of travels that led her to Tibet, Egypt, India, Mexico, Canada, and America. During her childhood she was tormented with what is described as “spirit possession,” but she displayed several remarkable abilities and an obsessive interest in ancient cultures. At the age of 42, she came to New York City, where she quickly married a young Russian immigrant. Although Madame Blavatsky never divorced her second husband, she became deeply enmeshed in a relationship with Henry Olcott that began from the moment she met him in 1875. In 1877 her first book, Isis Unveiled, was published and sold out within a week, running through the modest initial printing of 2000 copies. Shortly thereafter, Blavatsky and Olcott traveled to India, where they hoped to contact certain “Masters” who Blavatsky believed had been sending her psychic messages. After six years in India, the couple relocated to England, where legal problems ensued. Olcott soon returned to India, but Blavatsky moved around Europe, eventually moving back to London.
Blavatsky’s Atlantis speculations are primarily described in The Secret Doctrine, first published in 1888. Much of the material in the book is attributed to her translation of a Tibetan manuscript called the Stanzas of Dzyan. In The Secret Doctrine Blavatsky reveals that seven “Root Races” are destined to evolve on earth during the “fourth round” of seven cycles. Each of the root races supposedly has a separate continent, however this is a puzzling point since the word continent to theosophists denotes not separate bodies of land, but rather means all the dry landmass on the earth during the appearance of each root race.
Like Plato, Blavatsky wrote that civilizations are periodically destroyed by cataclysms that result in changes in the earth’s surface, but she added that each new root race springs forth from the destruction. The various root races overlap each other in terms of both timeframe and the land they occupied to such a degree that attempts to distinguish one race’s development from another quickly becomes fraught with confusion.
The first continent and the first root race began near the North Pole. Blavatsky wrote that this area was not actually destroyed, and four years before The Secret Doctrine was published, suggested that the earth was hollow and that an opening at the pole was somehow related to the emergence of the first root race. This race, according to Blavatsky, was the first entry of spirit into physical matter. The destruction of the first root race occurred when Northern Asia was cut off from the North Pole and waters first divided the region from Asia. A shift in the earth’s axis is given as the cause of the change.
The second root race she called Hyperborean and it also emerged near the North Pole extending into Greenland, Scandinavia, and parts of Asia. It too was destroyed by a shift in the earth’s axis, but she related that nearly all people of the second root race died during the destruction.
The third root race was called Lemuria and it began some 18 million years ago in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Lemuria was said to incorporate most of Asia extending around South Africa into the North Atlantic and Europe. According to Blavatsky, the major remains of Lemuria today are Australia, the islands of the Pacific, and portions of California. But because Lemuria also included the islands in the Atlantic and the European coast, it is often referred to as Lemuro-Atlantis, creating even more confusion.
The development of the fourth root race (Atlantis) greatly overlapped with the Lemurians, and Blavatsky related that a major destruction of Lemuria occurred 4.25 million years ago, “at the midpoint of the fourth root race and very end of the third.” The last major islands of Lemuria supposedly sank over a 150,000-year period—from 850,000-700,000 years ago.
The Atlantean root race (the fourth) began in “the Atlantic portion of Lemuria,” around 8 million years ago. The focal point of the emerging new race occurred in the center of the Atlantic. Eventually, that land became known as mainland Atlantis. Blavatsky related that Atlantis was once a large continent but it was gradually broken into seven “peninsulas and islands.” As Atlantis began sinking, many people migrated to the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the British Isles. Before the final destruction of Atlantis, which is related in Theosophical literature to have been in 9564 B.C., there was one remaining island. Called Poseidonis, it was located in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the Azores, and was about the size of Ireland. Interestingly referred to by Blavatsky as “Plato’s little island,” it was destroyed by earthquakes and tidal waves.
According to Blavatsky, the fifth root race (the current one) developed in the Americas starting some four to five million years ago, overlapping the Atlantean period during the entire period. There were early migrations of these people to central Asia. A future cataclysm is predicted to occur that will destroy most of Europe and affect the Americas, ushering in the sixth root race, which will also center in America. A seventh root race will eventually develop on the ancient lands of Lemuria and Atlantis, which will rise from the seas when the sixth race is destroyed.
It should be noted that Cayce also used the term “root race” a few times in his readings. However, Cayce’s depiction of root race is very different from that in theosophy.
Theosophy and W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis
In 1896, the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society published a book-length article by William Scott-Elliot in their journal Transactions. Initially titled, Atlantis: A Geographical, Historical, and Ethnological Sketch, it was immediately reissued as a book and retitled The Story of Atlantis. Relatively few people are aware that the psychics Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater provided many of the details that Scott-Elliot included in the book. In 1925, Scott-Elliot published an expanded version of the work as The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. The Preface to the 1896 book attributed its contents to both advances in scientific understanding and the utilization of clairvoyance techniques to gain access to memories of the past—thus revealing what occurred in Atlantis and the earlier Lemuria. The book contains scattered references to scientific findings of the time that support its assertions.
Scott-Elliot began by revealing that our current fifth root race is the Great Aryan race and that we are of Teutonic stock. Later he calls the Aryan race the more “noble one.” With this assertion, we must take a brief but bizarre sidetrack.
In recent years it has become well known that Adolph Hitler and key leaders of the S.S. took an interest in the idea of a Great Aryan race and actually came to believe that Germany was destined to establish an idealized society based on his rather twisted vision of Atlantis. Hitler saw the “pure” Germanic peoples as the descendants of Atlantis. He ordered German archaeologists to work in the Yucatan at ruins as well as mounting a search for Atlantis in various locations. It is also known that Hitler dictated a follow-up book to Mein Kamph after he assumed power in Germany. The unpublished manuscript contains Hitler’s plan to conquer the world with the United States cited as the necessary final conquest. Scholars believe that the book was stored in a safe—and never published—because it not only contained Hitler’s step-by-step plans for war, but also his reasoning for the wars that were about to occur. Hitler asserted the German people had both the right and the destiny to rule the world because of their racial purity. He used the terms Teutonic and Aryan in descriptions of the master race, and linked the lineage of the Germanic Teutonic race to Atlantis. Scholars believe he was influenced by theosophical writings as well as a few other early writers. While some others had suggested that the superior Atlantean race was “White” well before Scott-Elliot used the term Aryan to describe the current root race, the idea that Atlanteans were white became more firmly entrenched with Scott-Elliot’s works. Before going into more detail it needs to be made clear that many of Edgar Cayce’s visions of Atlantis are quite different from the Atlantis described in theosophy. While these differences will become obvious in later chapters, one major—and significant—difference is that Cayce asserted that the Atlanteans were a “Red Race,” many of whom migrated to North America where they merged with Native American Tribes. Cayce specifically mentioned the Iroquois as a tribal group composed of many Atlantean descendants. Of course, Cayce’s timeframe for Atlantis also is at variance with that given in theosophical writings.
Like Blavatsky, Scott-Elliot claimed that four major catastrophic events took place over a vast time period resulting in the destruction of Atlantis. The first three took place 800,000, 200,000, and 80,000 years ago. (These