress that this was a selective appropriation, but they also note that the raw material was present in the text.

The Influence of The Secret Doctrine§

Few esoteric books have travelled so far. The Secret Doctrine became the standard reference of the Theosophical Society, and later teachers built on its scheme: Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater elaborated the root races, Rudolf Steiner wrote his own accounts of Lemuria and Atlantis, and Alice Bailey's books carried its cosmology into the twentieth century. Through them its vocabulary of cycles, Masters and spiritual evolution passed into the New Age.

Its cultural reach was wider still. W. B. Yeats read it in Blavatsky's London circle, and painters including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint drew on Theosophical ideas of invisible forces and spiritual evolution as they moved toward abstraction. For historians of religion the book remains a key example of how Victorian esotericism fused Asian religion, Western occultism and evolutionary science into a new myth of the cosmos, discussed more broadly in our overview of Theosophy.

Frequently asked questions§

What is The Secret Doctrine about?§

It is a cosmology and spiritual history of the universe and humanity, presented as a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan. It describes cycles of cosmic manifestation, the evolution of souls through rounds and globes, and the succession of root races from ethereal beings to present humanity.

Is the Book of Dzyan a real ancient text?§

No manuscript of it has ever been found, and the Senzar language in which Blavatsky said it was written is unknown to scholarship. Most historians consider the stanzas to be her own composition based on her reading, although some Theosophical researchers link them to Tibetan Buddhist literature.

What are the root races in Theosophy?§

They are seven great stages of human evolution in the present cycle. Blavatsky named the third and fourth Lemurian and Atlantean after lost continents, and called the present fifth race Aryan, a term later misused by racist movements; scholars note both the spiritual intent and the racial hierarchies in her account.

Who published the third volume of The Secret Doctrine?§

Annie Besant published a third volume in 1897, six years after Blavatsky's death, compiled from manuscripts she had left. Many Theosophists and historians doubt that it represents Blavatsky's intended work.

Sources and further reading§