*Footnote: Collated from standard Theosophical sources.

IT is averred in Occultism that the land or island which crowns the North Pole like a skull cap, is the only one which prevails during the whole manvantara of our round. The first race lived in what is called the Sacred Imperishable Land. This land, it is said, never shared the fate of the other continents, because it is the one whose destiny it is to last to the end of the manvantara. It is Mount Meru. It was the cradle of the first man and will be the dwelling place of the last divine mortal, chosen as the seed for the future races of humanity. Of this mysterious and sacred land very little can be said, except, perhaps that the “Pole star has its watchful eye upon it, from the dawn to the close of the twilight of a day of the Great Breath.” Concerning Mount Meru, occult teachings place it in the very center of the North Pole, pointing it out as the site of the first continent of our earth, after the solidification of the globe.

Says The Secret Doctrine with regard to the emergence of the first race: “The ‘Lunar Monads’ or Pitris, the ancestors of man, become in reality man himself. At the beginning of the human stage of the fourth round on this globe, they ‘ooze out’ their astral doubles, and it is this subtle, finer form which serves as the model round which Nature builds the physical man.” The first two races, it is taught, never died, but only vanished. Death came only after man had become a physical creature. The men of the first race and also of the second, dissolved and disappeared in their progeny. Its “men” melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own “sweat-born” progeny, more solid than their own. The old form vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and physical. There was no death in those days of a period more blissful than the Golden Age, but the first, or parent material, was used for the formation of the new being, to form the body and even the inner or lower principles of the progeny.

The second race had a “sound language,” to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. This second race was psycho-spiritual mentally, and ethero-physical bodily. It was an astral race, composed of inactive androgynes: ethereal, a-sexual, and even devoid as yet of the vehicle of desire, or kama rupa, which evolved only in the third race. The first sub-races of this second race were born at first by the process described in the law of analogy; while the last began gradually, pari passu with the evolution of the human body, to be formed otherwise.

The land of the first race crowned the North Pole like a skull-cap. During the second race more land emerged under the waters as a continuation of the “head” from the neck. … The Hyperborean will be the name chosen for the second continent, the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the second race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia. It was a bona fide continent, which knew no winter in those days. Thus Northern Asia is as old as the second race. One might even say that Asia is contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its root-continent, so to speak, already existed, that part of the world now known as Asia being only cut off from it at a later date, and divided by the glacial waters. “The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore Northern Asia is called the ‘eternal or perpetual land’ and the Antarctic the ‘ever living’ and the ‘concealed’.”

Between the first and second races, the eternal sacred land was divided by the waters of life (the fluid of life which animates the earth). It flows around and animates her (mother earth’s) body. Its one end issues from her head; it becomes foul at her feet (the Southern pole). It gets purified on its return to her heart — which beats under the foot of the sacred Shamballah, which then, in the beginnings, was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man’s dwellings (the earth) that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives and breathes. During the first and second races the belt was covered with the great waters. But the great mother travailed under the waves and a new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-gear (the cap). She travailed harder for the third race and her waist and navel appeared above the water. It was the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world. … Occultism points to the Himalayan chain as that “belt,” and maintains that whether under the water or above, it encircles the globe.

The third continent we propose to call “Lemuria,” though it stands to reason that neither the names of Lemuria nor even Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost continents, but have been adopted by us for the sake of clearness. Lemuria covered the whole area of space from the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia and the great desert of Shamo (Gobi) — from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam (India). From thence it stretched south across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon and Sumatra; then, embracing on its way, as we go south, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle. From Australia, an inland region of the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean.

Three great nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the Kingdom of Saturn or Lemuria: these are the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the old Greeks. But the oldest civilized country of Asia — India — can be shown to claim the same descent likewise. The two worships, of Adonis and Osiris, were born in the north of Lemuria. Nearly all the gods of Egypt, Greece and Phoenicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern origin, and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the third race, after its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed. Thus it is to this period, the Lemurian, that we have to look for the first appearance of the Ancestors of those who are termed by us the most ancient peoples of the world — now called respectively the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and the Chaldees and Phoenicians on the other.

