The period during which each great root race of the human race flourishes on earth is sharply marked off from that of the one succeeding it by great convulsions of Nature which destroy practically all traces of the preceding civilization, and which leave but few survivors thereof. A writer has said of this point of the occult teaching: "The periods of the great root races are divided from each other by great convulsions of Nature and by great geological changes. Europe was not in existence as a continent at the time the fourth race flourished. The continent on which the fourth race lived was not in existence at the time the third race flourished, and neither of the continents which were the great vortices of the civilizations of those two races are in existence now. Seven great continental cataclysms occur during the occupation of the earth by the human life-wave for one round period. Each race is cut off in this way at its appointed time, some survivors remaining in parts of the world, not the proper home of their race; but these, invariably in such cases, exhibiting a tendency to decay, and relapsing into barbarism with more or less rapidity." The individuals of the First Race of the present (fourth) round of the human race on earth ranged from a gross type scarcely above the brutes up to a very barbarous type. These higher types reincarnated later as the higher individuals of the Second Race, the lower types of the First Race constituting the lower subdivisions of the Second Race; the rule being that the less advanced souls of any race incarnate as the lowest types of the next and higher race.

The Plane of Human Mind, in its seven sub-divisions, comprises those manifestations of life and mentality which are common to Man, in his various...

According to the secret doctrine, man, through the gradual refinement of his vehicles and the ever-increasing sensitiveness resulting from that...

Rudolph Steiner, "ran their course at a period when the earth was still 'fiery'; and the first human incarnations were formed out of the element of fi...

There are also legends to the effect that long before the appearance of human beings there existed a race or species of composite creatures which was...

Then must be reenacted the eternal drama of reconstruction. Out of the ruins of the civilization which died when its idealism died, some primitive peo...

The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as...

After the deluge sent by the gods to destroy mankind at the close of the Iron Age, only Deucalion and Pyrrha were left alive. Entering a ruined...

The Hermetic Teachings regarding the process of Evolution are that, THE ALL, having meditated upon the beginning of the Creation--having thus...