We believe in dynasties of divine beings, those Kings and Instructors of the third race in arts and sciences. In their original divine natures, they were the beneficent Entities who, symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with intellect and reason. There have been several divine dynasties — a series for every root-race beginning with the third. These (the third race) were governed by the divine dynasties, kings and rulers who had of mortal man only his physical appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from spheres higher and more celestial than our own sphere will be, long manvantaras hence. “The ‘Watchers’ reign over man during the whole period of Satya Yuga and the smaller subsequent yugas, down to the beginning of the third root race; after which it is the Patriarchs, Heroes and the Manes, the incarnated Dhyanis of a lower order, up to King Menes and the human kings of other nations.” “The third race became the Vahan of the Lords of Wisdom. It created ‘Sons of Will and Yoga,’ by Kriyasakti it created them, the Holy Fathers, ancestors of the Arhats.” These were the spiritual forefathers of all subsequent and present Arhats, or Mahatmas, “created” in a truly immaculate way. They were the “holy seed grain” of the future Saviors of Humanity. In the first or earlier portion of this third race, while it was yet in its state of purity, the “Sons of Wisdom” who incarnated produced by Kriyasakti a progeny. Set apart, in archaic genesis, for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyanis, “Munis and Rishis” from previous manvantaras — to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during the present cycle.

It is from them, these Brahmaputras, that the high Dwijas, the initiated Brahmans of old justly claimed descent. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion, as it is to the disciples of the initiates of the fourth race, the Atlanteans, who handed it over to their Cyclopes, the “Sons of Cycles” or of the “Infinite,” from whom the name passed to still later generations of Gnostic priests. There will always be Initiates and the Profane till the end of this minor Manvantara, the present life-cycle. What is claimed is simply the fact that the wisdom imparted by the “Divine Ones” — born through the Kriyasakti powers of the third race before its fall and separation of the sexes — to the adepts of the early fourth race, has remained in all its purity in a certain Brotherhood. Happily for the human race, the “Elect Race” had already become the vehicle of incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races — save some lowest — of the third race had perished with the great Lemurian continent, “the seeds of the Trinity of Wisdom” had already acquired the secret of immortality on earth, that gift which allows the same great personality to step ad libitum from one worn-out body to another. … This race could live with equal ease in water, air or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the “Sons of God” — the real Elohim. It was they who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men.

When, moved by the Law of Evolution, the Lords of Wisdom infused into man the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators. Devotion arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor of his nature. It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Aryan heart from the third race direct through its first “mind-born” sons — the fruits of Kriyasakti. It is through these “Sons of God” that the infant humanity got its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge. And it is they who laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient civilizations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students and scholars. From Manu, Thoth-Hermes, Oannes-Dagon, and Edris-Enoch, down to Plato and Panadores, all tell of the seven primitive and dual gods who descend from their celestial abode and reign on earth, teaching mankind astronomy, architecture, and all the other sciences that have come down to us. These Beings appear first as “gods” and Creators; then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as “divine kings and rulers.” It is the Kabiri who are credited with having revealed, by producing corn or wheat, the great boon of agriculture. What Isis-Osiris, the once living Kabiria, has done in Egypt, that Ceres is said to have done in Sicily; they all belong to one class. To them — the Kabiri or Titans — is ascribed the invention of letters (the Devanagari, or the alphabet and language of the gods); of laws and legislature, as of the various modes of magic, so-called; and of the medicinal use of plants. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Asclepius, all those demi-gods and heroes, to whom is ascribed the revelation of sciences to men —  are all generic names. When incarnated as kings of the divine dynasties, the Kabiri (Sons of Wisdom) gave the first impulse to civilizations, and directed the mind with which they had endued men to the invention and perfection of all the arts and sciences.

The third race ended its career in Lanka, or rather on that which became Lanka with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the northern highland of ancient Lanka. The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began at the Arctic Circle (Norway); the cataclysm which destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest remnant, was due to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean floors. The Pacific and Indian Oceans were land when Africa and South America were in infancy; Lemuria sank as these regions were upheaved. … “Lemuria perished 4,242,352 years ago.”

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